156: Star Trek TOS Season 1, "The Menagerie (pt. 1&2)"

https://youtu.be/lsIK83tsmh4

Matt and Sean talk about the repurposing of the original Star Trek: The Original Series pilot, putting Spock in the spotlight, and testing Kirk’s patience. Does recycling old content work for Star Trek?

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell 🐨

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Trek In Time?

Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.

This week on Trek in Time, we're talking about recycling. That's right everybody, we're talking about Star Trek Season 1 episode, well, episodes. The Menagerie, both parts 1 and 2. These were 16th in shooting order, and 11th and 12th in broadcast order, which I found surprising. A little bit earlier in the season than I would have anticipated.

Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological order. That's chronological stardate order. And we're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So currently we're talking about 1966. And who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a published writer.

I've written some sci fi, I've written some stuff for kids. And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He's the guru and inquisitor behind the YouTube channel Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you doing today? I'm pretty good. Uh, yesterday, Sean, sometimes my OCD kicks in and I sent you texts yesterday as to what I was doing.

Yeah. I ended up spending all day working on this. Yeah. Um, we, we had nothing on our website, the Trek in Time website. We had nothing there for what the start date order was for a long time. And then Sean had put together a, he found a, a listing that we were following and a spreadsheet. And I just copied that spreadsheet and just pasted it onto a page on the website very cursory way to do it.

And then there were episodes missing. We didn't have Discovery on there. We didn't have Strange New Worlds on there. There was like this stuff missing. And so what I did was I spent a few hours putting in all the missing episodes, cleaning up all the star dates and the dates, and like I added season numbers and episode numbers and all that kind of stuff to it.

And then I took that And I created a database, an actual database on the website. And so now that list on the website, I'm starting to, I'm doing this manually at the moment, but crosslinking the relational database items so that when you look at the list, the name of the episode will be hyperlinked and you can click it and it will take you to the episode that you and I actually talked about that episode.

So it's like, I'm trying to build this out and I want to get it automated so that as we go, it'll automatically link the most recent episode. And it'll make it much easier to see where we are in the list and what's coming up next. And in fact, I want to have something on the homepage that says up next and we'll have the

episode we're talking about next. I wanna make this as easy as possible 'cause there have been times where I watched the wrong episode and, uh, cause problems for the show. Yeah. So I use the website myself just to double and triple check that I'm watching the right episode before I watch it. So yeah, I tend this, I tend to check self serving.

Part of it's self serving and part of it's for the audience. Yeah, I tend to check in as well, just to double check, even though we close out every episode that we record before we're watching the next one. And I've said and built into the script what episode we're watching. I still go back there before I watch anything.

And I know What Matt speaks of when he says, like, it's easy to make a mistake. I texted him a couple of weeks ago before we watched the episode court martial. And I sent him the message court martial this week, and he wrote back, what the hell are you talking about? And I had to clarify, I'm talking about Star Trek.

I'm talking like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we get into our conversation about the menagerie, we always like to go back and take a look at what you've had to say about our previous episodes. So what have you found in the mailbag this week, Matt? Nice variety this week. Uh, we have from, from J. D. Lewis, who wrote, this episode feels like, no, this is about the episode court martial that you just brought up.

This episode feels like it was made to placate the network by doing a story to appeal to mainstream audiences. As far as Star Trek courtroom drum episodes go, my favorite is the Next Generation episode, The Drumhead. Next week's very special two part episode, The Menagerie, is about when Spock leaves Starfleet to pursue his long life dream to become a zookeeper, and Kirk and crew conspire to find a way to lure Mr.

Spock back to Starfleet, and as a result, hijinks ensue. Today's reaction was great. I can't wait for the next one. I like that. It was a two fer. I think that if, I think if they were actually to create an episode about Spock doing that, it would have been called, I Bought a Logical Zoo, and it would have starred Matt Damon as Spock.

Next we have one from AJ Chan, wanted to highlight the new intro song for Trek in Time. You changed it up around year three of this podcast, similar to how Next Generation and DS9 changed their intros on season three. Good catch. I never brought this up on the show, but for the first couple of years, we were using a song that I had licensed from, I think it was Envato Elements.

