1x12 The Menagerie (2)

9.7/10. I wonder if Gene Roddenberry knew in 1966 how prescient and relevant something like “The Menagerie” would feel more than fifty years later. There’s an irony to the episode, which offers an implicit critique of Talosians, who have become so consumed in their fantasies, in exploring simulated lives, that they have become weak and unable to sustain themselves. There is the ouroboros quality of viewers watching an episode of television about characters in the show watching what amounts to an episode of television that is, in subtext, about the dangers and delights of losing yourself in the sort of glimpses of other worlds and other lives that television, and Star Trek in particular, provide.

That’s what’s so striking about “The Menagerie.” In some ways it feels like Roddenberry is warning about not only his own medium, but his own product. Make no mistake, the Talosians are us, or at least, a cautionary tale about what we might be if we let our stories overtake the rest of our lives. It’s a warning that feels especially prescient in the context of Star Trek, a program that cultivated a fanatical, at times extreme devotion, documented in films like Trekkies and parodied in Futurama. Arguably moreso than any other franchise, Star Trek is associated with the type of “nerd in his parents’ basement” stereotype, the kind of person who as Roddenberry himself seems to caution against, let’s these flights of fancy become substitutes for social interaction and even living one’s own life independent of these artificial reflections of it.

In age where we’ve moved beyond television – to video games, virtual reality, social media bubbles, and more and more tools that can either be means to connect us to the wider world, or to seal us off into our own little spaces, the ideas “The Menagerie” plays with are, if anything, more relevant now than they were in 1966.

But rather than confining that idea to pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals, Star Trek grounds it in character. When we met Captain Pike in part one, he was contemplating hanging up his spurs, wondering what kind of lives there might be other than being a Starfleet captain. That detail adds weight to his temptation, resilience, and resistance when captured on Talos IV. The Talosians offer him visions of other lives, ones where he can be a brave knight, where he can return to his home, where he can have anything he wishes or can imagine, far from the life-and-death decisions and day-to-day struggles of being an explorer and military commander.

Pike, however, rejects these tempting illusions, this gilded cage, even when threatened with flashes of hellfire meant to offer a stick on the other side of that carrot. There are real philosophical questions raised by poor Vina, arguing that things he can hear and see and feel are as real as anything even if they’re constructed. Still, Pike cannot abide this resignation. The images he sees are false, the pleasures they offer are transient and ephemeral, and the price for enjoying them is to be a prisoner, if not a slave. More than Kirk, he feels like a precursor to Captain Picard in those moments, remaining steadfast, sharp, and resourceful even in the face of allure and torture.

To the same end, it’s hard not to watch “The Menagerie” and think of the other works that seem to have influenced it or been influenced by it. It addresses the same notion of the isolating numbness of escape tackled early in Fahrenheit 451 and comically in Wall-E. The scenes of Pike and Vina enjoying a bucolic paradise plucked from Pike’s memories feels of a piece with Pike’s successor’s experience in Star Trek: Generations. And the humans in a sort of intergalactic zoo, prompted to mate by their captors, calls to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s superlative novel Slaughterhouse Five.

What’s just as notable (and what shows the franchise’s heart as well is it’s imagination) is that the Talosians, like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians are not evil so much as they are simply other. The don’t mean Pike or Vina any harm exactly, they are simply so advanced, so removed from the human experience that these people embody, that their morality doesn’t even exist on the same axis. For them, humans are primitive (a blind spot that turns out to be their undoing), to where they respond to emotional responses and pleas for this or that with clinical curiosity, the way a scientist might study the behaviors of a lab rat.

And yet they’re also tragic figures. Despite their incredible powers, the Talosians are doomed, so divorced from their more rough-hewn past that they cannot sustain their planet, nor repair the technology that makes their lives possible. It’s one of Star Trek’s trademarks, one seen as recently as in “The Corbomite Maneuver,” where the antagonists are not merely mustache-twirling baddies, but rather fantastical, otherworldly beings with their own goals and understanding of the universe that leads them to clash with our heroes.

We also gain a greater understanding of Spock’s motivations of bringing the Enterprise back to Talos IV in the present day, in a way that both accounts for his actions in the prior episode that's in accord with what we already know about the character, but which also deepens him. There is an unshowy nobility to Spock. His secrecy and deception in shanghaiing the ship and its crew were not acts of malice or selfishness, but rather, meant to place the burden and the responsibility of breaking the rules on his shoulders and his shoulders alone, thereby sparing Kirk and the rest of the crew from having to face the mortal consequences of the specified punishment.

But beyond that bit of gallant cleverness, we also see the fierce loyalty Kirk mentioned early, and most strikingly, a streak of compassion in the otherwise detached Vulcan. Spock, however, reserved he may seem on the outside, is willing to go to such lengths, take such risks, in order to give his former Captain another chance at life, to free him from his afflictions and allow Pike to live out the rest of his days in bliss rather than, true to the theme of the episode, a prisoner in his own body.

That is the other irony, and the flipside of Roddenberry’s warning, in returning Pike to Talos IV to allow him to embrace those illusions he once rejected. The planet that once represented imprisonment for Pike (the episode was originally entitled “The Cage”) now represents freedom. There is such beauty, such joy, such catharsis, in seeing the images of Pike, no longer confined to his apparatus, reunited with Vina, permitted to be himself again.

Star Trek, after all, would not really function as a luddite tract. Roddenberry show us the dangers of technology, of the immersive forms of storytelling he himself is offering, but he also gives us the brighter side of them, the ways in which for those who can no longer see the world, experience life as we do, such escapes can be freeing, vital, and heartening all at once. The Talosians encourage Kirk to continue on with his journey, to see the galaxy and to stay in the saddle as Pike resolved to after his experiences on Talos IV, but they also welcome Pike back with open arms, and deliver him to a paradise that is otherwise outside his grasp.

Had Star Trek met the same fate as the plucky show that emerged out of its shadow, Firefly, and been cut down half a season into its run, closing with this episode, the series would still be justified and worthy of adulation from this episode alone. It blows everything that came before out of the water, and considering it was written by the father of Star Trek himself, that’s an encouraging sign for the rest of the show’s run. “The Menagerie” is a high water mark, if not the high water mark, for a show embracing the philosophical, the technological, but above all else the hopeful – that there’s more worlds to explore, that the stoic possess hearts of gold, and that the lame shall walk.