Chapter Text
STARDATE: October 2, 2012
THE CAGE
Written by Gene Roddenberry
Man, are we lucky this pilot didn’t get picked up.
“The Cage,” of course, is largely incorporated into “The Menagerie,” so most of the plot is already familiar to us: Captain Pike and the Enterprise respond to what they believe is a distress call from Talos 4. A landing party goes down and finds a “refugee camp” which turns out to be an illusion created for the purpose of ensnaring Pike and caging him up so he can be a breeding partner for Vina, the lone human survivor of the ship that crashed there 18 years before. The Talosians inflict various hallucinations on him and eventually bring down Number One and Yeoman Colt to share the cell with him. Pike manages to get the jump on his keeper and they escape the illusion, returning to the ship sans Vina, who turns out to be old and misshapen and ugly and not young, hot, beautiful, and fertile at all. The End.
Or so we thought. There is more to “The Cage” than what’s in “The Menagerie.” And some of this ‘more’ is very bad news.
To begin with the less bad news: the most interesting thing to me about “The Cage” was getting to see more of what the beta version of the Star Trek world looked like. Because it’s a pilot, a lot of time is spent demonstrating the range of special effects, some of which are literally rough around the edges (especially the first shot that takes us onto the bridge via the overhead skylight). That part of it actually does sort of convey a sense of how cool all this was back before we got used to it. Some of the effects didn’t survive. For instance, the first time they go into “time warp”—they’re all calling it “time warp factor” at this point—there is a pretty long shot of stars superimposed on the image of the bridge; the stars speed by at an accelerating rate while the theme song plays. I suppose initially they thought they needed to give people a sense that the ship was speeding up. It would have been unwieldy to keep, and of course the music is nothing to write home about; but that one time, it was kind of pretty. The transporter effect survives virtually unchanged except for the fact that on the pilot set the transporter pad was really badly lit. The transporter pad also looks the same, although since that design was stolen straight from Forbidden Planet that’s what you would expect. The sound effects survived virtually intact.
As for the look of the Enterprise, the layout of the bridge survives but the look is much more retro—more visible metal, less streamlining, and way more active video monitors on the bridge than in the final set. The monitors look a lot more like old-school TV sets than they do in the show. They envisioned a kind of no-touch-screen technology—Spock changes the image on one of the screens by waving his hand in front of it—which disappeared in the next pilot. The handheld technology is also retro; the phasers look like ray guns from the 1950s and the communicators are these gigantic metal things that are the size of iPads but look like they were made out of radiator grilles.
As corny as the original Enterprise set looks now, it is vastly more attractive, and much more futuristic, than the one they built for the pilot.
Also, in “The Cage” they’re still using paper. It’s multicolored and it feeds out of these horizontal slots in the computer consoles. The reports the yeomen walk around asking Pike to sign are carried in gigantic metal binders. Going paperless really de-cluttered that environment.
The costumes are more obviously military-inspired; they all wear these gray jackets when they beam down, and there’s a scene where they’re all grabbing phasers out of the weapons lockers and stuffing them into underarm holsters before putting their jackets on. Much more practical than the uniforms they went with—you spend the whole three seasons wondering why no one ever wears a coat on this show—but the elimination of the jackets and holsters was undoubtedly part of the general streamlining of the design, the importance of which I now fully appreciate.
The cast is also rough around the edges. The ship’s doctor is an old coot, but nowhere near as engaging as Kelley; he’s a little too close to “Get off my lawn!” too much of the time. The communications officer is a complete nonentity. I have spoken elsewhere of my disappointment regarding Majel Barrett as Number One. As for Spock, no one seems to have a handle on the character yet apart from the ears. He shouts a lot of his dialogue, for no reason I can understand; maybe they told him to ‘sound alien’ and this is what he came up with. He smiles and laughs in an unSpockly way when he encounters the only form of flora left on Talos—a plant with blue leaves that makes a singing noise, which I thought was a nice touch. Spock’s low point in the episode comes after Number One and Yeoman Colt vanish from the transporter pad and he makes a big “OMG totally floored” gesture and yells out, “The women!”
