8.1/10. It’s hard for me to evaluate this one independently of my knowledge of this production history. While I don’t know much about the behind the scenes goings-on of TOS, I did learn that “The Cage” the original pilot for Star Trek, was repurposed for use in “The Menagerie,” even after the show was retooled. That means that this bit of corporate expediency (“we filmed all that stuff, may as well use it somehow”) allows some of the seams to show – particularly the fact that everything amounts to a frame story where we watch the main characters sit around and watch the original pilot.
And yet, that frame story offers one of the most compelling plots the show’s presented thus far. It’s encouraging that this one was written by Gene Roddenberry himself, as it has pacing, intrigue, and even improved dialogue that are spotty at best in other episodes.
For instance, so many Star Trek episodes (at least through the show’s first ten) have been about mysteries of some kind. It’s an easy way to try to hook viewers to stay through the end of the hour, to try to find out what the answer to the riddle is. But the problem is that many of those answers have been pretty obvious, many of the journeys to get there dull, and many of the answers themselves not particular inspiring.
Here, however, Roddenberry does a stellar job (no pun intended) at making not only the “what” but the “why” of the mystery in “The Menagerie” interesting. Much of that comes from the fact that focal point of that mystery is Spock himself. As usual, the show somewhat holds the audience’s hand by emphasizing that Spock is incapable of lying and is fiercely loyal, but even so, from prior episodes we know Spock’s character, we know his decency and devotion, and so it immediately grabs your attention when he’s the one hiding things from the Captain and basically commandeering the crew and the ship for a secret mission.
Frankly, it reminded me of an episode of The Next Generation, where the typically anodyne and guileless Data suddenly takes over the ship and sends it to a different land. These kinds of moments are exciting, not only because they show somebody on the crew as the antagonist (or at least the cause of the crisis of the week), but because the person causing those problem is otherwise so without malice or treachery that the audience instantly wonders what could make them act in this manner.
It’s also a little scary (and a little exciting) just how effective Spock and Data are in their quests. The way Spock is able to deceive the crew, maroon Kirk, and execute his mission is startling in how dangerous Spock could be if he genuinely wanted to cause trouble, and as with Data, it serves as a nice reminder to be glad he’s on our side.
But the episode also does a good job at building up to the “what” of the mystery, not just the intrigue of what would possess Spock to act like this. The fact that Kirk reads a top secret file about Talos IV and that visiting the planet is the last crime in the Starfleet rulebook (is Starfleet a thing yet? Everyone says “Earth Ship”) is punishable by death immediately heightens the stakes for what Spock is up to. In the same way, the fact that Spock has a history with Captain Pike, some past shared experience that not only motivates Spock to initiate this whole business, but to seek Pike’s blessing in the process adds to the mystery of what exactly happened on that planet and why it was enough for Starfleet to ban visiting, Pike to act as frantic in his warning as possible given the circumstances, and for Spock to risk court-martial and even death to get back.
Pike himself is one of the most iconic characters in Star Trek, with parodies in South Park and Futurama, and an important role in the 2009 reboot. That gives him some instant credibility for a viewer coming this late to the game, but beyond the reputation that proceeds him, there’s something weird and tragic about this maimed soldier, a man whose brain is reportedly fine but whose trapped in a useless body, that makes his story and his warnings quickly compelling. (And, as a bonus, there’s also a certain Hector Salamanca from Breaking Bad vibe that only heightens his presence to a modern viewer.
Oddly enough, the thrill of Spock’s deception and the ensuing chase culminates in a military tribunal. Courtroom drama is a somewhat odd place to take the story (albeit one that nicely allows for everyone to hang out and watch “The Cage”), but it works. Spock’s instant surrender and attempt to plead guilty, and the back and forth between Kirk, Mendez, and occasionally Pike is well-written. Given what’s at stake, turning the whole escapade into a hearing works surprisingly well as another part of the frame story.
Once we actually get into “The Cage,” though, things start to sag a bit. There are, understandably, going to be pacing issues when you spend 3/4 of an episode telling one story, and then abruptly shift toward telling another. But it is interesting to see a different version of the enterprise, both in-universe as a mini-prequel to the current season, and out-of-universe as a glimpse of an early conception of what the show might have been. (A female first officer, and Majel Barrett no less!)
