"The Menagerie" questions

[Nebusj]

I just kind of love the idea of doing it as a flashback story where the characters are essentially watching their own pilot episode on a big-screen TV.

It's kind of funny that, in "The Menagerie," we watch a TV show about people watching a TV show-- and the double remove doesn't stop us from getting into it. It's the only episode of Star Trek that Kirk ever saw.

The episode also must have really, really left awestruck the first generation of watchers, who'd presumably have no idea there was a rejected pilot to use as framing device. The episode presented the idea not just that the Enterprise had a past, but that it looked radically, enormously different. It must've been mind-blowing; the audience expectation would surely have been for a lightly redressed Enterprise set.

 

[FormerLurker]

Yeah, he was watching the home video version.

^I though it was the streaming video version.

If it were streaming, the interruptions would have been lag, not breaks.

 

[Ithekro]

The breaks seem to be because Pike was tired.

 

[Metryq]

^I though it was the streaming video version.

More like the stream of consciousness version.

Ironic that the very first STAR TREK has a built-in warning about re-runs...

"You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record."
—Vina, "The Cage"

But then, Pike was looking forward to some re-runs with Vina.

"I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank pina coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day over and over and over?"
—GROUNDHOG DAY

 

[ZapBrannigan]

The episode also must have really, really left awestruck the first generation of watchers, who'd presumably have no idea there was a rejected pilot to use as framing device. The episode presented the idea not just that the Enterprise had a past, but that it looked radically, enormously different. It must've been mind-blowing; the audience expectation would surely have been for a lightly redressed Enterprise set.

I've had that thought too. A few fans had seen GR's black and white print of "The Cage," along with WNMHGB, at a sci-fi convention before Star Trek debuted on NBC, but only those few. To the vast majority of viewers, the sudden creation of a "retro" Enterprise and its crew must have seemed incredible.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Keep in mind that they would have already seen the second pilot in broadcast at that point, so if they were paying that much attention, some of the features of Pike's Enterprise would have looked familiar.

 

[Christopher]

When I was a kid watching the show in strip syndication, it took me a while to register that there was this one episode where everything was suddenly weird, with turtleneck uniforms and a rounded viewscreen and no McCoy and gooseneck video intercoms on the bridge, and then they were back to normal in the next episode. It took me even longer to figure out why it was different.

 

[GNDN18]

When I was a kid watching the show in strip syndication, it took me a while to register that there was this one episode where everything was suddenly weird, with turtleneck uniforms and a rounded viewscreen and no McCoy and gooseneck video intercoms on the bridge, and then they were back to normal in the next episode. It took me even longer to figure out why it was different.

I had the same experience. I couldn't wait for the pilots to turn up on the rotation; the differences subtle and gross were endlessly fascinating. Being a callow youth untutored in television production, I thought the events of Captain Pike's mission really happened 11 years before Kirk took command. Everything about the episode bespoke anachronism and history. WNHGB, with its orange highlights and recogonziable transporter sound, seemed to be a logical intermediate step.

Then I read TMOST and the first edition of the Compendium, and I understood the mechanics of pitch, pilot, and amortization. That was a lot of fun, learning how things worked in the real world, but I miss those days when hearing "This is thirteen years ago," unlocked a universe of imagination.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Even though I was in kindergarten, it always registered with me that The Menagerie was like a clip show using earlier footage, because there's a pretty big giveaway: It's that when they beam up to Pike's Enterprise, they have to come up one at a time.

That sort of limitation is not one you're likely to write into an earlier version of the tech, after already establishing that people could beam up together, because it's basically a waste of screen time. Rather, it clearly shows the evolution of the premise: at this stage of development, they were evidently trying to illustrate a limitation of the tech for dramatic purposes, by supposing that beam-up consumed so more power than beam-down that they couldn't bring everyone up at once who beamed down together; it's easier to drop something than to lift it. Hence, they were probably using footage produced at an earlier time.

 

[Maurice]

They didn't have to beam up one at a time. They all beamed down at once, after all. I suspect the "serial beamup" was for dramatic effect, plus the Talosians were in control, not the transporter dudes.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

They didn't have to beam up one at a time. They all beamed down at once, after all.

Yeah, I already noted the asymmetry.

I suspect the "serial beamup" was for dramatic effect, plus the Talosians were in control, not the transporter dudes.

That was the only beam-up we ever saw in "The Cage" though, so I figured it was the way they did it. I mean, when she's beamed up, Colt steps down and turns around to see who's beaming up next, like it's the routine procedure for beam-ups. If it was unusual because the Talosians were in control, you'd think she wouldn't have known to do that.

