Writer: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Robert Butler (but also Marc Daniels)
Producer: Gene Roddenberry (but also Gene L. Coon)
The clip show continues as Spock shows footage from the unaired pilot as his legal defense in the finale of the Original Series' only two-part episode.
Part Two is comprised primarily of reused footage, as Part One had done the heavy lifting of establishing the in-series rationale for the clip show. And so we follow Captain Pike after he's captured by the Talosians, and led through a series of illusions to try and get him interested in Vina, the human woman they've also captured, so they can breed a service class to rebuild the planet and their society.
What's amusing and occasionally maddening is that the episode seems unwilling to cut to commercial directly from the reused footage, meaning that for every act break, the show finds some asinine reason for the trial to pause, reminds us the stakes (Spock's life and career), and then come back to resume the clip show. These range from "Captain Pike is tired", (semi reasonable, dude is heavily disabled) to "The Talosians have stopped transmitting for no reason at all" (the perfection of the footage is explained as it having been generated by the telepathic Talosians from Pike's memories), to "Commodore Mendez has decided to skip the rest of the testimony and have Spock declared guilty" (a hilarious attempt to "up the stakes" that is completely ignored when we come back from commercial).
Also interesting, if one watches both this and "The Cage" is what elements from the pilot did not make it into this rendition. While a lot of it is the standard editing out of unimportant details to improve the pacing -- and the pilot did have sluggish pacing -- some of the edits include the more risque sexual referenes and inferences of the original script, elements the network had objected to the first time around. Also gone is a lot of the more embarassing sexism in the original pilot. Most of these edits and changes actually render the two-part version more watchable.
The biggest change is to the ending of the pilot, altered through tricky editing so that "The Menagerie" can have an ending of its own. In the original pilot, Vina was revealed to be horribly mutilated by the crash of her ship, and beautiful only through illusion. In the end, she chooses to stay behind on Talos so she doesn't have to live with the reality of her broken body, and has an illusory Pike to keep her company. In the revised version of this seen in this episode, the illusory Pike is not included, because the ending to this episode is that Spock's motivation for bringing the cripppled Captain Pike to the forbidden planet of Talos IV has been so that the Talosians can provide him with an illusionary healthy body and he can live happily rather than as a vegetable, and thus the excised footage is now used to show Pike and Vina together in their illusionary bodies.
As mentioned last time, "The Menagerie" is a fine episode, especially if you haven't already seen "The Cage", but I have the same problem with it that Kirk does. Once the truth is revealed, including the fact that Spock's court martial was also a sham designed by the Talosians to distract Kirk from regaining control of his ship, Kirk tells Spock he could have just asked. Spock's response is that then Kirk's career and life would have been jeopardized too, but in the end, Starfleet exonerates everyone given Captain Pike's long history of distinguished service and his unique relationship with the Talosians. So, y'know, why not just draft a proposal to Fleet Headquarters to begin with?
Oh well. It's a clip show that won a Hugo Award, who am I to argue?
Rating: 3 out of 4
Next Voyage:
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