It's a website you can go and you can license music and photos and stuff from. And I picked it because it's very Star Trek feeling. Every week I published, we published an episode on YouTube. YouTube's copyright system would automatically flag every episode as a copyright violation. Because of that song.

And I would have to go dispute it. I would every week disputed it and put this thing like I had to copy and paste the license and say, no, it's authorized. And then the company that owns it would go, yeah, he's good. I had to do that every week. And I used to work in the video game industry and I'm, I have a friend that's a very talented composer and I had him doing work for me on, you know, My Undecided YouTube channel.

And I said, you know what? Hey, Keith, can you, uh, create a Star Trek-y sounding theme so that I don't have to worry about licensing ever again? He was like, sure. So that's the new intro. It's, it was created by Keith Zizza, very talented composer. Um, I'm so glad he did it because now every time we publish, I don't worry about it, Sean.

It's fantastic. Yeah. The copyright infringement system on YouTube is both critical and not super great.

We have another comment from style8686. Sean, great to hear you now have all the James Blish books and are planning to compare them to the viewed episodes. It's something I was thinking of doing myself and now I don't have to. I am looking forward to hearing your opinions. So am I. Cause I don't want to have to read them either.

So Sean, you're taking, you're taking one for the team, buddy. Yeah. The, my, my actually doing that is going to have to start next week because this week I had a week from hell and did not have time to read the story for this one, but I will be reading it and I will share my thoughts next week as kind of a bonus wrap up to the Menagerie and I will read next week's story as well.

And finally, uh, Mark Loveless, he's getting really good at putting these wrong answers only in every single week. So thank you, Mark. His wrong answer only for today's episode, the Menagerie Plot. Scotty wins an alien zoo in a drunken card game on shore leave, sells it, but secretly keeps one of the animals in his quarters after the sale.

It goes fine except its urine is a form of acid and slowly eats through the wires and its feces is radioactive and Scotty gets caught. However, the feces is used as fuel later on and saves the day with Scotty famously saying, Well, shit happens and everyone laughs.

Okay. Yeah. There's a lot to take in there, Sean. That one went like, you know, wild zigzag direction. I wasn't anticipating. Yeah. That was terrific. Thank you so much, Mark. That noise you hear in the background. Yep. That's the read alert. That can mean only one thing, that Matt's going to buckle up and get ready to read the Wikipedia description.

However, just like last week. This description doesn't come from Wikipedia. It comes from IMDB, user alfedo159. So it should be better. So it is better. Yes. All right. Well, while visiting Starbase 11, the Enterprise is hijacked by Mr. Spock, leaving Captain Kirk behind while abducting the recently crippled Captain Christopher Pike, former commander of the Enterprise.

The destination? Talos IV, off limits by Federation orders since the Enterprise first visited the planet 13 years earlier while then under the command of Captain Pike. After Kirk and Commodore Mendez, the Starbase commander, intercept the Enterprise, a court martial against Spock's apparent treachery is convened.

Spock's only defense is a video feed showing Pike's capture and imprisonment by the inhabitants of Talos IV. That's actually a pretty good, pretty good description. That's pretty good. Yes. Not bad. Yeah. This episode directed by Mark Daniels. And here's an interesting crediting issue. Mark Daniels directed all of the new content.

We of course know that the Menagerie is a repurposing of older content. It takes the original pilot and it turns it into a two parter. And Mark Daniels directed all of the new content, but he's only credited on the first episode. Robert Butler is credited on the second episode, but he actually directed

the original pilot, so they kind of split it down the middle and give credit to one each going either direction. The entire episode is also given credit to Gene Roddenberry as writer. And we know that he wrote the original pilot and he apparently was in charge of the second go around as well, when he repurposed the original content.

These two episodes aired in consecutive weeks, November 17th, 1966, and November 24th, 1966, excuse me. We have amongst the characters that we see, we see William Shatner. We see Leonard Nimoy quite a bit, DeForest Kelly. We see a bit of James Doohan and Nichelle Nichols as well. Majel Barrett, of course, also appears in this one as number one from the original pilot.

