Star Trek TOS S01E11, The Menagerie Part 1

Dir. Marc Daniels, Wri. Gene Roddenberry

The Summary: Spock commandeers the Enterprise in order to take care of some old business related to a very old adventure (The Cage, the unaired pilot episode of the series, from which much footage is used in this two part episode).

The Good: They do a great job of making us wonder what exactly Spock’s goal is—it must be something huge, obviously, but the sense of mystery is great. Pike’s fate is really sad and the source of some actually good discussion on ideas like what it means to be alive and if life is ever so hopeless that it’s not worth living. Kirk gets to do cool commander stuff when his ship is stolen–Spock is a formidable adversary, but neither looks stupid here. On a related note, thank God Spock is on our side—he’s a scary dude when the chips are down. Captain Pike’s single beep to allow Spock to continue is nice and tense. It’s hard to get pathos from a sound effect, but they manage it. The cliffhanger of Spock’s potential death sentence isn’t very weighty, but there is a good sense of wanting to see the next episode at the end, if for no other reason than to see exactly how he’ll get out of this mess.

The Bad: They’re clearly still feeling out the sci-fi elements of their universe, as evidenced by the fact that they still have a bell (of all things) that they ring for their court-martial. They don’t even try to make the new dude look like the old Chris Pike. If you’ve seen The Cage, there is a lot of recap here, with only the framing narrative to hold your attention. The episode doesn’t hold up well to multiple viewings.

The Review: The most serious issue in reviewing this episode is that people’s mileage is really going to vary. If you haven’t seen The Cage (or haven’t seen it recently), this is a really solid episode. If you have, your attention is going to inevitably wander as you recap in almost its entirety something you saw a few weeks ago. The framing narrative for revisiting this story is undeniably compelling. Spock has been around just long enough for this kind of out of character behavior to really surprise and intrigue. As opposed to “The Naked Time,” we actually have a good enough idea of the character in our minds that seeing him commandeer the Enterprise, and worse, betray James Kirk, is a real shock. The viewer immediately wants to know what’s going on, and the episode doesn’t take long in beginning it’s rather compelling explanation. The reason is mostly tied up with Spock’s work with the previous captain of the Enterprise, Captain Pike. To TV watchers at the time (who were largely unaware of the pilot), this must have been a fascinating and world-expanding idea. That the Enterprise had existed before this crew was aboard it, and that it had had other captains is a significant increase to the scope of the fictional universe.

In addition, the story we get is an interesting one. The pilot episode that they reuse for much of the footage here is a solid Trek story with great alien design and interesting questions to puzzle over. Because of this, the viewer gets both a cool science fiction story and also a character driven story for Spock as our narrator. In general, the ingenious ploy of reusing a failed pilot as an entire new episode is brilliant, and worthy of respect. It takes creativity (and maybe a little desperation) to try something like this, and it really does pull it off, especially for this first half of the event. Also, The Menagerie is a way better name for the episode than The Cage, in my opinion at least.

If you’ve seen “The Cage” before, however, it really is a different story. What was a really interesting interplay between two narratives becomes a couple of tiny moments of interesting character work punctuated by interminable flashback scenes. I also think that because of this it’s one of the least rewatchable episodes of The Original Series. Most of the excitement of the episode comes from the payoff, and if you already know where it’s going, getting there isn’t really very much fun. You don’t really care about the flashback story because you already know how it ends, and you don’t care about the characters because they’re all one-offs. At the same time, the framing narrative is too thin to really do much since it’s mostly just Spock talking. If I were recommending the series to someone, I would absolutely tell them that this was a can’t-miss episode. I would even tell them to watch this over the actual pilot, The Cage. This is a much better episode than that, and for a first watch forms much of our opinion of Spock. I don’t know if I’d really put it on a rewatch list for Trek veterans, though. You get a couple of nice moments out of it, but it’s far from vital. My final score represents a first run through the series watch, and so is very good, but knock off a star if you’ve seen this stuff a thousand times. It’s probably not worth going back to.

The Score: