The Menagerie (Part 2)
OK, so. This one’s a clip show…
Mystery Science Theater 2267
This isn’t automatically a problem. A show with almost eighty episodes and a franchise with - *checks* SHIT, over eight hundred - can surely be permitted a few dips into the bargain bin. They ain’t all gonna be gold. That said, the details of “The Menagerie, Part 2” aren’t encouraging. The most immediate problem here that the Kirk/Spock/Pike dynamic that so captivated me last time is buried too deep here for me to find it. With that unavailable, the vast majority of the episode adds up to little more than the audience watching the court watching the Talosians watch Pike. Which is a fun structure, I guess – note how at one point our screens show the Enterprise’s screen showing a Talosian screen showing Pike and Vina, even though their captors don’t actually need a television to monitor them. There’s little actually done with this, though. How could it, with the footage from “The Cage” not filmed with this in mind?
So what can spin out of this orgy of observation? A good starting point, unsurprisingly enough, is the first part of this story. Back when I wrote it up, I argued it was best viewed not as a clip show, but as a flashback episode. Another way to frame this is that “The Menagerie, Part 1”, in some sense, rewrote the past of the series. Sure, the pages written over were originally blank, but as with all flashback episodes, the point was to give new context to the present by changing the assumptions of the viewer about the past.
This concluding episode does something similar, and indeed does it far more explicitly. This is not unambiguously to its credit. The second part of this story not only rewrites its source material, but its own first instalment, with the threat of Kirk’s execution getting quickly and silently dropped. There’s also a quick scene added to the top of the episode in which Spock pleads guilty to the charge of mutiny, rather rendering the entire court-martial process superfluous. It’s impossible to watch the cold open here without hearing Kathy Bates yelling furiously in my head. “He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie CAR!”
But it’s the altered ending that makes all the difference here. A brief reminder of how the two conclusions vary. In “The Cage”, Pike watches as the Talosians generate an illusory version of himself to keep Vina company, after which he leaves. In this episode, the illusory companion is instead Pike himself, given the ability to believe absolutely that he’s both thirteen years younger, and can leave his wheelchair/life-support machine.
With so little else going on here, where the episode places on the scale from disappointment to disaster – really the only plausible boundaries in this case – comes down to how we interpret this ending. More specifically, it boils down to how much that ending can be argued to be anything other than an ableist horror-show.
“Work Actually Helps Free People”
I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s wind things back a bit. I can see two plausible readings of this episode. Both stem from one of the clearest concerns in “The Cage” – making it one of the clearest concerns here too, simply because no effort is made to supplant it – which is whether reality can be considered to be superior to illusion.
The episode presents two arguments here in favour of the position that reality is automatically the better bet. Neither are particularly original or interesting, but I’ll summarise them anyway so we’re all clear on what’s going on here. The first argument is that forsaking reality for illusion is inherently dangerous, because doing so removes people’s motivation for getting work done. This is a fairly standard veneration of the Protestant work ethic – the idea that working hard is a moral good, as oppose to something our circumstances require of us, like breathing or needing to empty our bladders. This kind of thinking has been gleefully embraced by capitalism, because arguing that overindulgence in leisure activities risks impeding production is a very handy one for those reliant on stealing what others produce.
Unsurprisingly, I’m totally opposed to such arguments. If people aren’t taking any kind of enjoyment in and/or satisfaction from their jobs, you need to end the alienation of labour, not try preventing people from enjoying anything anywhere else.
For a while it looks like Roddenberry has grokked this, given that the Talosian plan for saving themselves through the work of others is so obviously doomed to fail. They’re in the straits they are not because no-one wants to work the machines that keep them alive, but because no-one knows how to work them. That’s not a problem any amount of additional person power can solve. The Talosians are convinced an irreducible fault within their society can somehow be scrubbed away if enough grease is applied to other people’s elbows.
Even more damning is the Talosians’ argument that this solution could only work with a slave race, and not with willing volunteers. Not only do they think getting humans to labour for them will somehow magically solve their problems, they think they need to utterly dominate every aspect of their workers’ lives in order to “save” them from becoming as unproductive as their masters are. This is a ruling class demanding that others do the work they refuse to do, whilst insisting that being able to refuse to work is somehow a terrible fate. This is not, to put it mildly, an uncommon form of hypocrisy out in the real world.
But none of this is actually addressed. It simply exists as a kind of Magic Eye pattern assembled accidentally by Roddenberry’s own incoherence. “The Cage” and hence “The Menagerie” comes much closer to inviting us to sympathise with (or at least pity) the Talosians than suggesting we goggle at their vicious hypocrisy. The idea that work is an end in itself is never challenged. We have to wait for The Next Generation to do that when it invents the holodeck, which on top of all its other virtues is about the clearest rebuttal to the Talosians possible. How do you stop a society from giving up labour entirely once illusions are commonplace? You make sure people recognise the need for and value of labour that sustains human life and dignity, and then let them make their own choices on what and how to contribute in response to that. Once that’s gotten through on any given day, it’s time to bask in whatever illusions we damn well please to bask in.
I’m drifting off the subject. The second argument proposed here for reality’s inherent superiority appears tautological: what’s real is better than what is not real, because what’s not real isn’t real. Doubtless, those more familiar with philosophy would have some very smart things to say on whether this preference ordering makes sense, or whether there’s even any point in trying to divide experiences up into two buckets labelled “real” and “imaginary”.
My own objections here are rather more grounded. I just can’t see any worth in a value judgement about illusions that doesn’t take into account which illusions we’re talking about. Plus, obviously, which reality. There’s absolutely no reason we should feel compelled to listen to, say, an able-bodied white guy with his dream career and literal movie-star good looks tell us that we should always prefer the real world to anything we can imagine for ourselves. Pike might be feeling awful about the three crewmen he lost on Rigel Seven (and imagine how more interesting “The Cage” would have been had the Talosians brought them back to life, rather than replacing them with Vina), but holistically speaking, Pike is on top of any world he visits. His opinion of anyone else’s reality in general, and Vina’s in particular, can be safely and immediately discarded.
Gen Pop
Unlike the problems with the work ethic argument, though, the issues with this latter position are ultimately recognised by both “The Cage” and “The Menagerie”. After browbeating Vina earlier in the episode for being willing to accept fantasy over reality, Pike makes a point of confessing to his crew that he agrees with her ultimate choice to remain with the Talosians. He’s facing up to his earlier ignorance. It’s dawned on him that his reality is not the same as Vina’s, and as such, he can’t expect her to share his preferences about how that reality is experienced.
(This admission has relevance to the plot of this episode, by the way, given Spock was there to hear it. Pike’s comment is what allows Spock to claim he’s been “completely logical about the whole affair”. Spock knows there are states of being for which Pike agrees that illusion is preferable to reality.)
It’s here that the issue of ableism comes into play. An awful lot here depends on what lesson Roddenberry thought Pike has learned. Is it that he was wrong to assume the right to decide the correct choice for anyone but himself? Or is it that people with disabilities are qualitatively different, and that therefore the “normal” rules don’t apply to them?
Because only one of those positions is acceptable, clearly. Equally clearly, though, given my status as an able-bodied person, my opinion on which is the more plausible option counts for very little. I therefore spent some time deploying arcane Google summoning rituals to get hold of articles on this episode’s disability politics, ones written by people with actual authority on the issue. The results were not particularly ambiguous. I didn’t ultimately find anyone who specifically linked Pike’s comments about Vina with his later decision to stay on Talos IV. As Space Crip points out, though, it’s easy to view the ending as taking Pike to a metaphorical nursing home so no-one else has to deal with him, with all the ugly associations that brings with it.
(This isn’t of course any kind of dig at the staff of nursing homes – the framing of such places as dumping grounds is one raised by the text, and certainly not one I subscribe to).
In fact, this gives the episode’s title an ugly sort of sense. It seems fair to assume significance in the fact that what Roddenberry once considered a cage has now become a menagerie. A menagerie is just a cage with more than one occupant, though, and – recent developments in the US notwithstanding – a cage is not somewhere one is supposed to put people. There’s no way in which one could apply the word “menagerie” to any kind of care home and it not be profoundly offensive, but, once again, there’s nothing else here to actually suggest anything else was intended.
We could perhaps try bypassing all this by questioning whether Vina should actually be read as being a person with a disability in the first place. After all, according to her own dialogue the Talosians have fixed her up in a manner that’s functionally indistinguishable from baseline. It’s only her appearance that demonstrates her healers’ unfamiliarity with humanity (this is completely ridiculous, obviously, but let’s put this to one side). We could read Vina as not a person with disabilities, but someone with the unique misfortune to be simultaneously scarred and elderly.
If anything, though, this manages to make things even worse. It doesn’t so much weaken any negative message regarding disability as end up drawing some horrible equivalence between disability, age, and existing outside conventional beauty standards. Three things that are not completely uncorrelated, of course, but which still should neither be equated, nor lumped together under the heading of “not a life you’d want”. Note that when Pike asks whether the Talosians will allow her to return to the status she enjoyed when they first met, he doesn’t ask about an illusion regarding her health, or even her age. He wants confirmation that they will restore “her illusion of beauty”. Age, body-image issues and attractiveness are thereby all conflated here even before we get to Pike’s own health. Nor can we simply dismiss this as Pike’s own failings. Not when Vina becoming young and beautiful is presented as a parallel to Pike becoming fully mobile once more.
“How Could I Have Been So Completely Wrong?”
Let’s finish by turning our spotlight onto the two leads. The nickel summary of this episode certainly doesn’t seem worth much as regards their interplay. This somehow manages to be (one half of) a story that fails to do anything interesting with Kirk literally sentencing Spock to death. In amongst a concerningly expansive pile of bloodied objects in jiffy bags, “The Menagerie, Part 2” manages to be among the most damning evidence yet that Roddenberry never wrote anything well, except by accident.
Even here, though, we can mount at least a partial defence. A big part of the reason Kirk’s doesn’t seem to resonate is that it doesn’t actually make any difference to the big picture. The Talosian control of Enterprise is not lessened in the least by Spock’s sentencing.
