The Menagerie

[Wingsley]

I just re-watched "The Menagerie, Parts I and II".

What struck me is how both the clever nature of Roddenberry & co. (in recycling "The Cage" and making it into a TOS "movie" within a TOS two-part episode, all for next to nothing in cost) and how well the plot flowed. This could have been a pieced-together disaster, but what we see instead is like a baby feature film; a TV movie of the week.

"Menagerie" also contributed to TOS folklore, giving the fictional TREK universe a sense of history and continuity. (This happened even though there were some odd technical puzzles in the dialogue.)

Even stranger still is that Starbase 11 was recycled for TOS as well, with a different officer minding the store. To this day, I've never heard of anyone criticizing that. Instead, it just becomes another folklore topic for discussion.

Some people here don't think highly of "The Cage", but I think it was better than just an excellent re-make of "Forbidden Planet". The Enterprise here has more of an Earth-ship feel, even if it is never expressly said that Pike represents only Earth. If there is a flaw in "The Cage", it's the way the supporting cast is written. All the good lines go to Pike, the doctor, Vina and Magistrate. Spock and the rest aren't as well written, so they simply suffice in keeping the action going.

By the way, John Hoyt was ever bit as good as Paul Fix/Doctor Piper or Deforest Kelley/McCoy. Roddenberry used the "ship's doctor" to much greater effect as a major character in '60's TREK than any other TREK since.

 

[Nebusj]

I just re-watched "The Menagerie, Parts I and II".

What struck me is how both the clever nature of Roddenberry & co. (in recycling "The Cage" and making it into a TOS "movie" within a TOS two-part episode, all for next to nothing in cost) and how well the plot flowed. This could have been a pieced-together disaster, but what we see instead is like a baby feature film; a TV movie of the week.

What gets me is thinking of what the fans who were watching this for the first time must have felt. They'd have no idea about the twin pilots or the complete recasting or the schedule pressure that made the show patch the failed pilot into the regular series. To them, it was just another week of the show and ... they redid the whole bridge! They built new sets, new costumes, hired a whole second ship cast! It'd have to be stunning to see that much work and money put into an episode, even a two-parter like this.

And, yeah, the introduction of the long backstory is one of the moments where the Trek Universe really became something involved. I think all the first season episodes are independent of one another; this is the first time we get the accumulation of history. It's the second and third season where stuff started getting cross-referenced a lot to make a real continuity, but ``The Menagerie'' is the first one that gave us a longitudinal study of the Trek universe.

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

Roddenberry used the "ship's doctor" to much greater effect as a major character in '60's TREK than any other TREK since.

agreed. hasn't gates mcfadden (dr. bev "bone" crusher) spoken about how little screen time she got during the movies and almost didn't return for NEM...?

... as if she had anything better to do jk

but really, Dr. McCoy's character was the best fit for that series (his Pulaski clone, not so much imho but that's another thread) and has not yet been duplicated in terms of audience/character connection

 

[Wingsley]

I was hoping that Gates McFadden would take her character somewhere, but it never happened. To often, TNG characters seemed to behave too much like being an astronaut was just a day-job for them. Pulaski's sarcasm was a welcome change of pace, but I guess studio politics killed that, too. It appeared that TNG's staff (ever-changing) wanted to make TNG into an un-TOS, and every series since has gone out of its way to repudiate TOS in one way or another.

That has always disappointed me. If the studio wanted to re-invent TREK as something fresh and they wanted to avoid comparisons with the original, this wasn't the way to go about it.

That having been said, I wholeheartedly agree with Nebusj; by recycling "The Cage" in "The Menagerie", Roddenberry & co. managed to pull off a big coup. Different sets, characters, costumes, "look & feel", and yet make it part of the TREK Universe by making it "history".

The one question sitting in the back of my mind is the music. WNMHGB had a unique musical score that was not wed to the familiar TOS theme song. Did "The Menagerie" shoe-horn in familiar TOS music after the fact?

 

[Mysterion]

Even stranger still is that Starbase 11 was recycled for TOS as well, with a different officer minding the store. To this day, I've never heard of anyone criticizing that. Instead, it just becomes another folklore topic for discussion.

Nothing strange there. Somewhere between Enterprise's visits to SB11 there was a change of command. Mendez moved on to another positing (or retired, or was fired, or died, or whatever) and Stone took over for him. Or visa-versa, I forget which order we saw those guys in at the moment. Happens all the time in real-life.

 

[Jackson_Roykirk]

...By the way, John Hoyt was ever bit as good as Paul Fix/Doctor Piper or Deforest Kelley/McCoy. Roddenberry used the "ship's doctor" to much greater effect as a major character in '60's TREK than any other TREK since.

Not to take anything away from DeForest Kelley, but I really liked the way Dr. Boyce's character was written. He reminds me of the character of "Doc" in the play Mister Roberts, or in the film version of Mister Roberts, in which "Doc" was played brilliantly by William Powell.