Ah yes. The women.
“The Cage” finally gives us the prehistory of Yeoman Rand’s character; and it’s not pretty. The Enterprise crew is supposed to have gone through a really shitty battle right before “The Cage” begins; and in this battle, it transpires, Pike’s yeoman was killed. He was therefore assigned another, and that’s how the captain of the Enterprise winds up with a female yeoman. Pike hates having a female yeoman. She is literally in his way; in both of her appearances on the bridge he almost walks right into her. He is inspired after her first appearance to rant about how he hates having “women on the bridge,” causing Number One to look over at him in a wounded way. (There are actually other women on the bridge too, but they apparently don’t count.) Pike then mutters something about how he didn’t mean any offense and “you’re different.” So, Number One is not a woman because she is intelligent and useful. Thanks, Gene.
The actress playing Colt looks much younger than Grace Lee Whitney did. In a way, the youth makes that character make a little more sense. I know Yeoman Rand was found to be sexy by many of the show’s male fans; but to me she always seemed weirdly maternal, or maybe like a bossy older sister. She doesn’t have that starry-eyed look of wonder that was supposed to be part of the original character.
But here’s the worst part: On the evidence of “The Cage,” it appears that the female yeoman character’s main function was to have a crush on Captain Pike—which would then put her in permanent competition with Number One, who is also secretly hot for Captain Pike. We know that they are both hot for him because the Talosians tell Captain Pike that Colt has always had a thing for him but thought until now that he was inaccessible, and that Number One’s unemotional façade is a “pretense” and that she frequently has “fantasies” about Pike. Even worse, Colt and Number One are conceived of as the yin and yang of femininity, Number One being the brainy defeminized woman and Colt being the young hot woman whose “exceptionally strong female drives” dwarf Number One’s pitifully stunted ones. So I know, female first officer, woohoo; but people, if they had gone with this setup, we would have had years of watching Smart Woman and Hot Woman catfighting over Handsome Male Authority Figure. I think that for me that would have pretty much sucked all the awesome out of this scenario.
How do I know this? Well, we get a taste of it in the final banter scene, most of which was not included in “The Menagerie.” As Pike is looking forward to getting back to normal after his interesting stay on Talos, Yeoman Colt gets in his way again. Pike signs the report. She stands there at attention. Then she blurts out, “Captain, I was wondering…who would have been Eve?”
She is referring, of course, to the Talosians’ attempts to pimp her and Number One out to him as alternative breeding partners. And what she REALLY wants to know is: hey, would you have picked me? Am I hotter than the other woman? Hey, Captain, look at my legs! And then—because if there’s a way to make it worse, Roddenberry will find it—Number One snaps at her and tells her she’s delivered her report and she should clear out. Oh, so Smart Woman is pulling rank on her competition cause SHE wants to be Eve too. I am quickly running out of scorn…oh wait. Here’s the ship’s doctor asking what the Eve thing means. “Eve as in Adam?” he says, with a twinkle in his cantankerous eye. “As in all ship’s doctors are dirty old men,” Pike responds.
Well, now we know why McCoy was always played as a sensualist. But…really…say, the experience of being locked in a cell with you by hostile super-powerful telepathic beings has totally fueled my erotic fantasies about you, and would you mind confirming by sense of self-worth by saying that you find me hotter than another woman who’s smarter than me? Cut power to the warp drive, Scotty, I can’t take much more o’ THIS!
And yet…and yet there is more.
OK, so, you remember back in “The Menagerie,” when Pike is talking about his fantasy of going to Orion to become a trader, the ship’s doctor does in fact—I checked this—use the phrase “green animal women.” In “The Menagerie,” you may recall, the imaginary Commodore Mendez describes these green Orion women as being “like animals” and saying that “no man can resist them.” Representing sexualized women as animals whose magical hotness relieves men of all responsibility for their conduct is pretty low. Can Gene go lower?
Yes he can!
In the green Vina fantasy, Pike and two buddies are lounging poolside while green Vina gyrates. They talk about how great this all is, Pike gets hot and bothered, and then the buddy who is wearing a Starfleet uniform complete with insignia says to Pike, “Funny how they are on this planet. Actually like being taken advantage of.”
DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER! Gene Roddenberry, in the freaking founding document of Star Trek, created a planet full of women who enjoy being raped. My friends, we have hit rock fucking bottom.
Maybe.
So, the “actually like being taken advantage of” line was excised from “The Menagerie” and replaced with Mendez’s comment about their irresistible animalistic nature. Perhaps someone pulled Gene’s coat on that one. Maybe it was Majel Barrett. “The Menagerie” ends with Kirk watching an image of Pike and Vina, rejuvenated and all that, heading hand in hand into the subterranean lair to be doped up with addictive illusions for the rest of their natural lives. I always wondered where that shot came from. In the story as told in “The Menagerie,” there’s never a moment where the two of them look psyched to be together—at least not one that takes place outside. Well, now I know. In “The Cage,” after Pike asks the Talosians whether they’ll give Vina back “her illusion of youth and beauty,” the Keeper smiles and says, “And more.” And then we see Vina heading back into the mountain hand in hand with…an imaginary Captain Pike. So she’ll get what SHE wants, which is…the ILLUSION of being in love! She doesn’t actually care whether the guy she’s in love with is real or her own introject! Look, a happy ending!
It has happened. I have run out of scorn.
All right, well, let’s not linger on this longer than we have to. Two things to wrap up:
1) We all mock Shatner’s acting from time to time. It is so mockable. But it is mockable because Shatner was a risk-taker. When presented with an opportunity to do something outside the box, he grabbed that opportunity by the balls. The results are uneven; but they are fascinating. Jeffrey Hunter, as Captain Pike, is less mockable; but that’s because he stays well within the very limited action-hero range. Pike is not fascinating. He is boring and I would not have watched him for three years, never mind rewatching him. Perhaps Hunter’s biggest drawback, based on “The Cage,” is that he never seems to be having any fun. OK, most of this episode is traumatic; but even in the final banter, he can’t really snap out of angry brooding mode. Kirk, when he wasn’t being tortured or overtaken by an evil woman or otherwise traumatized, always seemed to be enjoying the ride. It’s the sense of adventure that draws you into this show, and Shatner brought that through much better than Pike did. So thank you, William Shatner, for making this show what it was. I only wish you could have acknowledged how much help you had doing that, and maybe left in a few of those lines for Uhura that you caused to be removed because they threatened your enormous ego.
2) “The Cage” demonstrates that K/S is, in a very indirect sense, canon—because K/S is a spectral survival of the suppressed romantic attraction between the captain and his first officer that Roddenberry was clearly planning to build into the series when he created Number One’s character. Moving Spock into that position prevented them from making any of that explicit. But Star Trek retains at some level the original idea of an intimate bond between the emotionally volatile captain and his supposedly (but not really) unemotional first officer which is freighted with imperfectly repressed erotic desire—at least on the first officer’s side—and always threatening to turn into a romance. It’s not so much that the first K/Sers were seeing what was never there, as that they were seeing the ghost of something that was once there.
Did I say two things? I meant three:
I don’t know what Nimoy did between “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” but it worked. Spock 2.0 is superior in every way to Spock 1.0. It’s very interesting to see how much Nimoy’s approach to Spock developed. I’ve been impressed all the way through by what Nimoy was able to do with that role. Spock is really the heart of the show, for a lot of people—but Spock 1.0 couldn’t have been. So thank you, too, Leonard Nimoy, for making Spock a honey badger.
So thank you, NBC network executives, for passing on “The Cage” and giving Roddenberry the opportunity to rework this concept. The show that emerged is so much better than this one would have been. And I have gotten so much joy and wonder and WTF! out of it, all my life and especially now. I am sad to see it end. I will move on to the films; but it won’t be the same.
This is the end of TOS rewatch, too. I would like to thank all the people who have been following along and commenting from time to time. If you read these reviews, and you enjoyed them, do consider leaving a note on this very last entry. I will enable anonymous comments for the occasion. Until I get flamed, anyway. Ahead warp factor one!
