The Menagerie: Part II

When NBC turned down the original Star Trek pilot The Cage, which still had Leonard Nimoy but starred Jeffrey Hunter instead of William Shatner, many people assumed that episode was gone forever. They were wrong: not only can it be seen on the Season 3 DVD, it was actually incorporated into two other episodes of the series, as part of Gene Roddenberry's attempt to acknowledge the episode's existence on-screen. The merger comes to a head in the second part of The Menagerie, arguably one of the best Star Trek episodes, or at least as far as the first season is concerned.

Picking up from the end of Part One, Spock's court-martial continues, and the officers judging him (including Kirk) are offered a visual testimony of what happened 13 years earlier, when Pike was imprisoned on Talos IV, the now forbidden planet Spock is trying to bring him back to. As the images, which are revealed to be mental projections coming from the Talosians themselves, progress and the truth about Pike's harrowing experience is revealed, Spock's motive becomes clearer and the mystery gets closer to its rather surprising conclusion.

The main interest of the episode lies in the fact that it features very little of the regular cast: about 70% of the footage is archive material from The Cage, featuring Jeffrey Hunter as Pike and Leonard Nimoy as a more "human" Spock (yes, you read that correctly). This extended flashback is a clever trick used by Gene Roddenberry to tie his two visions of Star Trek together, uniting what could have been with what actually came to be. Remarkably, from what can be seen here, the "first draft" turned out to be every bit as riveting as the final version, except for the absence of one James T. Kirk.

As a standalone mystery story, The Menagerie holds up beautifully. It's the heartfelt inclusion of the previously unaired footage, however, that lends it that extra emotional punch. In fact, it's a bit of a shame Captain Pike wasn't brought back in some other form when Roddenberry rewrote the pilot script: it would have been fun to see the character interact properly with Kirk.