We also have Jeffrey Hunter. We have Malachi Throne, who is Commander Mendez. An interesting side note, Malachi Throne, was the voice of the Keeper. Oh, okay. But in order to keep there from being a recognizable overlap, they enhanced the treble of his voice after the fact, so that the Keeper's voice would be higher pitched.

So it's the same actor and he did that for the original pilot. It was never aired. If it had been, it would have been his actual voice. So it would have been a woman playing the Keeper, Meg Wiley, but the voice provided would have been this actor's voice instead. And they decided to not replace it entirely, but keep it as

this digitally affected voice, they decided to keep that as a result of it then being a connection between the Keeper and what turns out to be an artificial Commodore who is part of the trial. So it's this kind of interesting hidden in the production detail that, uh, is not one you would recognize right away.

I would not have recognized the voice. It was only upon reading more about the background of the episode production that I found out about that. We also have Susan Oliver back as Vina. We have Sean Kenny as the fleet captain, Christopher Pike in the wheelchair. At this point. Of course, we have Jeffrey Hunter having died before Star Trek ever got to the air.

So, in a weird turn of fate, the fact that they did the pilot, and then they reshot the pilot, and they recast the captain, and they went a different direction. Jeffrey Hunter died at not a very old age, so they had to use a different actor entirely. And so Sean Kenney, who looked enough like Jeffrey Hunter, especially with the prosthetic makeup, reprised that role on his behalf.

As I mentioned, November 17th, 1966 was part one, November 24th, 1966 was part two. And what we have in those two weeks of history, well, the number one songs for these two weeks on the first week was Poor Side of Town by Johnny Rivers. I know this is a favorite of Matt, so I'll let him take it away. Good as always.

And once again, we have You Keep Me Hanging On by The Supremes. We've seen them at the number one spot previously in some of our rewatches of this, and Matt, I won't to ask you to reprise it, but you know, you can't help yourself. Go ahead. Very good. And at the movies, we have an interesting conundrum for these two weeks.

There was a list of top films, as was always done in variety. And during this two week period, they didn't actually mention which of these two movies was number one. So, we're sharing both these movies, and neither of them was identifiable in the second week as the actual number one, so it's perfectly appropriate for us to talk about both.

One was number one one week, one was number one the other week, I guess. We have The Professionals, once again, this is a movie we've talked about before. Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Jack Palance, and Ralph Bellamy in a terrific Western film. And Also Hawaii, based on the novel of the same name. If you were to be interested in rewatching one of these, I would heavily encourage The Professionals, which I think holds up and is still a terrific film.

Hawaii, maybe not so much. And on television, we have been looking at shows that ranked according to the Nielsen's in comparison to the original series, the original series hit about a 12 in its first season. And we've been looking at the programs that were at the top of the list. So far, we haven't looked at a show that dipped any lower than a 22 in the Nielsen's.

So you can see that Star Trek was somewhat successful, but it was a moderate success. It was not a runaway hit. And we've compared it to shows like Green Acres, Bewitched, the Beverly Hillbillies. Last week, we talked about the Dean Martin show. And this week, Sort of a two for one, instead of looking at two different programs.

So we'll just mention one program. We will talk about Family Affair, which was a show that aired on CBS. It earned just about a 22. 6 in the Nielsen's. And Matt, this is another one of those cases of reading about a program that would apparently drew millions of viewers every week. And I have , heard of this show and the graphic that we're sharing on the screen with you right now is I love this graphic because it really gives you a sense of what the show is about.

Family Affair is of course, the American sitcom starring Brian Keith and Sebastian Cabot. It aired on CBS from September 12th, 1966 to March 4th, 1971. So it started at the same time as Star Trek, but it outlasted it. The series explored the trials of a well to do engineer and bachelor, Bill Davis, as he attempts to raise his brother's orphaned children in his luxury New York City apartment.

Davis's traditional English Gentleman's Gentleman, Mr Giles French, played by Cabot, Also had adjustments to make as he became saddled with the responsibility of caring for 15 year old Sissy and the six year old twins, Jodi and Buffy. Family affair ran for 138 episodes in five seasons. The show was created and produced by Edmund Hartman and Don Fedderson, who are also responsible for My Three Sons and The Millionaire.

