Star Trek Thoughts: The Menagerie
Jul. 18th, 2013 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter watching the second pilot of Star Trek and the first regular episode filmed, I was interested in getting around to the two-part episode that parsimoniously reclaimed the first pilot, "The Menagerie." Quite a while ago, my family had managed to videotape a TV special wrapped around "The Cage" itself, but I had never quite got around to watching the whole thing. This might have had to do with having read James Blish's short story adaptation (pleading the difficulty of adapting a story within a story, he just adapted the pilot) and not wanting to see just how it ended. Now, though, I was more than ready to get around to that unfinished business.
I suppose the familiar comments about the rejection of the first pilot for being "too cerebral" begin to set up the familiar theme of "the executives versus the original series" and give an impression of "the Star Trek that could have been." The cast we wound up with is well-loved, of course, but perhaps the temptation is to think "it could have been smarter." At the same time, though, I have noticed Gene Roddenberry's first draft proposal had a good number of ideas that were developed into actual episodes. I also noticed a "brief guide" to the show mention another book claiming the executives were also a little worried about some bits of the pilot (the "green slave woman" among them, no doubt) being too sexed up for 1960s television. In his afterword to the short story adaptation, James Blish suggested the pilot had wound up implying a love triangle with Captain Pike, Number One, and Yeoman Colt and had to jettison it at all costs; I can imagine this possibility just might have bent fandom in a different direction than "slashing" Kirk and Spock... (So far as Spock's introduction goes, with Number One the "logical" character he's just a guy with pointed ears, and I do wonder a little if his character could have developed in any other way.) With Captain Kirk's character having become famous to the point of self-parody, I do find myself contemplating the briefer impressions of Jeffrey Hunter's Captain Pike, who considers quitting once off the bridge (which doesn't have the somewhat garish red paint I imagine helped it stand out on contemporary colour TVs), and seeing a bit of the famous comments about "Horatio Hornblower in space" there.
For the purpose of the framing story, it does make sense that Talos IV has to be an enigma to the viewpoint character Kirk, but in the context of the "Star Trek universe" I do wonder a bit about "you can't go there but we won't tell you why." It was amusing to all of a sudden think of the Talosians as "the Morlocks and the Eloi all at once," but another sudden thought I had was that both the original pilot and the frame have a pretty negative take on being handicapped, even if the 1960s might not have been so quick to think "you can still communicate in 'binary'". I was inclined to think that Star Trek: The Next Generation would have taken a different tack on the idea, even if some would have criticised it for being "touchy-feely" and "politically correct." Of course, when all's said and done, I should remember the pilot warned about becoming too interested in "illusions..."
I suppose the familiar comments about the rejection of the first pilot for being "too cerebral" begin to set up the familiar theme of "the executives versus the original series" and give an impression of "the Star Trek that could have been." The cast we wound up with is well-loved, of course, but perhaps the temptation is to think "it could have been smarter." At the same time, though, I have noticed Gene Roddenberry's first draft proposal had a good number of ideas that were developed into actual episodes. I also noticed a "brief guide" to the show mention another book claiming the executives were also a little worried about some bits of the pilot (the "green slave woman" among them, no doubt) being too sexed up for 1960s television. In his afterword to the short story adaptation, James Blish suggested the pilot had wound up implying a love triangle with Captain Pike, Number One, and Yeoman Colt and had to jettison it at all costs; I can imagine this possibility just might have bent fandom in a different direction than "slashing" Kirk and Spock... (So far as Spock's introduction goes, with Number One the "logical" character he's just a guy with pointed ears, and I do wonder a little if his character could have developed in any other way.) With Captain Kirk's character having become famous to the point of self-parody, I do find myself contemplating the briefer impressions of Jeffrey Hunter's Captain Pike, who considers quitting once off the bridge (which doesn't have the somewhat garish red paint I imagine helped it stand out on contemporary colour TVs), and seeing a bit of the famous comments about "Horatio Hornblower in space" there.
For the purpose of the framing story, it does make sense that Talos IV has to be an enigma to the viewpoint character Kirk, but in the context of the "Star Trek universe" I do wonder a bit about "you can't go there but we won't tell you why." It was amusing to all of a sudden think of the Talosians as "the Morlocks and the Eloi all at once," but another sudden thought I had was that both the original pilot and the frame have a pretty negative take on being handicapped, even if the 1960s might not have been so quick to think "you can still communicate in 'binary'". I was inclined to think that Star Trek: The Next Generation would have taken a different tack on the idea, even if some would have criticised it for being "touchy-feely" and "politically correct." Of course, when all's said and done, I should remember the pilot warned about becoming too interested in "illusions..."