The Cage (Unaired Pilot)

These are the voyages.

Of the brothers Comstock.

Their continuing mission, to seek out and review old episodes of Star Trek.

To explore strange new worlds of snark and new civilizations of insight.

To boldly blog what many nerds have blogged before...

Jonah: Welcome to 5-year mission, a blog where two longtime, somewhat obsessive fans seek to review the whole Star Trek canon in the space of five years (give or take).

Each week we’ll post two reviews, either one Original Series episode (from Jonah) and one Next Generation offering (from Nathan) or one Deep Space Nine episode (from Jonah) and one Voyager voyage (from Nathan). I’ll switch gears over to Enterprise in TOS’s slot when we get through its 3-year run. So the schedule will run like so:

Tuesday: TOS, from Jonah
Friday: TNG, from Nathan
Tuesday: DS9, from Jonah
Friday: VOY, from Nathan

But today, to kick things off, we’re tag-teaming the original unaired pilot, "The Cage", in the form of a live-blog of sorts. Nathan, tell us a little bit about "The Cage."

Nathan: The Cage is the original unaired pilot of Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry in 1965 to try and sell the networks on a new kind of sci-fi TV series. The networks didn’t bite, saying it was “too cerebral” and not action-packed enough. They also didn’t like the idea of a woman and an alien 2nd and 3rd in command of a Starship.

Ultimately, Roddenberry made some changes and the Star Trek we know and love was born. He refused to get rid of the Mr. Spock character, though, and as a sort of a slap-in-the-face to the network, Nimoy actually ended up being the only series regular not to get recast.

But enough chit-chat. Here is our first official review - "The Cage"!

Same old bridge, same old Enterprise, same old Mr. Spock. The rest of the cast - who knows? 



Jonah: I’d forgotten how long it had been since I’d seen this! What do we think of Jeff Hunter’s Captain Pike? He seems to lack Kirk’s confidence.

Nathan: Two civilians walk by in the hallway. What’s with that? 

J: Yeah they look like people who randomly wandered onto the set.

N: I digress. The old country doctor (Dr. Phillip Boyce, played by John Hoyt) has a lot more warmth than McCoy. Pike is definitely less confident than Kirk. All this existential self-doubt. I wonder if that’s part of why this was considered too cerebral?

J: It’s a little ridiculous to have your lead considering resigning his commission in the first episode. And he’s so young, it just comes off as sort of hipster whining.

N: But we’re also doing a good job of establishing the larger world out there. Orion slave women, etc. And we know Earth is still around.

Pike puts them to warp with an "Engage!" Ha. And the Alexander Courage theme kicks in.

J: Pike establishes upfront that the Enterprise is a boy’s club and he doesn’t much like his new female yeoman (J.M. Colt, played by Laurel Goodwin.) Majel Barret’s “Number One,” though … she’s different. There’s something very Gilligan’s Island about the two women on the bridge. Like the Yeoman is being set up to be the Ginger to the First Officer’s Mary-Ann... 

N: If I recall correctly, we’ll see that play out more later. So plot-wise, we’re investigating a crashed ship. Pike leaves Number One in command of the ship, takes Spock, the Doc and three blue shirts down in the incredibly slow transporter. Damn, beaming takes forever.

J: And check out those stylish jackets! But also, remember that everything old is new here. We’re taking a long time beaming, laying in courses, scanning the planet, because none of this stuff has become a trope yet.

N: Good point. I want to pause for a moment and point out that Spock just smiled. Okay, we found the survivors of the crash. They’re surprised a ship got here so quickly. This brief exchange establishes warp drive (or “time warp”) has just been established within the last 18 years, which contradicts the timeline of the Original Series and Enterprise.

N: Ominous Aliens are watching everything! OMG. Also, number one has the computer’s voice. Kinda wigging me out.

J: Pike and his women! In addition to the two on the ship, the stranded Starfleeter’s beautiful daughter Vina (Susan Oliver) has the hots for him, too. It’s immediately weird that the survivors are a bunch of old men and one young, super beautiful woman. Who’s her mother even?

N: Maybe these ominous aliens know something about it? Oh, hey. First time we see phasers. Already they’re not very effective.

J: Nimoy may not have the Spock character figured out, but he already stands out as an actor here. He has a real presence that you take for granted, but imagine seeing him for the first time. Oh, here’s the TOS camp we know and love, in the form of some guy-in-a-suit monsters. Pike is from the “Space Vehicle Enterprise.”

N: Title drop! The aliens taunt Pike in a super-condescending way. And we’re back to the ship.

J: I find myself asking “What about this cast doesn’t work?” With Pike gone we have this conference table of types - the old guy, the young guy, the alien, and .. Number One, who’s surprisingly vanilla actually, for as flamboyant as Majel will be in some of her other roles.