Captain Pike’s laments in the vein of “heavy is the head that wears the crown” offers a unique contrast to Kirk, at least the Kirk we know. While the small part of the past adventures we see here amount to a pretty typical Star Trek story (something mysterious happens on an unknown planet, “let’s go investigate,” trouble ensues), Pike’s declarations that there’s other way he could live, that he might be ready to give up the chair, add dimension to the character in short order.
Of course we get a cliffhanger and hint toward part 2, with everything up in the air and much at stake. But it’s an encouraging first half of this story, one that admittedly slows down a bit once the show starts recycling its old footage, but one with a number of impressive elements that mark this as a notable episode out of the gate.
[7.3/10] I think I owe Ray Wise an apology. Leland Palmer grief-stricken jigs were one of my least favorite parts of the first season, and certainly one of the most laughable, and I had pretty well written the character, and by extension the actor who played him, off. Coffin-surfing and show tunes and more overwrought falling to pieces just struck me as too much, verging into, at best, “so bad it’s good” territory.
But now that he can fully play up Bob’s predatory instincts, his malevolent glee, his unhinged villainy, Wise is a revelation. In his first interaction with Donna in ages, he is so unbearably creepy. “Arbitrary Law” does well to tease and taunt the audience, putting Donna in the place Maddy was two episodes ago, in the same corner, while this shark of a man starts to pen her in. From his skin-crawling touching of Donna’s hair, to his awkward dancing that quickly turns into creepy dancing, to the same lewd gestures he performed before killing Maddy, Wise’s take on Leland goes all out in seeming to come this close to striking again.
He, of course, doesn’t, and a last minute reprieve for Donna thanks to Sheriff Truman leads him back to the Roadhouse for Cooper’s last seance, or whatever you’d like to call it. That sequence, like most of the show, is a bit hokey, with lightning crashing and showy camera angles. But at the same time, the episode does a nice job of not only attempting to tie all the psychic elements together, but setting a mood to make those reveals meaningful.
So we have all, or almost all the major players in one room -- Ben, Leland, Leo, the cops, and even, by serendipity or providence, Major Briggs escorting the senile bellhop. It’s then that Twin Peaks plays its hand. Leland’s dancing connects with The Man From Another Place’s little boogie. The “gold circle” that Gerard warns Cooper about in a severe and unnerving fashion comes back in the form of The Giant returning Cooper’s ring to him. The senile bellhop offers a stick of gum to Leland, serving as the cosmic force of the universe essentially fingering him as the killer in light of the “your gum is coming back in style” comment. In the shadow of all of this, Cooper thinks back on his dream, and for once he can hear Laura’s whispered words -- “my father killed me.”
What’s noteworthy about the scene is how much we already know. We know Ben’s a red herring. We know that Leland is Bob. We know who killed Laura Palmer and to a lesser extent why. And yet, this still feels like a reveal, a momentous occasion -- Cooper not only realizing who the culprit is but deciphering all of the cryptic images and clues he’s seen up until this point. I’m sure half of it is a retcon as I doubt how much of this Lynch & Frost had planned out in the beginning, but it works well enough to feel like a satisfying, if not fully clockwork, resolution of all the mystical symbolism Cooper has been chasing throughout the series.
There’s also some cleverness from Cooper here, realizing the dangerous animal he’s about to try to nab and making Ben the temporary patsy to lure Leland to the station as his lawyer. Again, the episode leans into the shorthand and trust that Cooper and Truman have developed, and the scene where they push Leland into the cell and he begins running around like a crazed beast is both a triumph and a fright.
It’s there that Ray Wise really shines, letting the beast out of his cage and creating a truly ominous and horrific presence. The way he hoots and hollers and toys with his captors as they interrogate him about what happened to Laura and the others gives him the character of an unchained spirit, unconcerned about his current circumstances and revelling in his taunts and his terror. It’s the scariest Bob has ever seemed, and that’s saying something.