So this is part of a long storied, proud tradition of building sitcoms around the death of parents. And in the news, I kind of picked from a range instead of talking about the headlines of two separate days and going over the news. I just kind of like skimmed a variety of newspaper headlines from the weeks that these two shows would have aired.

And I landed on this one from Saturday, November 18th, in which the headline article was about a newly emerged style of President Johnson, who was more animated and more off the cuff in a press conference than he had been previously. And the article describes how his friends were saying, this is the real Johnson.

This is the, this is the guy that we know. What I think is interesting about this is this In some way, a foretelling of the fact that he would not seek reelection, because I can't help but think if he had decided, you know what, I'm not going to run again in late 1967. Maybe he stopped putting up a false front and was a little more honest in who he was.

I found that it was an interesting article. Other stories from these two week period included the president having surgery for a polyp. It was removed and analyzed. It was on his, in his throat and it was determined to not be cancerous. There was also speculation that New York city mayor Lindsay would run for the presidency and there were reassurances from the US military that the US was winning an attrition style war in, you guessed it, Vietnam, Matt, you're shaking your head. Like somehow that didn't come to pass. I don't know why. So here we are now, we are landing firmly in our discussion on The Menagerie. I don't see a need to go deep into the, the broadcast, like of they're getting this signal from Talos IV and they're seeing all these events.

We've talked about that. So let's focus instead on the framing episode, which sets up everything that's going on. I'm curious, did you find anything about this episode? We've talked about this before with other episodes. From Strange New Worlds, having re informed or altered your experience of this? Um, well, first let me just say, I skipped through all of the menagerie stuff.

I was watching this. I was like, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. I'm not going to watch this part again. Um, my first note that I wrote down as we were watching this was, holy shit, the weight that first scene with Spock has when he tells Pike his plan and Pike keeps saying no, and there's a single tear rolling down his face.

This episode hit me in the heartstring, Sean, in ways that It never did before. Yeah. Purely, purely because of Strange New Worlds. And so I had other notes saying like, we're like half hour into the episode and I was just like, I am loving this episode. Like catnip, eating it up. I am loving everything about this show.

Purely because of Strange New Worlds. Yeah. Because it has fleshed out Pike as a character. It has fleshed out the relationship between Spock and Pike. Just like in Star Trek II where, you know, he's in the engineer room, puts his hand on the glass, and Kirk is on the outside, and they're weeping at each other, and like, That hits you because we know this bond between these two men and what it means, and the sacrifice.

And it's the same thing with Pike. We know the sacrifice he has made that ends him in that wheelchair. And we know why Spock is willing to sacrifice his career to save his friend. And so it's just like, there's a weight there that would have never been there when this was originally aired. That was never there when I saw it as a kid.

And I didn't dislike or like this episode. I thought it was okay. Yeah. And I remember even as a kid being like, because by the time I got into these shows, it was like, everybody knew that the original Pilot was a thing. And I remember seeing the pilot when I was a teenager. And so I was like, oh, they just repackaged it.

So it was like, this never really struck my fancy to watch because, oh, it's just a repackaging of something that's something I've already seen today. It's like, no, that's, it's incredible. And part of the problem though I had was every time it's shifted to the menagerie, like the redone stuff, it was like somebody slamming the brakes.

And it wasn't just because I'd seen it before. It was because the pacing and the feel of it is very different. So the drama and the tension of what Spock is doing is like right there on you. And then screech, let's spend 10 minutes watching them slowly walk around this planet and let's let them have long conversations in this jail cell.

It's like the pacing of it's so different. It creates this dissonance, so as a whole, I don't think it works super well, but if you extract the Menagerie stuff out, I think The first two thirds of this are fantastic, and it's mainly because of Strange New Worlds. Yeah, it's interesting this was made, they had reached a point where they were delaying delivery of every episode to the network, and it was because the special effects were adding to delivery time.

So they were, and it was growing exponentially. If episode one is late by a day and episode two is then late by a day plus another day, and then episode three is another day plus those two days. Now you're like, how are you going to catch up? So Roddenberry knew he had to do something and he was like, I got this episode that's already done and we're not going to do anything with it.