In Mister Roberts, the doctor was more than a doctor, but rather a friend and confidant of the title character. The character of "Doc" was there -- just like Dr. Boyce -- as a plot device to be a sounding board for the inner thoughts of the main character.

In the case of The Cage, the presence of Dr. Boyce gave the audience a chance to know what was on Pike's mind. That plot device works much better than the cheesy alternatives, such as the audience hearing a character's thoughts in a voice-over, or have him talk to himself like a cartoon superhero. The "confidant" character is a common way for a TV or film character to reveal his/her thoughts and feelings to the audience.

In the production version of TOS, the duty of "confidant" to the main character was split between Spock and McCoy, which also worked very well, because the feedback they gave to Kirk was coming from the two very different points-of-view that Spock and McCoy could provide.

 

[J.T.B.]

An excellent episode and, as others have said, very cleverly done.

I remember seeing it in reruns as a kid, not knowing anything about rejected pilots or envelope stories, and being utterly transfixed by the richness and solidity of the incarnation of the ship's past. I guess it had never occurred to me that a future show would have its own past, and here it was, and darned if it didn't look different than the future "present," just like it should if it were real. That episode more than any other intrigued me and got me interested Trek's "universe."

Of course "The Menagerie" along with "Court Martial" are also some of the strongest episodes for laying the foundations for the Starfleet we didn't see. Many "treknichal" arguments trace their origins to those three hours.

It must have been a hoot back in the original run, not only for the changes in scenery, but, wow, Jeffrey Hunter for a guest star? And Susan Oliver and John Hoyt. Oliver is my favorite Trek actress of all.

I thought Hoyt was great as Boyce, but he was always good and had plenty of work. Boyce was a little world-weary, but didn't seem a skeptical as McCoy. I remember seeing a syndication-cut episode in the '90s that dropped the Pike-Boyce scene in the captain's cabin. I was disgusted, naturally.

Paul Fix was always dependable, too, but I really don't get much of a feel from him in WNMHGB, they didn't give him much to do.

--Justin

 

[Wingsley]

Susan Oliver, Jeffrey Hunter, Paul Fix, Deforest Kelley and John Hoyt seemed to be from a very different time. If a new TREK series were started in the future and its makers wanted to capture more of the essence of TOS, do you think Hollywood could still find actors like these? Or have they already died off?

One thing that really struck me about TOS, especially "The Menagerie", is that we've watching a show where not only are so many of the actors long dead, but some of the "survivors in encampment" were actors born in the 19th century. So the show takes us on a journey through time in more ways than one. I wonder if anyone ever interviewed any of these guest stars about TREK or their careers in general.

 

[TheThrasson]

When I first saw this episode as a kid, it blew me away. "Too cerebral", is what I wanted, but could not find elsewhere on TV (70's). The depth and quality of the backstory/history is one of the aspects of Trek that hooked me for life; as it did with Tolkien and Herbert.

Hoyt was well versed in the genre and would have excelled in the role of doctor of the Enterprise.

 

[gomtuu20]

Menagerie has been my favorite episode for years, for most of the reasons already noted in the thread. I always loved Hunter as Pike and often wonder what TOS would have been like w/ him as the captain. I suspect the show would have had less humor as it went along. Throughout the years, I have come to the conclusion that Shatner really gave the show that extra something that it needed. While Shatner's speaking style and mannerisms are now frequently parodied and mocked, they were just what the show needed. Hunter didn't have that sense of charging in where angels dare not tred like Shatner did. There wouldn't have been as much of a contrasting dynamic between Kirk and Spock or even the Dr. and Spock with Hunter.

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

do we know how long Spock served as Pike's XO?

 

[Timo]

Nope. All we know is that they served together as boss/underling pair for eleven years, four months and five days. We don't know if those years were consecutive, and we don't know how big a boss Pike was during those years, or how high-ranking an underling Spock was, or where the service took place (that is, aboard which ship or installation, apart from the Enterprise). In theory, a civilian Spock could have been a civilian Pike's underling on some wholly separate undertaking before the two became involved in Starfleet, or during an extended leave, or whatever. The sky's not the limit on speculation here.

It is even possible that Spock was never Pike's XO, merely his Science Officer or something. That is, until the next movie tells us something new about this. But since it seems to feature alternate timelines and stuff, we might still not know what Spock's service history under Pike originally was.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ClayinCA]

Even stranger still is that Starbase 11 was recycled for TOS as well, with a different officer minding the store. To this day, I've never heard of anyone criticizing that. Instead, it just becomes another folklore topic for discussion.

Nothing strange there. Somewhere between Enterprise's visits to SB11 there was a change of command. Mendez moved on to another positing (or retired, or was fired, or died, or whatever) and Stone took over for him. Or visa-versa, I forget which order we saw those guys in at the moment. Happens all the time in real-life.

I guess that depends on whether you go by production order or airdate order - in production order, the Enterprise's visit to Starbase 11 in "Court Martial" was followed in the next episode by...the Enterprise's visit to Starbase 11 in "The Menagerie"!