But Wise isn’t finished. As usual, things get a bit melodramatic, but he also sells Leland’s remorse, his regret, his revulsion to all that he’s been a party to after Bob pulls the “ripcord” and Leland is forced to remember all of the deeds that Bob committed in his body. The sprinklers going off from Dick’s cigarette is too convenient, but it creates worthwhile imagery of Leland leaving this mortal coil and Cooper easing him into the next world, trying to help him let go of his unimaginable pain.
The only big problem is that Twin Peaks feels the need to sum up too much, both at the conclusion of Leland’s incident and in the aftermath. The scenes speak for themselves, so having Truman wax rhapsodic about what he can or can’t believe, and having the group give their “I sure learned a lot” speeches is an unsatisfying finish to some great work. It also doesn’t help that they’re wondering what’ll happen to Bob results in a cheesy sequence of an owl flying and a freeze frame that looks like the rejected cover of a prog rock album.
There’s also a good chunk of other pretty useless junk in the episode before we get to the meat of it with Leland. The Norma’s mom storyline continues to be entirely uncompelling. The same goes for the James-Donna romance, which never ceases to include the worst dialogue in the entire show on a regular basis as they torture one another (emotionally -- something I have to specify on this show) over Maddy’s death. And Lucy’s paternity situation wears on without end. There’s an awful lot of crap to wade through before the episode really kicks into gear with Leland, and by extension Bob, being exposed.
But once that happens, the show and the episode finds its way and delivers a satisfying wrap-up of the Laura Palmer saga, with enough imaginative verve and dot-connecting to make it feel like this jumble of nonsense was part of a plan after all. And you have my apologies Ray Wise -- you knocked it out of the park here, and for once, the outsized, supernatural world of Twin Peaks felt right at home for someone other than Agent Cooper. Godspeed, Leland. So long, Bob.
[2.8/10] Woof. After having such a rough time with the first season of the show, I blanched a bit at the suggestion that the second season was a step down. “How much further could it go off the rails?” I wondered. How could it conceivably recede from the already paltry levels it had already hit. Well, there’s my answer -- ninety minutes of television that is 90% shlock.
But, as I always try to do when talking about something I don’t particularly care for, let’s start out talking about what’s good about this one. Full disclosure, the opening scene with the senile old room service guy doddering around while Cooper lays bleeding on the floor initially annoyed the hell out of me. The scene drags and drags and is almost excruciating in its duration. But I take that to be the point, and somewhere around the second time the guy returned just to give a thumbs up, it elicited a chuckle for the sheer rake gag-esque audacity of the scene, so that’s something.
We also get the who, if not necessarily the why, of the central mystery of the show. Cooper lays out the details of what he’s pieced together, and the episode reveals, or at least seems to reveal, that Bob, the guy from Cooper’s dream and Mrs. Palmer’s vision, beat up Ronette and seemingly killed Laura. Some of the scene veers into cheese, as nearly everything here does, but the quick, spliced together clips of that grisly final scene are legitimately chilling, and add a level of fright and severity that the show has had trouble establishing outside of myna bird mimics thus far.
There’s also some nice material involving Ed and Nadine. I’ll admit, I’ve come around on this portion of Twin Peaks, which I initially found bothersome. Ed offers a sad and exaggerated but believable tale. He and Norma were longtime sweethearts; he thought Norma ran off with Hank (where presumably there’s more to the story), and Nadine was there for him in a time of need. Ed was impulsive and distraught and married her, but she was so happy and so gracious and so devoted to him (never even blaming him for accidentally shooting out her eye) that he didn’t have the heart to leave her. It’s a little melodramatic, but it’s a good performance from Ed, and the look of wistfulness in Norma’s mind when she sees the husband and wife together adds another layer of pathos to the whole thing.
That said, the theme for this episode seems to be two-fold: 1. Baffling transformation and 2. Doing a collection of really stupid stuff.
The latter assessment may sound harsh, but I don’t know how else to explain some of what seems to be trying to pass for comedy or texture throughout this episode. While the senile room service guy has a certain anti-humor charm to it, the similar attempts at weird or wooly humor are painfully bad. The numerous, extended shots of Deputy Andy’s odd little walk and wobble were dumb as all get out. Leland breaking into a little jig and Ben and Jerry following him was a baffling effort at charm. And the “hospital food is terrible” recurring gags are the hackiest kind of easy crap. I think the show means to be funny here, but it never quite makes it above moronic.
