When the Enterprise finds survivors of a years-old ship crash, it seems too good to be true. And indeed, it is soon revealed to be the illusory creation of a powerful alien species of telepaths. They abduct Captain Christopher Pike, imprisoning him in a sort of "menagerie" of creatures, and forcing him into imaginary situations with the same human woman, Vina. What are their motives? And how can Pike overcome an adversary who can read his thoughts?
"The Cage" is an interesting place to start a Star Trek journey --it is literally a television pilot that wasn't good enough to make the cut. But the reasons that TV executives disliked it (famously, they declared it was "too cerebral") aren't necessarily the reasons it comes off "less than great" today. No, Star Trek did not spring into being fully-formed, and this episode is full of examples. The setting is much more militaristic than what would ultimately develop. The sound effects are obtrusive. Few of the characters pop, and even the familiar one -- Leonard Nimoy's Spock -- isn't being written they way we'd all come to know him.
But there are other ways "The Cage" clangs that I'll have to reckon with repeatedly as I watch the original series. It is very much a product of the 1960s. How could it not be, no matter its futuristic setting? It features a stilted and distant style of acting that's the product of another time; only Jeffrey Hunter as Pike and John Hoyt as Doctor Boyce give anything approaching the sort of lived-in performance that reads as "natural" today. Still... it's one thing to know intellectually that "this is the style of the time," and another to try to overlook the snail-like pace of the editing and storytelling.
It can be harder still to overlook some of the content. In the fullness of time, Star Trek would grow to be respected as years ahead of its time in matters of race and civil rights. But it's not immune to the occasional gut punch of six-decade-old cultural norms. There are a lot of awkwardly sexist moments in "The Cage": Pike's discomfort with women on the bridge, a starship captain speaking admiringly of women who "like being taken advantage of," Spock's alarm at the abduction of "the women!"... and the fact that Gene Roddenberry thought the right button for his episode was a female crewman asking her captain who he would have picked to be "Eve" to his "Adam."
But despite all that, there's still something here. I mean, there had to be, since this pilot did earn Star Trek a second chance. It is exotic and intriguing, and it does make you think (even if a few TV executives didn't see that as a good thing). It seems like an intractable problem to go up against aliens who can make you see anything. (Maybe too intractable? They sort of have to just "change their minds" in the end for Pike to get out of his situation.) Already, the perhaps subversive idea that force won't save you in every situation is being planted here.
Since the last time I watched "The Cage" (as the re-master of the original Star Trek was airing in the first decade of the 2000s), the context for viewing it has changed a bit. Trekkers used to look for it for small hints of what Star Trek would become in the years after it was made. Today, you can look to it more specifically for any hints of the what would become the spin-off, Strange New Worlds. Even though the answer to that might simply be "there aren't many," the fact that there are now nearly a dozen Star Trek series just highlights even more: it's all here because of this. Without it, we wouldn't have any of it.
Don't worry, I'm not getting too sentimental. I'd say "The Cage" deserves a C-. No, it's not the most auspicious start... but then, it wasn't seen as such in its own time, either.
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