The Cage

"A person's strongest dreams are about what he can't do." 

I watched TOS for the first time earlier this year, and I loved it, yet I never bothered with The Cage because it's partly recycled in The Menagerie and to be frank, every time I tried I was bored to tears within the first ten or fifteen minutes.

Setting aside the aesthetic differences, the original pilot lays the foundation for a fairly standard episode of Star Trek. I'm not going to sit here and lay out the whole plot - that's what Memory Alpha is for. Instead, I'm going to talk about how it made me feel.

Having sat down for the entirety of the episode, I found that I did not care for The Cage - but there were things I did like and could even appreciate about the episode.

I liked Pike. Looking past the fact that he's uncertain of remaining in command (a very un-Trek attitude when contrasted against James "don't let them make you retire" Kirk and Jean-Luc "not planning on it" Picard), he's a pretty solid Starfleet officer. For the duration of his captivity by the  Talosians, Pike tries to use his wits and reason over violence to escape, only turning to the latter as a matter of last resort. That's standard Starfleet operating procedure if I know anything about it.

The man has a despairing loneliness about him and soulful eyes, but he lacks the swashbuckling charm of Jim Kirk, and I think Shatner's (and by extension Kirk's) charm is at least 60% of his performance and 5% of what makes TOS great. You won't get that from Pike.

The Talosians were assholes. They apparently nuked their planet, fled underground, then got into mental fantasies so intense and addictive they couldn't even maintain their facilities, then they go about luring aliens to their world in order to capture them and feed off their fantasies (and hopefully enslave, breed, and use to repair their infrastructure.)

They look like humans with oversized heads, but they don't know how to put Vina back together? She must have been a real lump of meat, but once they got her to a certain point, they should have realized "oh hey, she kind of looks like us but with hair!" and fixed her up.

I did read that in the original draft the Talosians were supposed to be crustaceans, and someone online posited that maybe they still were and the humanoid forms were also mental projections...in which case why did they not project straight humans? Whatever, it services the overall plot.

The point I'm trying to make is that the Talosians made their bed and now they have to lie in it - and I don't give a shit about that, but they picked the wrong species to try to enslave.

Dicks.

Other things I noted were the usual early installment weirdness things - like Spock ordering they engage hyperdrive, warp factor (7, presumably.) When they meet the (illusory) scientists, one officer excitedly talks about how the time barrier has been broken, which is some new development in the 18 years since the crash. There's some interesting, pre-streamline warp drive stuff here, like there's maybe some hard science going on with relativity and what not.

The show struck me as more 50s futurism than 60s; the bridge was very military looking, like if someone raised the ceiling on the NX-01 and replaced everything with office furniture from the 60s - I thought those tiny monitors were lamps. How the hell do they even read those things? The monitor is the size of an old Nokia flip phone!

It's interesting how Nimoy adopted Number One's logical demeanor and defined a race in the first season of TOS, but I didn't find her so logical as much as aloof and professional. She's not cold, she's working.

That kid by the elevator looked super uncomfortable the whole time.

Apparently Earth is all public parks surrounding major cities, according to the illusions. How quaint a future is that? Reminds me of some old article from a newspaper published in the early 1900s about how 100 years from then we'd pave over all the grass and drive non-essential animals to extinction...only Gene went the opposite way and people have pet horses and the Mojave Desert is completely terraformed. I guess that's fine, because most of the planets we visit in TOS are nice, dry American Southwest style deserts and studio back-lot wastelands.

Hot, dry; comfy. Can't beat the matte views. 

I bet kids would have loved seeing spooky aliens and ray guns on TV, cerebral or not - I've never seen Lost in Space, but I bet it's trash compared to the positively cerebral episode of television I saw in The Cage.

I found it incredibly humorous when Yeoman Smith asked the captain who was to have been Eve. That was a nice note of levity after a fairly dark and heavy episode.

It was a heavy episode. Star Trek history notes that NBC turned it down for being "too cerebral", and I can't say that I disagree. I don't know how audiences were back in the mid-60s, but if they're anything like audiences now then nobody tunes into TV to think, and I sure as hell didn't either. Many say the strength of Trek lies in its morality plays and the depth of subject material, but I believe that's a half-truth at best; there is always a large part of the audience tuning in for the alien TnA and pew-pew laser fights over "what is it to be a man?"

I'm not really ashamed to say I fall into the latter category sometimes; after all, I felt the second pilot (Where No Man Has Gone Before) was a much stronger episode for having gone almost straight into the action and ending in a physical confrontation. What can I say, I'm a man of my time.

I don't find Star Treks strengths to be in the morality play, although that certainly is a strength of the franchise it's not necessarily the foundation; that belongs to the interaction between characters and their development, and that's just not here - Where No Man Has Gone Before may be comparatively brainless, but it also has the tragedy of Kirk's friend becoming a callous god and Kirk having to put him down like a dog to save his crew. (THAT would have been a better movie than Into Darkness.)

Without the charm of the characters and interactions though, The Cage is sort of bog standard sci-fi.

Personal Rating: 3/5, skip.

While it's not necessarily a bad episode, it's a very boring episode and only a hardcore Trekkie (or an acolyte determined to watch all of Star Trek such as myself) should view it, and even then there is no real reason (other than perhaps hipster irony) to watch it more than once. 

END

NOTE: It's been a few days churning this out, editing information from my original post on reddit discussing it and trying not to sound like a raging plebeian. I'm a little backed up in reviews, but I'll try to push one out per day, maybe every few days as I continue to boldly go where millions have gone before. Right now I'm probably 20 minutes into The Enemy Within, with intention to finish by Thursday and have at least two more entries in my log posted by then.