Let's see if we can't make a two parter out of this. This is the only two parter of the original series and it was received very, very well at the time. It actually won a Hugo at the time and it does. It managed to do what they needed it to do. They were able to shoot an episode in a week, which was the framing episode, but they got two weeks out of it.

So that's a, that's a home run from the network's perspective. It's a home run probably from the entire crew's perspective, the actors. I'm not sure if the renaming of it from The Cage to The Menagerie was a, uh, screenwriters guild rule. Like maybe if he used the original name that would do something where you'd have to then do something with the crediting in some way.

I don't know if that was going on because the renaming of it always strikes me as a little strange, but I agree. What you have on display is. What would the Jeffrey Hunter show have been like, and it would not have been a carbon copy of what Star Trek now was. And I think that rests very much in the writing of where they landed with, what does a dynamic captain look like?

We see dynamism in Pike, but it's in the form of his burnout at the beginning of the episode. We've talked about that previously. And now we see Kirk in response to that, who is a younger actor and brings out more of a challenge about the work itself, as opposed to challenge being born of his own exhaustion.

So what I think was on display was that William Shatner's captain is more engaged in a dynamic way. With the work itself of being a captain, that seems to be where they land with him more and more in every episode. It seems like it's always, my ship, my crew, what am I doing to protect them? How am I getting the work done?

As opposed to the most dynamic stuff for Jeffrey Hunter's captain. And we talked about this when we reviewed the episode originally as The Cage. His stuff is very internal and very personal and it's about his hurt at having failed his crew. It's the fact that he had people hurt under his watch and the Best scene for him from a dynamic perspective in my mind is not him battling with the keepers and trying to do the whole, I'll keep anger in my mind.

It's the scene between him and the doctor, which looks the most Trek like to me. It's similar to what you would see between Kirk and McCoy or Kirk and Spock or even Spock and McCoy. The other thing that's on front and center as far as connecting to Strange New Worlds for me is this Spock. In this episode, tying it back to the Spock who is growing up effectively under the command of Captain Pike and the relationship here, as you mentioned, seeing Pike blink the light to say, no, no, no.

And then later on, they're watching him through a monitor invasion of privacy, but nonetheless, they're watching him on the monitor and he just keeps repeating the phrase. No, no, no. He doesn't want what's happening to happen. And this, of course, is a Pike who we know foresaw himself in that wheelchair. So he has engaged with his reality for these many years, knowing what was coming, and has come to terms with it.

We see that in Strange New Worlds, but we see also a Spock who is learning what it means to have loyalty that is emotionally based, and he's doing that with Pike. One of the things that I think is interesting is they say in the timeline, this is 13 years ago, which means that we conceivably get seven years of Strange New Worlds.

And then there's one year between the end of Pike's captaincy and the beginning of Kirk's that we have not seen. And so we, that year is effectively at this point, if I remember correctly, do they show Kirk and Spock getting introduced in season two of Strange New Worlds? I can't remember. Season two or season three.

I think it was season two when they were playing chess. Yeah. I think it might've been season two. So we end up with being given effectively a timeline of they knew each other for five years before Kirk became his captain. Yeah. That's a different type of relationship than between Pike and Spock. Pike has that kind of substitute father position.

In the show, he's kind of the dad of the enterprise. Kirk is definitely not the dad of the enterprise. And I think that that's on display here in Nimoy's performance, which I think Nimoy's performance in this is stellar because he is Kirk's first officer. He is his friend and he is effectively trading in trust from Kirk to carry out what is an emotional family obligation for Pike.

And I think the tension of that for me was clear when I was a kid watching this. But I couldn't have put it into those terms until Strange New Worlds helped inform all of that. I find it fascinating that they have been able to do something as a prequel which can inform so much of a series that existed for 40 years before they even thought about doing anything like it.

And for Spock in particular. This is a scene stealing performance from Leonard Nimoy, I feel. Like, Kirk does a lot of background work. He has to sit and listen and watch what's going on. And he gets moments with the Commodore that are great. He gets the shuttlecraft scene, which is, I think, great.. But when it comes to Spock owning the moment, he's in control.