This obviously leads to a structural issue, with everyone’s response to the death sentence being to just sit down and watch another rerun. On the other hand, this awkward shuffling does genuinely serve a purpose. The fact Kirk’s decision doesn’t slow his ship’s journey towards Talos IV matters less than how totally it torpedoes the Talosian’s plan to keep him distracted. This highlights how badly the Talosians – and therefore Spock himself – misunderstood Kirk when their plan was hatched.
Having just poured scorn on Roddenberry’s abilities as a writer, I need to admit how much I genuinely love the idea that the Talosians knew they’d have to compensate for Kirk uncanny ability to wriggle out of seemingly inescapable situations. In an episode already about characters who are themselves part of the audience, the idea people within the Trek universe have watched Kirk long enough to understand his narrative role as an irresistible force is entirely delightful. What I love even more is the fact their distraction fails not because Kirk is too smart or too brave or too resourceful or even too lucky for it to work. It fails simply because Spock underestimates Kirk’s willingness to have him executed. The Vulcan didn't expect his human friend to be so cold.
Before I started this project, it had been a very long time since I’d watched an episode of the Original Series. Turns out, there’s a great deal I’ve forgotten. I’d blanked, for instance, the fact that Commodore Mendez turns out have been a Talosian illusion from his appearance on Kirk’s shuttlecraft onward. Initially this struck me as a pointless twist, undoing most of the character work which had been among the story’s highlights. It also seemed odd, given the Talosians were relying on Spock to deliver them Pike, that their fictional commodore was so hell-bent on having him executed for participating in the very scheme they were running. Indeed, the bloodthirstiness of the mirage-Mendez actually contributes to the collapse of the plan to distract Kirk. Had he not been so bullish in his treatment of Spock, the court-martial might well have lasted much longer.
On reflection, though, this is actually a smart, subtle, and melancholy commentary on our characters. Of course the Talosians fashioned their Mendez into a hanging judge. They assumed the best way to stretch out the court-martial was to keep insisting Spock die, forcing Kirk to dedicate all his energy to keeping his best friend alive. Instead, Kirk also votes guilty, and does so almost indecently quickly. This is a decision so stunning that not only is Spock blindsided, the entire episode shifts its course, throwing everything into free fall.
That’s already heavy stuff. What gives it even greater weight, though, is the fact the Talosians apparently gained all their knowledge about Kirk from Spock. That means their assumption Kirk wouldn’t be able to condemn his friend (or not quickly, at least) came from Spock himself. He genuinely believed Kirk couldn’t bring himself to order the execution, and he’s proved utterly wrong.
Guts don’t get much more punched. Spock finds himself sentenced to death not just by the former lover he simply wanted to heal, but by the man he’s currently closest to as well. The two humans most important to him in the whole galaxy both treat him no less harshly than an illusion created specifically to act with maximal hostility. He’s completely undone by his own faith in those closest to him. If there’s any way to forgive Spock for his decision to kidnap Pike (“Don’t worry, disabled person; I know what’s best for you!”), I think it’s rooted here, in the awareness that he’s misjudged Kirk just as badly as he has Pike, and both men want him dead as a result of his mistakes. Even after the death sentence is commuted, Spock has been roundly punished. Moreover, as a Vulcan, Spock is under colossal pressure to not let any of his astonished and horrified misery over all of this show.
In short, all the interesting stuff is happening here in negative space – in what Spock’s not able to show, in the awkward lack of action following the timing and nature of the distraction’s collapse. None of this should be considered a problem. Or at least, it needn’t have been, had anyone bothered to insert a pay-off. The contents of that negative space is never investigated. Instead, it’s just left to slowly evaporate unseen, like water trapped within a ship’s hull. It’s as though when Mendez fades away, the decision to put Spock to death fades out with him. Worse, Pike and Kirk’s complicity in that sentence is also treated as an illusion, with the real Mendez’s decision to exonerate Spock somehow supposed to Tippex out their signatures on their friend’s death warrant. The story of how Spock betrayed his friends and was betrayed in turn doesn’t resolve, it simply stops.
This is all tremendously frustrating. It leaves us with no way to redeem the episode, even if you’re more inclined than I am to forgive what look like nods towards unpleasant viewpoints on disability. Really, though, what was the alternative here? This simply isn’t a television series that can process a total and irreparable collapse in the relationship between its main characters. If nothing else, we’re simply not at a point yet where something as simple as a guaranteed episode order exists. There’s really nothing that can be done but to pretend it was all a dream. And so Pike suddenly changes his mind about his willingness to return to Talos IV, and Kirk goes from sentencing his first officer to death to awkwardly joking about Vulcan self-control. A happy ending is conjured up like, well, like an illusion. The fact the episode ends with the Talosians showing Kirk a happy Pike reunited with Vina immediately after Spock has pushed his former captain out of the door – far too quickly for them to have actually reached the transporter room – just highlights how completely fake this resolution is – how desperate everyone involved is to end this quickly, since it clearly cannot end well.
Perhaps fittingly, the show (and ultimately the franchise, up until Discovery) decides to forget “The Menagerie” every bit as thoroughly as it did “The Cage”. I suspect it might be best to simply follow its lead.