N: Good point. They don’t have backstories or even names. Yet it still at least feels like its making some effort to establish an ensemble, rather than the Power Trio dynamic of TOS. I wonder why that was abandoned.

J: We definitely see shades of TNG here.

Ok, Pike’s out of the Cage (or so it seems) and cast into a dangerous memory with Vina. And being attacked by some kind of space-Cossack.

N: : Remember he talked about this mission he’s remembering at the beginning, in that scene with the doctor.

Didn’t take long to goad him into fighting.

J: But you do see where the fears of “too cerebral” come from. In the midst of this action scene, Pike and Vina are having this argument about reality. He says “None of it’s real, I won’t perform.” and she says “It’ll feel real, doesn’t that make it real?” These are deep questions.

N: He’s almost reacting more like Picard would in this situation. Kirk would be banging her by now.

J: This pilot really turns on Pike - whether you care about him, whether you believe his portrayal. And there are shades of the themes that will make up Generations 30 or so years later, when Picard has to choose between a better illusory life and a worse, real one.


N: Giant phasers are just as ineffectual. Again, laying the foundations. Technobabble solutions don’t solve the problem here.

J: Country Doctor guy is a bit of a ham, isn’t he?

N: A bit. His acting doesn’t quite fit the style. Reminds me of Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet, actually.

J: I like Pike though. I’d watch a show about him. The whole thing is so Forbidden Planet! It’s more like a 50s sci-fi novel than Star Trek in some ways.

N: Pike has no intention of fathering a race of humans for an alien zoo. So they give him the illusion of being burned alive. And he continues to try and puzzle it out. He thinks more than Kirk. Kirk acts on emotion.

Good catch on the parallels between this and the Nexus. This scene really draws that into focus.

J: Vina and Pike are having a picnic now - complete with horses, just like in Generations.

N: Pike is philosophizing. Vina is making sandwiches. And the Mojave desert has apparently been terraformed. TNG and post-Trek don’t do as much of that, aside from LA being under water.

J: There’s an honest question here about why Pike is fighting this so much. He says it’s because he’s looking out for the next generation and doesn’t want to father a race of slaves.  But really, it seems like he’s just really opposed to being anyone’s puppet. As soon as the Talosians allowed him to be aware of their existence, they’d already lost.

N: The iconic Orion Slave Girl.

J: One of several Star Trek cliches that only actually appear once. I don’t think we’ll see another Orion slave girl until Enterprise.

N: References to them, but we never see them. Now we’re seeing Pike’s Pirate fantasy. The Talosians just don’t get it. They still think they just haven’t found the right fantasy yet.

J: We’re back on the ship. We have an Asian transporter tech, which is notable even though he has no lines. Star Trek in it’s reincarnation will make waves with it’s diverse cast. This version, though, pretty white.

N: This is the scene I remember. The Talosians let the women beam down, but not Spock. So Pike finds himself being asked to choose between Ginger and Mary Anne.

Vina compares Majel’s character to a computer. Ha!

J: The Talosians tell Captain Pike that all his female crewmen have crushes on him. He does not seem surprised.

N: Of course not. He’s a Starfleet Captain; i.e. A Pimp.

J: But only theoretically. In actuality, he’s been so chaste you start to wonder if he’s gay... In other news, it really bugs me that the two women don’t have names! Spock has a name. Why the heck don’t they have names? (note: it turns out the Yeoman does have a name. But none for Number One.)

N: To be fair, I haven’t heard a name for the young guy either. Speaking of which, why don’t they just capture the whole crew? Wouldn’t it be easier to populate the planet with a race of humans  if they started with a larger gene pool?

So Pike has the upper hand. OR DOES HE?

J: This is a classic Kirk sort of maneuver. Outthinking the superior thinkers, playing chicken with his own life.

N: Every Captain plays the bluffing game at some point.

Kind of a cop-out ending. “Humans are too violent to make good slaves. You can go.”

J: Can you imagine if this pilot had been picked up? A whole different Star Trek universe.

N: It was probably for the best. Okay, this is creepy. Vina gets to live out the rest of her life with an illusory Captain Pike.

J: And Pike is left with the nagging doubt that he may have made the wrong choice.  Luckily, he’ll get a chance to do over (SPOILER ALERT). That reminds me, we should probably have a spoiler policy.

N: That’s right, you’ll get to check in with Pike in a few episodes. I, meanwhile, will be skipping ahead more than a century for an Encounter at Farpoint. Incidentally, another episode that deals with the theme of illusion and places our captain head to head with a God-like being. It’s almost a tradition. Looking forward to seeing you all there.

J: Before we go, we'll leave you with this preview of what's to come. Warning, Trekkies, this might make you cry for some reason.