And that’s not the only place where “Giant” be with you makes no sense (in a bad, rather than merely surreal, way). When Ben chases Audrey around the bed, why in the world doesn’t he recognize his daughter’s voice, or the other features besides her face? The whole bit is creepy (which is, in fairness, what I think Lynch & Frost were going for) but it feels like a cheap way to avoid the reckoning the show set up in the prior episode.
That’s not the only nonsensical parent-child scene in the episode. Major Briggs tells his son Bobby about a dream he had where they embraced as family in a wonderful house some time in the future. It’s meant to play as some kind of reconciliation or corner-turning moment for the pair, but it plays as ridiculous as all get out. Much of that can be pinned on the horrible acting from Bobby Briggs, who seems be trying to communicate being sincerely touched, but mugs and renders the reaction implausible.
Then there’s the strange transformations in the episode. Leland Palmer’s hair turns white after he returns from strangling Jacques Renault. So...there’s that. But he’s also happy now, singing songs and passing out during them. I’ll admit, there’s something funny about Ray Wise playing so chipper (and it’s a nice change from his awful cry-dancing routine), but it’s so exaggerated and over the top that it’s hard to take anything from it beyond mild bemusement.
The same cannot be said for Donna’s transformation here, as she seems to be attempting to step into Laura’s persona. Between taking Laura’s glasses, her meals on wheels route, and toying with Bobby, we get an entire change in her personality without the slightest hint as to why or how. Maybe the glasses are cursed or the ghost of Laura is possessing her or some crap like that? It’s weak sauce from Lara Flynn Boyle, and a direction for the character that feels entirely unmotivated.
Oh yeah, and then there’s a soothsaying giant. While this struck me as odd, it’s of a piece with the “people who seem like they’re from an old circus’s freak show give Cooper vaguely-worded prophecy” shtick from the first season. It didn’t do much for me (and certainly didn’t feel as formally audacious as Cooper’s first dream), but it didn’t really bother me either.
In total though, “May the Giant Be With You” may be a new low for Twin Peaks, which had already been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a while by this point. Plodding pacing, more awful dialogue and acting (with Pete joining Bobby as a particularly bad offender on that score), dumb attempts at comedy, and nonsensical character choices. This was a slog, but hey, at least we have Alfred back to voice my thoughts on the ridiculous of this all in-universe. Yeesh.
I've tried something a bit different here, and watched this episode during my TNG rewatch as a companion piece to the episode 'The Pegasus'. As an episode of Enterprise, this is an absolutely horrid way to end the series, but taken as an episode of TNG... well, it's still not all that great, but kind of works a bit better.
The issues are numerous. Riker is supposedly trying to make a decision about whether to disobey orders and tell Captain Picard the truth about what happened on the Pegasus, but there is the question of when exactly he finds the time to take a jaunt in the holodeck to work all his problems out. On top of that - perhaps most confusing of all - the story he watches doesn't seem to have any bearing on what he's going through at all.
It's nice to see the recreation of Enterprise-D sets, but they do look a bit cheap and cheerful. It's also impossible to hide the fact that Riker and Troi look 10 years older all of a sudden.
This is a throwaway in every sense and a real slap in the face to the cast of Enterprise. The plot is meaningless and just a mess (how rubbish are those alien "criminals"?) and the death of Trip was unnecessary and poorly done. I'm not sure what was trying to be achieved here.
Once again, we find an Enterprise crew member alone aboard an alien ship without any Universal Translator, but still able to perfectly understand every alien language spoken on board. Funny how language is only a barrier when the plot requires it to be.
I found the T'Pol/Phlox plot even more uncomfortable than "Tuvix", which I watched yesterday. To be quite honest, I have no idea what point it was meant to serve. At least the main plot with Archer being captured by a bounty hunter working to service the Klingons' price on his head had some relevance to continuity and a cliché moral point to make (good men can be driven to awful deeds under the right circumstances). T'Pol throwing herself at the doctor (and, once, Malcolm) seemed to be pure fanservice.