Top to bottom, he has the whole mission impossible espionage stuff at the beginning. How did you feel about him having to sneak in, like, do all the stuff for the computers, fake everybody out, steal the enterprise? Yeah, there was, I loved it. Like I said, it's because we know Spock and we've seen him in Strange New Worlds, steal the ship in Strange New Worlds.

So it's like, Oh, Spock's doing it. Again, it's like this, this is MO, but he does it in a very logical, he's just going through the numbers. He has his plan. He's executing his plan. There's no malice. There's no, you know, anything behind what he's doing. He's just executing a plan, especially when he keeps nerve pinching everybody in the computer room.

The sequence where he's getting pummeled about the head while he's working on the computer and he takes a couple of very firm shots and then does a brilliant duck, come up, spin, pinch. Yeah. I loved it. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. This is a scene stealing episode for Nimoy. This, I think, is probably the first episode for him, for me at least, where we get to see him super logical and applying that logic in ways that you would not think would be a logical way to apply them.

Yeah. Like the fights. It's like, he's logically fighting. He's logically executing things. It's like there's, there's that feeling behind it. He's just trying to make sure his plan stays on course. And that to me was fascinating because all in the very end of the episode, when Kirk makes that jibe at him about like the human aspect of him.

Yeah. And what does Spock say? He says, you don't have to be, you know, you don't have to, you have to be insulting. It's like, that was great. Um, another aspect of this I want to bring up is McCoy because McCoy You green blooded bastard. He's one of the people that is defending Spock vehemently in this episode.

I love that because it shows when he's doing his Vulcan jabs, his slightly racist jabs at Spock in the show. It's coming from a place of. I don't know, not brotherly love, but it comes from a place of familiarity. Yeah. And he's kind of needling a friend. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it's not coming from a place of meanness.

And this episode to me kind of really highlighted that because it's like the first time we've seen McCoy like guns blazing, don't you come at my boy Spock. Yeah. Like there's no way he's doing this. He would never do this. His human side is so suppressed. He's Vulcan. He's like, he would never do this. Yeah.

I thought that was fascinating to see. Using the very thing. So strongly. Yeah. Using the very thing he always needles them about as the defense. Yeah. Like, like, he wouldn't lie. He's Vulcan. He can't. As opposed to, ah, you're green blood, blah, blah, blah. Like it really, yeah. It does show a lot of understanding there.

There, there's also another aspect of this episode where I, in the beginning I said, I love the first two thirds of this episode. What I did not like is how this episode wrapped. Um, the final third, actually it's like the final, like 10, 10 minutes. I hated, um, because it's Spock has done mutiny. He stole a ship and the end is like, you darn kids.

And it's like, it's like, they just shrug it off. It's like, no, he still did all that awful stuff. How are you guys just like walking away from this? Like nothing bad happened. It's like, okay, the end result, he achieved his goal, but still he still did mutiny. It's like, he lied to the bridge crew. It's like, how is that not going to damage all of his relationships with everybody he works with?

It's like, you lied to us. You should have come to us and talk to us. It's like all of that water on the bridge just. Just completely like, Oh, let's, let's not deal with all the ramifications of what just happened. Cause we got to go into our hijinks for next week. That part of it, I really hate it. It's like, cause they did not deal with it head on.

They just pretended it wasn't there. It's like a writerly cheat to write yourself into a lot of very tightly packed corners that are filled with TNT. And then just say, Oh, but there's a door right here. And like, okay, that's, that's not fair. Um, some of the things that stood out to me in that regard, like it's the death penalty is in place.

If you go to this planet, there's not a lot of logic behind why that would be true. There's not a lot, like, why would they kill people who went to this planet? Um, and I found myself kind of inadvertently thinking through a kind of weird logic of, Well, in the episode, they say if people came here, they would learn our abilities, and then they would run amok in the galaxy.

So is this Starfleet trying to keep people away from what effectively would be a terrible weapon in the wrong hands? Like, there's not enough. given for us to know why the death penalty exists. But we have to take it as a given. It's, we're told the death penalty for anybody who goes to that planet until at the end.

