So, the original pilot with basically nobody I'm familiar with besides Spock. One of the few episodes I've seen of classic Trek was the follow-up to this one, and it makes a lot more sense now that I've seen the original.
Part of my desire to watch the original Star Trek is based upon notalgia: my parents being early Trekkies, and the few original-cast movies I saw as a youngster, and starting with The Cage almost goes against that. The cast is entirely different, except for Leonard Nimoy, which is in itself funny because the Spock character hasn't yet fully developed.
Anyway, so they follow a distress call and beam down onto the planet Talos IV: it supports life, to their surprise I laughed out loud when he and Pike stumble across life on the new planet, and he and Spock share a horribly goofy grin when they find a particularly pretty flower!). Soon they're confronted with a beautiful young woman, who lures Pike into the clutches of the natives: Talosians, who are short, pale guys with huge heads that throb with each pulse.
As it turns out, their civilization is dying, along with their planet. They need a suitable species that they can breed as slaves to help repopulate and restore life to the planet, and conveniently have a woman, Vina; inconveniently, they lack a man, and that's where Pike comes in. They can create illusions with their minds, and try to tempt the good captain by promising him perceived riches, women, and luxury. Whatever he wants, they can make him believe he has.
Meanwhile, using their illusions, they thwart ever attempt of the Enterprise's crew to save their leader.
When Pike rebukes the advances of Vina, the aliens capture two women from the crew: the cool, collected first mate and the young, new yeoman on the ship, promising a superior mind and intelligent children with the first officer, and "strong female drives" in the yeoman (!).
Around this time, Pike realizes the Talosians can't read his mind when it comes to primitive emotions (primal anger, for example), and they manage to escape to the surface. Meanwhile, the Talosians realize, by reading the Enterprise's databanks, realize humans can be violent and hateful, and they would prefer death to captivity, even "pleasant and benevolent" captivity, and so decide that humans will not work for their plans.
As it turns out, Vina was horribly injured when the expedition she was a part of crash-landed on Talos IV. The Talosians rebuilt her, but without knowing what a human looks like, made her horribly disfigured, and so she opts to stay on Talos IV, where she has the illusion of looking like a normal human, and Talosians give her an illusion of being with Captain Pike as well.
Back on the ship, Yeoman Colt puts her "strong female drives" to work, and asks Pike who he would have picked to have been "Eve" to his Adam on Talos IV; the question is left unanswered as she is chased off the bridge by the first officer.
The pilot was apparently criticized by studio heads for being "too cerebral", but I thought it was pretty intriguing in a good way. Pike's battle against illusions, trying to discern reality from fiction, was interesting, and even more interesting was the assertion by the Talosians that humans prefer violent freedom to captivity that was full of pleasure.
The network also found it a little slow. I can maybe agree with that. IIRC, it clocked in at over an hour, and probably could have trimmed a good chunk off that.
I can see elements of the full series developing: Pike is not unlike Kirk: quick, decisive, and intelligent, and he had a good look. It makes me wonder what would have happened if he had decided to continue with the show (in hindsight, seems like walking away, especially with a career in trouble, was not the best move). I think he could have pulled it off.
Laurel Goodwin was incredibly cute. I would have liked to see her transition to the regular cast, but apparently, "The Cage" takes place fifteen years before the original series kicks in, so I guess that would have been hard to write in! I guess she's in one of the offshoot comic books or something, but thankfully, the expanded universe/apocrypha does not seem to be canon. It's so hard to follow that sort of stuff, and I'm already cringing at Disney making everything from here on out canon in the Star Wars universe. Yuck.
As a general comment, the HD upgrades do look pretty nice. I would like to see the original images of outside the ship, but so it goes. The trade-off is that we get a very nice, crisp picture during the rest of the scenes. Most of the other effects are untouched, I'm guessing, because the phasers and force fields look very 1960s.
An interesting start to the series. It's almost like watching it's own unique beast: like The Next Generation after it, it clearly takes place in the same universe, but it's not quite Star Trek yet (or rather, "Star Trek: The Original Series" as it seems to have been dubbed). Looking forward to moving forward!
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