The Cage, The Menagerie and Canon

So I've heard some people don't regard The Cage as canon, whereas others do. Personally, I haven't given it much thought.

But I wondered... For those that don't consider it canon, what is the reason?

The only really significant moment I feel that would impact or affect the Menagerie, is the removal of the illusionary Pike moment at the end of the pilot. Without this, it is unknown if Vina did have a fake Pike or not.

Beyond a few lines of dialogue that are cut, I don't really see anything that is cut from the Cage that would in any way contradict or affect the continuity of The Menagerie.

Indeed, one line I thought should have been left in was when the Keeper says the Talosian life span is 'many times yours' as it would have cemented the believability that the Keeper hasn't aged in thirteen years.

Thoughts?

 

Spoiler: Spoilers from Discovery

Vina implies that the ending of "The Cage" happened, so can probably be treated as canon. She also seemed to figure out that "her" Pike wasn't real somewhere along the way, so the ending of "The Menagerie" doesn't lose any emotional impact, either.

 

Surely she knows all along her Pike isn't real as he - the real Pike - is standing right there when the illusion appears?

 

I thought she looked in a daze, not aware of the real Pike standing there and discussing her with the Talosians. That said, the ending scene suggests to me that the Talosians did the mind trick on her. As for does she know her Pike is an illusion? Throughout the episode, she's well aware that everything is probably an illusion. She knows her Pike is an illusion, but she doesn't care.

 

The very scene is used in two different senses, first in "The Cage" to show how a Pike illusion joins Vina, and then in "The Menagerie" to show how the real Pike in an illusory body joins Vina. No contradiction there (even if we see the neck of Jeff Hunter on the foreground both times): the Talosians are entitled to recycling their illusions, and indeed might go for the familiarity angle.

The interesting thing is that in both cases, the scene seems to have been staged for the eyes of the audience. That is, in "The Cage" it is there to convince Pike that everything is all right for Vina. In "The Menagerie" it is there to convince Kirk that everything is all right for Pike.

In both cases, this may be a blatant lie. After all, everything the Talosians do is. But it's the audience that the Talosians are fooling there, not Vina or Pike, who for all we know are experiencing something utterly different anyway, or aren't even present at all. And that gives extra right for the Talosians to recycle an illusion: Kirk wouldn't have seen it yet, so he couldn't cry foul...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The only thing I found interesting with respect to what's being discussed above, about the ending of "The Menagerie"was:

The keeper reappears on Kirk's view screen showing him the image of Pike and Veena re-entering the (still damaged by the way) elevator that leads down to the Telosian underground complex a split second after Spock pushes Pike in his chair out of the briefing room.

My point? There's no way that Spock and Pike reach the transporter and manager to beam Pike back down to the surface so quickly.

IE - At that point in time, Spock and Pike were still traveling down the corridors of the Enterprise, so what Kirk was shown was a fantasy illusion of what the Keeper expected to happen once Pike arrived/wanted Kirk to see.

But bottom line: neither Kirk nor the audience know what really happened once Christopher Pike was returned to the Talosians.

 

Well, the episode loses a lot of time anyway: Spock initially claims it's "six days at maximum warp" from SB11 to Talos (not explicated, but what else could he mean?) and thus more at any other speed, but then we get the eventual adventure where Spock slows down to pick up Kirk. Do the characters really sit and watch TV for more than a week straight? Without popcorn?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I always assumed that when we have commercial breaks, and they reconvene afterwards, that perhaps a good number of hours is in between. At one point, Spock explicitly states Pike is fatigued, so it's quite possible there are quite a few adjournments to allow the injured Pike to rest.

 

It is my opinion that the Talosians kept Kirk from realizing how much time passed and kept him thinking that he still had several days to retake control of the ship, and they did it by replaying the courtmarial over and over again for Kirk and the other crew members. So they basically gave the others a Groundhog Day type illusion, making them foreget each day when they went to bed and wake up next morning thnking it was the previous day.

And posssibly the court martial might have been a bit different each day, so what the audience sees could be taken from different days and thus not be totally conistent. For example, Spock pleads guilty in "The Menagerie Part 1" and later the court martial board votes on Spock's guilt or innocence in "The Menagerie Part 2". It is my theory that those two scenes were taken from two different illusions of the court martial with different fake events.

 

Alternately, the Talosians gave Scotty a different idea of "maximum warp", being the impatient sort after having waited for more than a decade...

Nothing to do with this forum, but DSC resets the SB11/Talos spatial relationship to around two lightyears only, facilitating short hops plus indirectly making "The Menagerie" easier on the eye. (Might be they moved SB11 before TOS, of course!)

A key Talosian power in any case is to stop people from noticing things, such as Pike's disappearance from his room. The easiest way to achieve this might well be to dip key characters into deep reverie, sometimes for hours at an end.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I've mentioned the Pike and Vina shot from the end of part two before as Spock would still be in the corridor! It just seems too quick for me that Pike had beamed down so fast but there you go! While in the original Vina probably didn't see the real Pike standing close by only the one beside her who then went underground with her!
JB

 

It's shown on screen so it is canon, elements have been retconned but that happens throughout the franchise (some greater than others).

I, for one, love "The Cage" and often wonder what TOS (and the state of Trek now) might've ended up like had it been picked up as the pilot and the series continued on from there. Years ago, I managed to collect all of the Early Voyages comics and they're a fun romp through the era.