Oh, don't worry about it. You've been given special destination to get back to that planet. It doesn't matter. Like, um, that's not, that's not, that's not fair to the audience. Like your expectations build up during a story and the payoff has to match. The built up expectations, that's where the balance in good storytelling comes from.

I agree with you, the last 10 minutes of this feels like the rug gets pulled out. The whole trial is a sham. I did not like that. I wanted there to be the Commodore saying like, I think based, I would have, to me, it would have been a better ending for the Commodore to say, based on all the evidence that we've now been given, I no longer think that he's guilty of mutiny.

Like, yes, have him basically turn his vote and give Kirk the opportunity to like smile and say, like, not guilty. And then have the two of them give Spock the out as opposed to, you can't do that because they created the Sixth Sense where it's like, he's been dead all along. It's like, they, you know, he wasn't there.

So it's like, yeah, they, they couldn't do something like that because of the way they structured it. So it also presented an unfortunate Like, when you deal with time travel, uh, you don't want to create a paradox that undoes your very story. I speak of that from personal experience, Man in the Empty Suit is like, I had to like twist my brain into knots to try and figure out how do I tell this story without undoing it as I'm telling it.

They make the point that the entire event of the trial was effectively to keep Kirk busy. So that he would not break the ship free and then be able to, like, undo their plan of getting Pike there. There's nothing about a trial taking place that would have kept Kirk from ordering people, like, figure out how to get this ship unlocked.

Like, Kirk himself is not literally in the bowels of the ship. Taking the computer apart. He would tell Scotty, like, we're having this trial while I'm doing that. You got to get this ship free. Yeah. It didn't make sense. And it also adds another wrinkle, which is the Telosians are now demonstrating that they have the ability to cast these illusions really far.

They cast an illusion to Starbase 11, where Kirk faces They did that in Strange New Worlds. They did that in Strange New Worlds. Yes. But they show them casting an illusion that distance. Yes. What could have possibly kept them from being able to cast an illusion or a message to Pike or some group of people to very peacefully put Pike onto a shuttlecraft and then get him to them safely?

Their very actions undo the Need for what happens in the story. It stops making sense. You kind of have to go through that last 10 minutes with, well, they had to end it as opposed to it making a lot of sense. I, you, you're hitting on something I had thought of when I was watching it too, of like, if they had made this episode today, so Strange New Worlds exists and they were doing this episode, you know, Pike would have been a part of this episode because it's like, they could have been having conversations with Pike

in his head. So you would have had scenes with Pike standing and talking and talking directly to the Telosians about what they're doing, what the plan is. He may have tried to talk them out of it. They could have convinced him to just go along with this. Here's our, you know, it could have been a whole thing inside his head with the Telosians, which I think would have been fascinating.

But of course, Strange new worlds didn't exist. The actor who did Pike was dead. There's a whole reason, a bunch of reasons why that would make sense. Yeah. But today it's kind of like the fan fiction of me in my head is kind of like, Ooh, I wish they would have done that. Cause I've been really cool. Yeah.

Uh, we've fallen back into the trap, Matt. We're rewriting the episode, but while we're doing that, I'm going to pitch you my rewrite. The Enterprise gets called to Starbase 11. Little fun fact, Starbase 11 was the same Starbase in the episode we talked about last week, Court Martial. I do not know if that was intentional.

That they were creating the idea that there was a star base that was one star base that the enterprise would often go to because maybe it was on the edge of territory or something like that. I don't know if it was intentional or just Gene Roddenberry and a different writer both were like, uh, 11 is a good number.

Um, which I hate to say is probably more likely, but they get called a star base 11. Pike had been injured critically in this training accident. And. Was confined to this wheelchair and would permanently, they, they're, they're shown like video of him being, you know, the terrible accident, they see the terrible ramifications.

Spock sees images of his former captain and it breaks his heart and they've been called to the star base to help investigate because Pike has gone missing. And at the same time, somebody steals a vehicle and seems to be going to Talos IV, which is a forbidden planet. So the Enterprise is tasked with stop that ship and if they in fact are the people who kidnapped Pike, who's the only person who's ever been to that planet, find out why they're trying to take him there.