 

[Timo]

Well, it would be equally natural for her to turn if this was a surprise to her. "What happened to the others?"

What is "standard procedure" throughout Trek is to step down from the transporter pedestal at once, presumably so that the next batch of arrivals has a clear pad to arrive to. Once Colt completes that maneuver, it's time for her to react to the surprise of the week...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Obviously, we're interpreting this differently. It would be nice to have a baseline for comparison. But since there's no other beam-up ever before in Star Trek, or anywhere else afterwards in the episode involving more than one person, now we need to turn to the script and behind the scenes stuff....

 

[Metryq]

transporter dudes.

I remember a high school friend joking about the look of the transporter operator, "Why is the cook running the transporter?"

 

[Timo]

We know very little about the limitations of the transporter despite even getting snippets of dialogue specifically referring to those. What we do learn is interesting bt possibly misleading in all its ambiguity:

1) Beaming down typically involves stepping exactly onto one of those pads and waiting for an operator to operate the controls. In the second pilot, an unconscious transportee is even walked to a pad and pushed to precariously teeter on his unconscious legs, without support, so that his beam-down can commence! Yet sometimes people can beam down while not confined to a single pad - say, two people can hold hands ("Journey to Babel"). So the "limitation" about using just the pad seems arbitrary.
2) Beaming up involves very little beyond the operator operating. It's impossible if the ship's shields are raised, though ("Arena"). And to get the action started, one typically needs to signal with a communicator, although use of sensors may do the trick, too ("The Enterprise Incident").
3) Beaming down through somebody else's shields is also impossible ("Dagger of the Mind"). Yet beaming down through the ship's own shields seems simple enough! Ambassador Fox and his aide do that seemingly without assistance ("A Taste of Armageddon").
4) Beaming from A to B without using the pad in between seems impossible ("The Cloud Minders").
5) It's risky to beam from within the ship to within the ship for some reason - proximity, confined spaces, other? ("Day of the Dove")
6) Generally, only up to six people beam down - if there are more, they arrive in several batches of no more than six ("The Apple"). But more can beam up at once ("Day of the Dove"). So arbitrariness again.
7) Beam-down can be done without an operator, by setting the controls on some sort of a timer. If there's nobody at the controls, though, beam-up appears impossible, there being no remote control option ("This Side of Paradise").
8) There's a decontamination option available ("The Naked Time"), but all sorts of stowaways still find ways to travel in the beam ("Man Trap"), suggesting there isn't much automation involved in decon.

That's already plenty of rules or seeming rules, although it's nothing compared with the complications introduced in the spinoff shows...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

OK, but just to be clear, this is the first pilot. There's no reason to assume that the rules that more or less exist for the series proper apply here (cf. hand-lasers, hyper-drive, time-warp factor seven, etc.). A lot of stuff still had at least one more episode to go before getting finalized for the series. In the original series pitch, they didn't even have transporters.

 

[Timo]

Very true. It's just that while I did see "The Cage" before any other TOS episode, I'm an example of somebody not getting the impression that the machine would only operate for one person at a time (what with there being six pads and all). Conversely, even seeing all 79 pieces of the TOS puzzle left many mysteries about the equipment for me, not least because some of the pieces didn't fit. It's not an "underlying truth" that one would be able to uncover, but a matter of impressions and opinions. Even after a couple of hundred additional hours of Trek...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Marsden]

Yet beaming down through the ship's own shields seems simple enough! Ambassador Fox and his aide do that seemingly without assistance ("A Taste of Armageddon").

I'm not aiming this at you Timo, but I am so tired about the pretend mystery of how Fox beamed down. Scotty moved the ship out of range and lowered a shield to beam him down. Done. No anything else, just because they didn't spoon feed us with a paragraph of technobabble like other shows. We don't need to see the characters get dressed or sleep every night to know they do that, too.

 

[Timo]

I don't buy that for a second. Scotty was willing to throw Fox into jail (and his own career to the gutter) before agreeing to dropping shields. What was stopping him from obeying Fox was not the threat of the guns on the surface, but his Captain's orders, and he explicitly swore that the Captain himself countermanding those orders would be the only way to get the shields lowered.

Lowering the shields was never said to be a prerequisite for the beam-down anyway. It was to be a gesture of good faith, and when Fox didn't get that gesture, he beamed down regardless. And Scotty was aware of that, and had no great problem with that.

Furthermore, Scotty has not moved out of the range of the (as such harmless) surface guns by the time of the beam-down: it's an action Spock only later tells him to take, and Scotty certainly doesn't respond with "Done already, Sir".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Yet sometimes people can beam down while not confined to a single pad - say, two people can hold hands ("Journey to Babel").

That doesn't ring a bell.