Now, obviously there's got to have been some time in between, but I always thought that was funny: "Dammit, Jim, we've been to this starbase two weeks in a row, and both times they've tried to court martial our command crew!"

 

[Wingsley]

Which prompted McCoy to exclaim "I'm a doctor, not a prosecutor," no doubt.

 

[jealousblues]

...By the way, John Hoyt was ever bit as good as Paul Fix/Doctor Piper or Deforest Kelley/McCoy. Roddenberry used the "ship's doctor" to much greater effect as a major character in '60's TREK than any other TREK since.

Not to take anything away from DeForest Kelley, but I really liked the way Dr. Boyce's character was written. He reminds me of the character of "Doc" in the play Mister Roberts, or in the film version of Mister Roberts, in which "Doc" was played brilliantly by William Powell.

In Mister Roberts, the doctor was more than a doctor, but rather a friend and confidant of the title character. The character of "Doc" was there -- just like Dr. Boyce -- as a plot device to be a sounding board for the inner thoughts of the main character.

In the case of The Cage, the presence of Dr. Boyce gave the audience a chance to know what was on Pike's mind. That plot device works much better than the cheesy alternatives, such as the audience hearing a character's thoughts in a voice-over, or have him talk to himself like a cartoon superhero. The "confidant" character is a common way for a TV or film character to reveal his/her thoughts and feelings to the audience.

In the production version of TOS, the duty of "confidant" to the main character was split between Spock and McCoy, which also worked very well, because the feedback they gave to Kirk was coming from the two very different points-of-view that Spock and McCoy could provide.

yeah, I liked that doctor char too.
He almost was like a mentor to Pike or something, he didnt feel like a subordinate.

I wouldnt have minded seeing a couple episodes of that crew.

 

[Captain Zog]

Good and all as it was, could Star Trek as originally envisaged (starring Pike et al) really have worked out in the long term?

 

[Navigator_NCC2120]

Nope. All we know is that they served together as boss/underling pair for eleven years, four months and five days. We don't know if those years were consecutive, and we don't know how big a boss Pike was during those years, or how high-ranking an underling Spock was, or where the service took place (that is, aboard which ship or installation, apart from the Enterprise). In theory, a civilian Spock could have been a civilian Pike's underling on some wholly separate undertaking before the two became involved in Starfleet, or during an extended leave, or whatever. The sky's not the limit on speculation here.

It is even possible that Spock was never Pike's XO, merely his Science Officer or something. That is, until the next movie tells us something new about this. But since it seems to feature alternate timelines and stuff, we might still not know what Spock's service history under Pike originally was.

Timo Saloniemi

In the pilot "The Cage", Number One was the ships First Officer and Spock was the ships Second Officer. When Captain Pike and Number One were trapped on Talos 4 it was Spock who took command of the ship and gave the order to break orbit and abandon the them (Capt. Pike, Number One, Yeoman Colt) on Talos 4. Here is a picture of it courtesy of www.trekcore.com .

Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
/\

 

[Captain Robert April]

That having been said, I wholeheartedly agree with Nebusj; by recycling "The Cage" in "The Menagerie", Roddenberry & co. managed to pull off a big coup. Different sets, characters, costumes, "look & feel", and yet make it part of the TREK Universe by making it "history".

Basically, another example of how Roddenberry's real genius was as a producer. He essentially cooked up a "clip show" with clips nobody had ever seen before, that was also a two-part episode that only took four days to shoot.

The one question sitting in the back of my mind is the music. WNMHGB had a unique musical score that was not wed to the familiar TOS theme song. Did "The Menagerie" shoe-horn in familiar TOS music after the fact?

No, "The Cage"'s soundtrack was the same. With WNMHGB, they tried a lot of different approches, including a totally different theme song and Quinnn Martin type act breaks, which were all done away with when the episode was recut to run along with the regular episodes (that second pilot also set the stage for "The Menagerie", with the same uniforms and sets, so that when the two-parter aired, the different designs weren't totally unfamiliar).

 

[Hambone]

Good and all as it was, could Star Trek as originally envisaged (starring Pike et al) really have worked out in the long term?

I don't think so, unless Hunter really, really allowed himself to loosen up. While Pike (the one time we saw him) was an interesting character, Hunter's portrayal was far too steely-eyed and granite-jawed...compared to Shatner/Kirk's easy-going attitude, which was much more inviting as far as episodic TV goes.

 

[Basil]

What's remarkable, too, is how neatly "The Cage" fits in as a "prequel" to the Star Trek we came to know and love -- for instance, the uniforms, the more military feel, the less colorful sets, and the slower and more audible transporter all come across as natural precursors to what becomes TOS. Even Leonard Nimoy's performance gives his Spock a much younger quality than in the rest of the series. Considering that it was only made two years before the show debuted, The Cage does feel like it takes place a decade in the series' past. I think one of the reasons that some fans of TOS are put off by the aesthetics of Enterprise and the current film is because they've seen how The Menagerie did it right, giving us a past for Star Trek that was immediately believable.