1.1.P "It Literally Is 'Genesis'"

The Cage (excerpt)

I thought, given the auspiciousness of today - 60 years since America was introduced to the USS Enterprise - I should do something special on the blog.

Here, then, is the first two sections of my essay on "The Cage", available in its entirety only in the first IDFC book.

Live long and prosper.

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The essay I wasn’t ever intending to write. Maybe I should’ve stuck to the lack of plan...

“The Time Barrier’s Been Broken!”

Conventional wisdom says that any attempt to wrestle with the history of Star Trek has to start here. And fine. Even as a Marxist, it’s miserably clear that 90% of attempts to diverge from conventional wisdom lead not to unconventional wisdom, but conventional stupidity. Wherever IDFC exists on the trad/brainy axes, though, our approach vector saves us from having to tangle with “The Cage” as a matter of course. If your beat is the development of TOS as a production, skipping over Hunter’s outing is a dereliction of duty. Switch focus to how the show was and is received by viewers, though, and you find yourself handed a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card. How much use can there be in poring over audience reaction to something the audience never really saw?

“But technically...”. Yes. Technically. Technically, the first Trek pilot did receive an airing. More than one, in fact. Even the first such broadcast happened twenty-two years after filming, though. It wasn’t until October 1988 when “The Cage” was pressed into service to placate fans waiting for the second season of TNG, which had been delayed by a writers’ strike [1]. For over two decades after “The Cage” was forged, there wasn’t a complete version in colour that even could have been shown on television. Other than what might have been spliced together from “The Menagerie”, that is, which is just about all of it anyway [2].

Even the importance IDFC places on comparing pilot episodes doesn’t apply here. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” functions better in terms of what we understand a Trek episode to be production-wise, and “The Man Trap” more fully serves our purposes in terms of first exposure. Which leaves us with what? Canonical completion? Warp­speed LOL. Even if Trek canon weren’t a self-evidently ridiculous concept across the board, the fact the pilot’s ending got rewritten for “The Menagerie” means trying to fit this into a coherent fictional tapestry isn’t worth the needle and thread.

In short, “The Cage” is an artefact we can set aside not just with ease, but with gratitude. Honestly, I’m only poking at it now because it was an obvious choice for bonus content - and it’s only at the front of the book because I’m a sucker for symmetry. We’re going to treat this episode as a discrete slice of science-fiction, entirely divorced from what came later. No Tarkalean tea leaves, no dramatic irony. So, then. As a story unto itself, what can we pull free from “The Cage”?

The Opiate Of The Classes

Let’s start by talking about a total unknown in the context of science-fiction, a man named Eugene Wesley “Gene” Roddenberry.

Being new to the game doesn’t mean never having picked up dice, of course. Rodden­erry had an extensive TV writing career behind and around him when he wrote “The Cage”. This was still his first foray into sci-fi, though, a genre 50% unlike any other thing, and 50% exactly like various other things, and utterly incapable of admitting the fact. Given the steepness of the learning curve, it’s fairly remarkable how high he makes his mark.

That’s not to say the story is particularly original, even for the time. It isn’t, not in terms of science-fiction in general, nor even by the more specific and less stringent standards of American television. Roddenberry was treading on ground bearing the footprints of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, at the very least (we’ll talk more about that show later). The spin “The Cage” adds to proceedings matters, though. It distinguishes itself by jettisoning the Cold War paranoia that Voyage... was marinaded in. This difference is possibly most clear when considering the Talosians, a race better described as blinded by arrogance than as overtly villainous. I’m not disputing that their plan to create a slave race isn’t fundamentally evil - Number One’s position on this is unimpeachable, as we’ll get to. Still, it’s an evil born of desperation, and a familiar desperation at that. The Talosians are junkies compelled to justify any approach that doesn’t require sobriety. They’re not villains because they’re labelled as different, they’re labelled different to make it easier to explore what motivates their villainy. Home-grown monsters given a fake address.

That doesn’t mean the Talosians exist outside of Marxist theory, obviously. Not when it’s so easy to point out power and influence are both narcotics and mirages in themselves. Not when the idea that those in power care more about their own pleasure than their workforce’s freedom is closer to a law of physics than it is a flight of fancy. Sure, the Talosian’s feign interest in their workers’ happiness. Their evil is fuelled by self-interest (why should humans find it easier to reverse-engineer Talosian tech than they would themselves?), but it’s justified by the idea that allowing humans a taste of the narcotic the aliens have become dependent upon will make their slaves content in their slavery. This is classic classist rhetoric - you proles get something out of willing participation in an inescapable structure, so what’s the problem? Why have beef when you can get beef, cooked to perfection by your own mind, for your whole life? Just so long as you put your shifts in, that is [3].

We could go so far as to argue that a Marxist reading of the Talosian offer for humanity would judge it no worse than the deal most of us are forced into accepting in our own lives, and arguably might even be better. Eat absolutely anything you want each meal? Do literally anything you want to with the time you don’t spend labouring for the ruling class? You’d still be a slave to the wage, but hey: no-one’s doing better bread and circuses.

The Talosians are a familiar foe, is what I’m saying, at least until they realise humans cannot be caged, no matter how many toys are thrown in there with them. The capitalists recognise it’s better they die off than they spread their philosophy beyond the borders of where it has currently corrupted. That’s a genuinely revolutionary idea to broadcast (albeit one incompatible with actual revolutionary theory), both during the Cold War and after it. It’s also completely at odds with the gleeful villainy TV sci-fi indulged in at the time (including across the pond in, say, Doctor Who). How many ’60s sci-fi shows would feature an antagonistic race realising their time was up, and not trying to take the heroes down with them?

That isn’t how these aliens think, though. At one point, Pike goes so far as to risk his entire ship on the bet that the Talosian he’s captured isn’t going to murder everyone on the Enterprise if they aren’t freed, even when they claim the opposite. The Talosians just aren’t defined by their desire to do harm. They will threaten and even commit harm, but that’s simply a consequence of the situation they find themselves trapped in. And while both Pike and Number One threaten them with their phasers, ultimately the only violence necessary to resolve the situation is the breaking of a window.

It’s in this way that “The Cage” heads into new territory, rather than Roddenberry’s claim to be mapping science-fiction onto the Western adventure template [4]. It's also notable that, whatever his blind-spots, Roddenberry clearly has some good instincts in terms of writing a sci-fi script. There are two main mysteries presented here; what do the Talosians want, and who is Vina? Roddenberry smartly - and fairly - drip-feeds us clues to both mysteries, but also resolves one much earlier than the other, thereby avoiding pushing the audience’s patience without fully revealing his hand too soon. For a first foray into the genre, it’s remarkable how much is done right here...

[1] This is particularly ironic given how “The Menagerie”, the cannibalised corpse of the pilot, only exists due to a production crisis back in ’66 - but we’ll get to that

[2] I couldn’t find precise numbers, but at least sixty minutes of “The Menagerie” two-parter is footage from “The Cage”, with the version of the pilot available to watch containing around sixty-three minutes of footage (another, not completely colourised version apparently exists, which is eight minutes longer).

[3] We should note here the inescapable implication that dosing one’s workforce to keep them pliant is an act of great largesse, but risking them learning how to dose themselves would be unconscionable. Because, and this is more or less explicit in the text, if the workers could reward themselves, then why would they work? They’d just become lazy good-for-nothings!

[4] A suggestion which never actually made much sense, and certainly didn’t translate to screen. Perhaps he reached for the analogy both because that genre was incredibly popular with TV audiences, and it was the one with which Roddenberry had arguably enjoyed the most success.