 

Well, "The Cage" is less colorful in all sorts of ways. I gather this would have been a loss: where TOS excels in is aping Forbidden Planet but adding much-needed Batmanesque vigor. Hunter Trek might well have ended up doing the aping without the vigor.

Timo Saloniemi

 

People tend to misinterpret that as a statement of cause and effect. "What's onscreen is canon" doesn't mean that being onscreen makes something canonical. A fictional canon is the entire essential work by the original author or creators, as distinct from its imitations by outside creators. For instance, the Sherlock Holmes canon is the 60 stories and novels by Arthur Conan Doyle, as opposed to plays, adaptations, pastiches, etc. So with Trek, saying "what's onscreen is canon" is just shorthand for saying that the original, essential work is the TV series and movies, and that the novels and comics are merely emulations of it rather than integral parts of it. It doesn't mean that everything onscreen is equally authoritative. After all, there are plenty of deleted scenes and alternate edits out there, not to mention onscreen apocrypha like fan films and video games.

"The Cage" is along the lines of a workprint or director's cut of a movie, an alternate version to the officially released final edit. Something like that is usually more of a might-have-been than anything else. Although of course it's spurious to worry about what is "real" in an entirely fictional series. As long as nothing contradicts it, you can believe a deleted scene "really" happened if you like. There are parts of "The Cage" that I'm fine with believing in, like the bit where the Talosians take control of the ship's computer, but there are other parts I'm happy to ignore, like Pike's discomfort with women on the bridge, or the ship turning transparent at warp. (I handle the various cuts of ST:TMP the same way. There are parts from the extended cuts that I consider "real," and other parts I disregard, like the unfinished Kirk-spacewalk sequence in the wrong EVA suits.)

 

It's been noted a million times here that whoever the current producers of screen-Trek are, decree what is cannon, i.e., cannot be contradicted by ancillary material.

So I think we'd have to ask Alex Kurtzman or one of his helpers.

I personally want to know what canonical color Kirk's eyes are (Pine's are blue). It could play a role in a novel (a retinax scene?), and an author might need to know which color not to contradict.

JK, but only somewhat.

 

I've always wondered who decided to add that illusory scene from "The Cage" to the end of Part II of the "The Menagerie." It is not in any script version I have (or have seen), all the way from the first draft to the revised final (shooting) draft.

 

And I've pointed out a million times that canon is not a "decree." It's not something that has to be declared, any more than you have to declare whether something is land or water. It describes what something intrinsically is; it can't not be that. A fictional canon is the original work. Period. Whatever stories are told by the original creators or their direct successors constitute the canon. Nobody has to "decree" that; it's just what the word means.

It's like the works of a Renaissance artist as opposed to the works of that artist's apprentices imitating their master's style. The artist doesn't have to decree "my work is my work" (well, beyond signing it). It is simply a fact that it is their work, and other people's imitations are not.

When tie-ins deal with conflicting canonical material, there tends to be a certain leeway. We've seen this with Saavik. Some comics make her look like Kirstie Alley, others Robin Curtis, others a blend of the two. Some novels describe her appearance and personality more like Alley's characterization, others more like Curtis's. Similarly, some of the '80s DC Comics portrayed Koloth with ridges, others with his smooth-headed TOS appearance, with no explanation given. Where canon includes both versions, it's left to the storytellers to decide which to favor, just as it's left to the viewers to decide which to favor. Again, it's just pretending, so it's not as rigidly authoritarian as many fans seem to expect. Canon is the overall whole, the illusion of a unified reality; there's flexibility about the fine-grained detail.

I think when it comes to the description of the Prime vs. Kelvin characters, it would come down to whether the story is set in Prime or Kelvin. A Prime novel or comic would be aimed at fans of Prime TOS, while a Kelvin one would be aimed at fans of the Kelvin movies. So each one would be written or drawn to conform to its target audience's expectations. So the only place you might see Kirk described with blue eyes would be a Kelvin novel. Although the author might prefer to leave that detail vague.

 

Speed of plot is not limited to starship warp factors. This is the reverse of the same problem that comes up in "The Enterprise Incident" when Spock and the Romulan Commander take a slow turbolift ride from deck 1 to deck 2. The plot called for them to have a long conversation, so it took a long time to travel one deck. "Menagerie's" plot required Spock and Pike to set an Olympic speed record getting from the briefing room to transporter room to planet, so they set a speed record.

 

I used to be bothered by this timing discrepancy, but I eventually interpreted this as an example of how the Talosians can communicate literally, by letting someone hear words, or they can communicate by letting someone see images. A word-message could be something like "Vina and Captain Pike will be happy together. Don't worry about them", but that's not as emotionally convincing (note the look on Kirk's face) as showing the images which convey the same information. Both the words and the images can be conveyed while Pike is still in the corridor. It's just a form of communicating that isn't constrained by time.

Maybe a crude example would be how we use our smart phones to take pictures or videos to show someone. We don't need to live stream it, and we choose not to just tell them later using words. We can send it now by texting or email, or show them in person later. Someday our smart phones might be able to construct pictures and videos of fictional events, events that are expected to happen, or anything we want to say, based on words we enter. That technology might make us start communicating like Talosians, perhaps humorously prefaced by "what you now seem to hear, are my thought transmissions".

 

We also don't know how long Kirk stood there with that big grin on his face, prior to The Keeper calling out to him.
The power of editing!