Writer: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Marc Daniels (also kinda Robert Butler)
Producer: Gene L. Coon (also kinda Gene Roddenberry)
"The Menagerie" is an odd beast, an episode with a lot of asterisks attached. It's the reason there's kinda both 79 and 80 episodes of Star Trek. 79 because the pilot never aired, 80 if you include the pilot, but also still 79 because in the production schedules this two-part episode was counted as one production, the 16th.
The deal is, that at this point in the first season of the show, production was badly behind schedule. All of the scripts were being put through the absolute wringer of being written and rewritten by their writers, by story editor John D.F. Black, and by Roddenberry himself and the end result was that the show had run out of scripts. They had nothing to shoot, and would have to shut down production, which was unacceptable for a network series at this time.
So the idea was to salvage an episode out of "The Cage", which could never be aired as a regular episode but had still cost a boatload of money and whose footage was just lying around. The production team thought that if perhaps an "envelope" could be written using the regular characters, framing "The Cage" as a kind of flashback, it would basically mean they could shoot one episode's worth of footage and drag it out to encompass two shows, creating essentially a clip show for an episode the audience had actually never seen.
Black was originally assigned the task to write the envelope, but Roddenberry was displeased and decided to do it himself, leading to Black leaving the show and D.C. Fontana being elevated into the story editor position.
What's left is actually a really engaging two-parter, that must have been really cool and exciting for the original audience to see -- indeed, it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1967. If you didn't know it was a money saving clip show (and why would you, since "The Cage" never aired), it comes off as a pretty epic story about Spock, Pike, and a mystery in their past, dramatizing these events with all new costumes and cast and sets and so on.
The gist is that Captain Pike, former captain of the Enterprise, has been the victim of a debilitating accident that's left him a vegatable. By falsifying various computer records, Spock diverts the ship to the starbase he's being kept at, and then essentially kidnaps Pike and hijacks the Enterprise, with course set for Talos IV, a mysterious planet which no one is allowed to visit on punishment of death! The only death penalty on the books!
Eventually, Kirk and Commodore Mendez of the starbase wrest control back and Spock is put under court-martial, where he begins offering his defense in the form of a video record of the one ship that ever went to Talos IV -- the Enterprise under the command of Christopher Pike (in footage from "The Cage"). This makes the unaired pilot into a "flashback" from 13 years ago, explaining the different crew, uniforms and even design of the ship. The episode even addresses that the edited, multi-angle episode footage used can't possibly be from a standard ship's log and explains this in Part II. As it is, the footage goes up to the place where Pike is captured in the original episode, thus leaving on a dramatic double cliffhanger -- the fate of Spock's career, and life, and why he's risking it all for his former captain, and also the fate of Pike and the mystery of Talos IV.
That said, the episode does have some problems, namely that like in "Court Martial", once all the answers to the mysteries of Part I are solved in Part II, a lot of the actions taken and dramatic declarations made don't really hold up in terms of motivations.
Also unfortunately for this episode, modern viewers have full access to "The Cage" on the series DVD sets, and so while Part I does retain some excitement, it wanes once the stock footage starts, and Part II is more largely comprised of stock footage and so fares worse. But it's useful to remember how exciting the show must have been for the thirty odd years or so when you couldn't see "The Cage", and the mystique it gave the unaired pilot, and Captain Pike.
When watching Star Trek in a modern context, it does raise the question if one of the two versions is redundant. "The Menagerie" incorporates large portions of "The Cage" but not all of it. If one is watching to see how the show and Roddenberry's ideas developed, it's useful to start with "The Cage", which is excellent television in its own right. But if one is just watching Trek for entertainment or enjoyment, perhaps it's best to just watch "The Menagerie" and experience it's story in that context.
Rating: 3 out of 4
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