They catch up to this vehicle, they get aboard the vehicle, and they find a completely fine and functioning Pike. He is not in a wheelchair. He is just Pike, and he is defending himself in his In his trial aboard the Enterprise about why he should be allowed to go there. And he's showing this video evidence.

And as Spock sees what is being revealed, Spock puts two and two together, and then he takes charge of the Enterprise, takes control of the Enterprise and sets it on the path to Telos. And he and Pike together now have to convince Kirk, we know what we're doing. And then as they get to the planet. It's all been revealed.

Yes, this Pike is actually the wheelchair ridden Pike who went missing. He's just now under the Telosian illusion, able to present as still healthy and fully functioning beams down to the planet, goes his merry way. That to me would have been like the kind of thing you were talking about. Yes, exactly.

That sounds good to me. I wish that was the episode, but. It's not the one we got, but still, the one we got, like I said, the first two thirds, I thought the, the glue that they added to kind of break up the menagerie, The Cage's clips, I thought was fantastic. I think they did a good job, built tension, showed Nimoy off, let him grow as a character.

Yeah, that was great. And my rewrite, In No Way, just as you just said, In No Way was about me fixing an episode I thought was bad. I like these two episodes together. I think they do a great job, uh, Just from a, uh, the perspective of using what was made and not letting good content go to waste. This was a good pilot that for various reasons was not seen as being the show that the network wanted to buy.

To figure out how to use that in this way, I think is terrific. I think it actually, just from a production standpoint, is terrific to do that. And then from a storytelling perspective, I like a lot of the stuff they're doing, especially with Spock. And I do want to own up to one thing. This is a kind of a Mandela effect moment for me.

Um, we all of course know the Mandela effect is the phenomenon where you, false memory, just something becomes true and it's just reinforcing itself constantly. I had always absolutely be convinced. That when Kirk is asked if he had ever, if he had ever met Pike, his response was, I never had the pleasure.

That is not the line he gives. He gives the line, I met him when he was made fleet commander, which is Strange New Worlds. So it's like, Oh, they didn't make a mistake. They didn't make a bold change. They didn't do anything. They just did what actually was said and Sean absolutely misremembered the line.

Never had the pleasure, never appeared in this episode. When I heard that a record scratch in my brain went off and I almost had to walk out of the room. I was just like, , I've had a,

so my apologies Like the Berenstein Bears. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. . So my apologies. 'cause I've said that before in this, in the podcast, we've had conversations about that very issue and I, when talking about Strange World, I was like, I don't know how they're gonna square that circle. No circles. They didn't have to. They didn't have to.

They're doing great. Good job, everybody. So thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen this episode. Next time we're going to be talking about the episode, Shore Leave. And as usual, jump into the comments, wrong answers only. What do you think that episode is going to be about? And

before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you want to share about what you have coming up on your main channel? I know you've got travel plans coming up, which are going to keep new episodes from appearing for a while, but further down the road, what do you have coming up? Well, actually, by the time this one's out, the last one we have done will have been released.

And that one's about, it's revisiting the topic of More energy storage, Sean. Compressed air energy storage systems and why they've been around forever, but why are they now, just now, starting to catch on? Like what changes have happened to them that's making them appealing today? Um, I find it fascinating, but this is the last, last one after the break because we're coming back in mid September for new episodes.

There's gonna be some stuff around, The world's largest wind farm. I have a video I'm working on about my trip to Canada where I visited a wind farm in a separate episode about how it was built and what it's like to see these things get constructed. So there's different topics coming, uh, more variety.

Not everything's about batteries. That's good to hear. That's a relief. Yes. Especially since I help you with a podcast, which responds to your main channel about those topics. And you and I literally just talked about energy storage. So great. As for me, if you want to check out my books, please, you can find my books.

Anywhere you buy your books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any retailer, your public library, or you can go to my website, seanferrell. com. There's more information there. And there are some links to an online bookstore, bookshop. org, where you can pick up the books as well. And if you'd like to support the show, please leave a review, subscribe, share with your friends, leave a comment.

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