Anyone who's read my reviews or chatted with me about fanservice in anime knows the disdain I have for the practice. It applies equally to live-action and Western media, worry not. Briefly, I think sexualizing a character just for the hell of it (as this seemed to be) cheapens the entire series. Enterprise isn't alone in this. The same was done in Voyager, first with Kes, then with Seven when Kes failed to hold the target male viewership demographic. The Next Generation did it with Deanna Troi and her absurd non-uniform. I can still call it out when I see it, especially because other Trek series did the same thing. It's a pattern.
Frustratingly, Sato-chichi looks more like a Sato-appa (Korean, rather than the Japanese man his name implies). That said, it was no doubt motivated by the casting department trying to choose an actor who could plausibly be Linda Park's father—and since she's Korean, that almost certainly means casting a Korean man to play her dad. It's still worth nitpicking, because as much as I love Hoshi I object to the casting of a South Korean actor to play a Japanese character.
Belated edit: I finally got my head straight after a bit of research that I should have done before posting this review… Sato-san is portrayed by the same actor as Buck Bokai in DS9—a Hawaiian-born actor named Keone Young, whose parents were Chinese and Japanese immigrants. No Korean ancestry to be found anywhere; the surname "Young" led me to unwarranted assumptions. Nearly 19 months later, I shamefully retract my nitpick, and I will be more careful about checking my assumptions against facts going forward.
Star Trek episodes wherein a character phases out of normal reality but can still walk around the ship (albeit while passing through the bulkheads and most other solid objects) annoy me. How can they still breathe when the air is still in normal phase? If other people can't see them, and the ship's sensors can't detect them, how can they see? How can they hear? How do they not fall through the floor while they're walking through doors and bulkheads?
I had the same questions during TNG's "The Next Phase", but they'll never be satisfactorily answered. At the end of the day, the walking around is just a plot device, as is the "phasing" itself. But in this particular case, there's another annoying plot hole: Once Hoshi realizes that she simply passes through solid matter, why is she "trapped" in the gym all night after that? She could have just walked through the bulkhead, just as her hand passed through the free weights. For that matter, why do her clothes fade away too? She changed out of her uniform for the gym, so her gym clothes should be unaffected by the transporter accident and should remain fully visible even as her body disappears.
All of the plot holes with Hoshi being out of phase in this particular episode are probably explained away by the episode's cardinal sin: Making it all a dream. See, none of the episode really happened except for beaming from the planet's surface back to Enterprise. The rest was entirely in Hoshi's head.
I'm resisting the urge to give this episode a higher score. The absurd science and the aforementioned cardinal sin aside, I've loved every one of Hoshi's character episodes so far. But I didn't love it so much that I can excuse the writing.
I think this episode suffered from trying to include too many subplots. In the end none of the stories got any real closure.
Perhaps it was intentional that all of the plot lines were so superficial, but I don't have to like it.
What does it say about this episode that its only real effect was to make me like Hoshi even more? (For that matter, what does it say about me?) None of these little vignettes had any real character insight to offer. We already knew that Trip and Reed are perhaps a bit incautious when it comes to booze and women. (I'll leave aside the contradictions I see with their previously established backstories.) We already knew that Archer is inclined to distrust anyone who talks too much about the Suliban. We also already knew that Hoshi is amazing at learning languages—it's literally the reason Archer wanted her on his ship in the first place. (Doesn't make it any less interesting to "see" the character "learn" new languages.) I guess we didn't know that Phlox gets silly when he's woken up mid-hibernation, but that felt more like a shoehorned-in comic relief plot than anything.
To sum up: Hoshi is adorable. Phlox gets a chance to be supremely silly, though it doesn't really work with the tone of the show for me. Trip and Malcolm don't really have any presence, just a one-off gag (of sorts) scene that just gets left. Archer meets a mysterious woman who can only be a hint at things to come. (For that reason, his is the most fulfilling subplot—though it is fulfilling only in that it promises more intrigue next season and beyond.)
