Star Trek's original 1965 pilot episode: The Cage.

If you haven't seen Original Series Star Trek, you are missing out, dear readers. This may sound counterintuitive, but I love it so much that I... still haven't seen all of the episodes. I have to keep something for my old age, you know? But the other day I did watch the original pilot episode for the first time -- the pilot pilot, back before James T. Kirk was even a twinkle in Gene Roddenberry's eye, and the captain of the USS Enterprise was still Christopher Pike.

The premise of the unaired pilot is similar to a typical seek-out-new-worlds Trek episode, but the cast and overall tone is fairly different. The main trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy plus crewmembers Sulu, Uhura and Scotty didn't settle down until halfway through the first season, but the pilot episode featured the rather dour and worn-down Captain Pike backed up by first officer Number One (we'll get to her later), a surprisingly emotional Spock, and a crew of mostly interchangeable American men. Kirk's absence is significant, highlighting how gosh-darn serious the pilot is when compared to the rather jokey, colourful tone of "real" Star Trek episodes. I mean, there's still a hell of a lot of campy stuff to laugh at in The Cage -- angry humanoid pig-bear alien, anyone? -- but it was surely a good decision to replace the cynical, world-weary Pike with the more youthful, ridiculous Kirk and his love of doing forward-rolls in the middle of fight scenes for no apparent reason. (Sorry, have I mentioned yet that I LOVE CAPTAIN KIRK? I love him.)

A bizarrely smiling Spock inspects some super-convincing local flora with Cptn Pike. (source)

So, The Cage. Some of the crew beam down to the planet Talos IV to look for survivors from a long-ago spaceship crash, and find a small encampment of old men and -- gasp! -- a hot girl. What could possibly go wrong? As soon as Pike and his companions set eyes on Vina ("This is Vina, her parents are dead," one of the old men explains suddenly, in a moment of great unintentional comedy.) they become incompetent, because everyone knows that merely seeing an attractive woman instantly turns all men into craven imbeciles. Within minutes, Pike has been captured by mysterious aliens and his crew are left bewildered and bereft in a landscape of haphazardly-painted cardboard boulders. Number One was left onboard the Enterprise to lead the rest of the crew in the Captain's absence, and I'm pretty sure that if she'd been on the landing team then this whole kidnapping malarkey would've been a non-issue.

The plot of The Cage is pretty hackneyed, even by 1960s sci-fi standards, but it does work better with Pike than it would've done with Kirk. Pike, who admits to his friend the martini-swilling ship's doctor (some things never change) that he's thinking of retiring and going for something less stressful like the Orion slave trade (!!!), is the perfect victim for telepathic aliens who tantalise their prey with projections of their heart's desire. So even though he quickly works out that what he's experiencing is an illusion, his mind continues to conjure up fantasies of rescuing a damsel in distress, watching a sexy Orion slavegirl dance around in a bikini, and being married to a nice lady who makes picnics for him in the forst. Unfortunately, poor Vina is made to act out the woman's role in every one of these scenarios. (It's really astonishing that Pike is still single, isn't it?)

I love Number One's manicure and so should you. DITTO HER LASER GUN.

In some ways The Cage is less sexist than much of the later Original Series episodes, but it's still utterly rooted in 1960s society. Number One's presence on the bridge of the Enterprise tells us something about shipboard sexism almost immediately, beginning with an unfortunately realistic scene where Pike remarks that he's uncomfortable with "a woman" being on the bridge (referring to a young Yeoman, there to deliver some documents) before being reminded that Number One is a woman. He quickly catches himself and says that she "doesn't count". This kind of thing -- plus the fact that Number One is demonstrably the most competant person in the crew, yet is still left in a support role right up until the last moment -- indicates to me that the writers knew quite a bit about sexism and how it would show itself in this type of workplace (from a 1960s perspective, that is), and yet other aspects of the episode are preposterously misogynist. It's almost pointless to criticise a TV show written in 1965 for having terrible representations of women, but I find it fascinating that such a strong and strongly-written character as Number One can coexist with Vina's two-dimensional damsel/sexpot characterisation and Pike's incredibly dated fantasy life.

Vina in her guise as an Orion slavegirl.

When Vina first appeared ("This is Vina, her parents are dead.") I laughed out loud because she seemed so parodically vacuous and poorly acted, but by the end of the episode I was thinking that her situation was about 3242 times more horrifying and tragic than Pike's relatively brief clash with the Talosians. As a survivor of the earlier spaceship crash, Vina had been in the hands of the Talosians for twenty years, being tortured and forced to live in a fantasy world created by her telepathic captors. Pike, on the other hand, was trapped by the Talosians for a couple of days before his crew rescued him, during which time the Talosians forced Vina to try and seduce him in the hopes of creating more humans for the Talosians' entertainment. And at the end? Vina chose to stay behind because it turned out that her beauty was a Talosian illusion all along (and probably she has Stockholm syndrome). Oh, and it was Number One who saved the day. I miss Number One. If only Majel Barrett could've stayed in that role instead of turning into Nurse Chapel for the rest of the series.

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Regarding the less serious stuff (because let's face it, some enterprising superfan has almost certainly written their dissertation on gender roles in 1960s Star Trek, and this post is already fast approaching tl;dr territory): the costumes and sets in this episode are A DELIGHT. For one thing, the Starfleet uniforms are understandably even more cack-handed than they are in later episodes, with officers and crewmembers all dressed in the same blue or gold sweaters, all of which look like they're doing their best to choke the wearer. And when going down to the planet's surface, the crew changes into jackets so ill-fitting that even I, with my limited dressmaking capabilities, could hot-glue-gun something better.

The stunning Number One in a not-so-stunning jacket. (source)

The costume team must have invested in a job-lot of uncomfortable-looking silver synthetic fabric, because not only are all the Talosians decked out in it from head to foot, Vina's minidress is made out of the same material, as is the comforter on one of the beds. Oh, and speaking of beds, the set-design inside the Enterprise is, as always, to die for. The sets were spruced up quite a bit after this pilot episode was made, but the overal aesthetic is the same. That is, an aesthetic that revels in acres of soul-deadening empty space, greyish lighting, and an oppressive atmosphere of being trapped in a sealed container drifting through the cosmos with no hope of rescue from the monotony unless you volunteered for a deadly-perilous mission to an alien planet.

Captain Pike "relaxes" on his uncomfortable, too-short bed.

Honestly, I find it hilarious just how much of a nightmare it'd be to live on the Enterprise if it were a real place. You probably know that hospitals and prisons are painted specific colours in order to help calm the patients and inmates, and most offices have dismal-looking houseplants lurking on the windowsills in an attempt to inject some life into the room? Well, the USS Enterprise has none of that. Just hundreds of grey, pink and pale green oblong consoles and angular 1960s furniture, with the occasional ornament in peoples' personal quarters only serving to highlight the overall monotony. No wonder the redshirts are always so keen to fling themselves, lemming-like, into danger. One of my favourite Tumblrs in existence is Space Trek (subtitle: "the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise"), which posts nothing but hauntingly empty shots of 1960s-era Star Trek sets, sans people.

Pike and Vina have a picnic in the least organic-looking forest I've ever seen. (source)

Star Trek always seems to try harder with its "outdoor" sets. I like to imagine that somewhere out there, there are whole teams of people who spent their entire careers crafting air-filled boulders for TV heroes to throw at each other. In The Cage, the alien planet sets are even more painted-on than I dared hope, with the best ones being the utopic picnic scene pictured above (Pike's fantasy life = there is no middle ground between "alien slavegirl in a bikini" and "mid-20th-century suburban nuclear family Stepford Wife") and this deliciously cardboardy planetscape:

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So, yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff in this pilot (most of it in the adorably crumby low-budget visuals), but it's flawed enough that I can definitely see why so many changes were made before the series went to air. I'd have loved for Number One to reprise her role in the rest of the series, but I have my doubts over whether the writers could've created a successful dynamic between Kirk and Number One, particularly since The Cage featured some foreshadowing of Number One having feelings for Pike. From what little we saw I feel like a Pike/Number One relationship would be a lot more compelling (for all that Pike gives every appearance of being a misogynist) than a Kirk/Number One relationship. I can only imagine how easily it might have degenerated into Number One playing the role of sensible, scolding foil to Kirk's fun, adventurous playboy -- a dynamic that very rarely works, especially since it's almost always the woman who ends up being the straightlaced one. Like James Bond in the earlier Bond movies, Kirk's carefree skankiness is in many ways preferable to an ongoing romance subplot. As for Pike, I suspect that an Enterprise helmed by him would have made for a significantly different Star Trek from the show we know and love. He was wrong for the optimistic, forward-thinking tone the show later developed, whereas Kirk turned out to be the precise opposite of a reluctant hero.

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