The Cage was the first of two pilot episodes produced for The Original Series. It was filmed at MGM Studios in December 1964 and delivered to NBC’s executive offices in New York in February 1965. It was first shown to the public at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland. For decades it was never aired, but became available in 1986 on videocassette, and more recently on DVD.
After Captain Kirk replaced Captain Pike for the eventual prime-time series, the footage from The Cage was re-edited into a two-part episode called The Menagerie. The Pilot wrapped in an Envelope won the coveted Hugo Award for filmed science fiction excellence, and has been called “one of the most famous two-parters in television history.” (Herbert Solow and Robert Justman)
The starship Enterprise, with Captain Christopher Pike in command, answers a mysterious radio wave emergency distress call from long-lost Federation personnel believed to have crash-landed eighteen years earlier on the planet Talos IV. The distress signal turns out to have been counterfeited by the super-intelligent beings of Talos to lure Captain Pike into a zoo-like captivity.
Captain Christopher Robin Pike of Mojave, California, Sector 001, UFP, born April 11, 2214, is in command of the Enterprise when the mysterious distress signal from Talos IV is received. The super-advanced Talosians seek to confine Pike, played by Henry Herman “Hank” McKinnies, Jr., screen name Jeffrey Hunter, and two of his female officers, Executive Officer or “Number One” Leigh Chapel, elder sister of Nurse Christine Chapel, also played by Majel Barrett, listed as “Leigh Hudec” in the credits, and Yeoman J.M. Colt, in a Cage designated for Homo sapiens inside their Menagerie.
The pale, swelled-cranium custodians of the galactic Zoo are so techno-scientifically advanced that they are all brain. They have lost the capabilities to experience sensory and tactile reality, to feel or emote, and to stroke the physical world. They seek to benignly imprison two humans, a male and a female, cut them loose in a virtual, live-out-any-fantasy-you-desire Disneyland, and start grooving vicariously on the sensations and emotions.
The Talosians have collected biological and post-biological cyborg specimens from around the Milky Way whose shadows Pike can see in nearby cages: snarling anthropoid-arachnoid creatures with saber tooth fangs; humanoid-birds with “angel wings” from a spired city in the sky; Lemur-life rodents from Arcturus with miniature weapons technology and clothing; and imposing hominid refugees from the Planet of the Apes.
But the two “Adam and Eve” humans, endowed with “excellent memory capacity” exceeding all the others, will be the Talosians’ premium ticket to a virtual reality lust-fest.
Aside from scattered hints about its multithreaded, high-performance operating system architecture, the fundamental algorithms and software class inheritance mechanisms of TheMenagerie’s virtuality engine are never specified. We can assume a ring zero concentric clustering saltation, descendant from early complex-adaptive Artificial Life programs. Captain Christopher Pike and his hologynic “computer-generated” ideal woman can live out any scenario found in the dream-reservoir in Captain Pike’s head.
Pike rejects the two female Starfleet officers, Commander Chapel and Yeoman Colt, in favor of the gentle hologram as his companion. Any childhood memory, sexual fantasy, “historical” time and place, folklore, fairy tale, strategic game situation, vision of home, or galactic adventure can be “brought to life” and felt in full sensual intensity by The Menagerie’s virtual reality “neural network” and wetware. The ideal woman is synthesized from a reading of Captain Pike’s capital-intensive libidinal unconscious worked upon the ruined body of an Earth female. The ubiquitous woman-special effect named Vina, played by Susan Oliver, was the sole survivor of the Talos IV crash of the Federation citizens’ spaceship, the archeological survey science vessel S.S. Columbia. “They found me in the wreckage dying, a lump of flesh,” Vina later explains. The badly scarred woman appears beautiful to Captain Pike through a chimerical Talosian mind technology resembling trick photochronography. Her first “optical illusion” appearance to Captain Pike and the Enterprise landing party is as one of the ensemble of eleven marooned, non-existent S.S. Columbia crew members and scientific researchers who appear to live in a makeshift survival encampment on the planet’s surface. The landing party includes a much younger Lt. Spock, with more Satanic-looking, harshly diagonal eyebrows.
Vina takes Pike aside to a remote clearing near an unusual rock formation, on the pretext of wanting to show something of urgent import to him. Then she suddenly disappears, without any transporter-like shimmering effect taking place. The aging Earth scientists in tattered clothes also disappear. Two Talosian All-Brainers with pulsating forehead veins emerge from a camouflaged elevator shaft embedded in the rocks. They drug Captain Pike with a yellow tranquilizing spray-gas, and drag him down to his sparse holding cell in the deep underground zoo.
After some mind pre-processing and preliminary Cage orientation, Captain Pike is sent on a whirlwind tour of lifelike scenes which The Menagerie’s virtual reality engine instantiates from the databases and “software base classes” of Pike’s memories and fantasies. In each incidence, the multimedia server adds the ingredient, in a different guise, of the seductress Vina. It installs Pike as the first-person star of the interactive storyboard.
I am inside a deserted fortress, in the Middle Ages of the planet Rigel VII, just as it was when I was trapped there two weeks ago by an attacking Kalar warrior. My previous Yeoman and two others were killed, seven injured. Vina is a colonized peasant girl with long braided hair. I engage in combat at close quarters with the ferocious gargantuan soldier, using assorted spears, swords, maces, rocks, and crossbows as weapons. I defeat my opponent this time by tricking him into leaping from a platform directly onto an elongated blade.
On a splendid summer’s day, at a parkland setting near my small-town North American West Coast boyhood home on Earth, I am greeted by my favorite quarter horses, Tango and Mary Lou. Vina is my affectionate wife dressed in casual warm weather clothes. We have been riding all day and have stopped for a picnic lunch. Coffee and my favorite chicken-tuna sandwiches are spread out on a lawn blanket. My loving spouse also informs me that my mother is nearby.
In Roddenberry’s “Pilot Story Outline” for The Cage, dated June 29, 1964, there are also sketches of Captain Pike debauching with virtual Vina in a sumptuous palace in Renaissance Venice; and in a penthouse apartment overlooking an Earth city’s magnificent skyline in 2049.
When his Talosian guards wish to punish him for “wrong thinking,” Pike is sent to a Spanish Inquisition torture chamber. In the filmed version, he is dispatched to a macabre hell and engulfed by flames. He stands waist deep in a hot, bubbling liquid for a few moments of eternity.
The Magistrate or head Keeper of The Menagerie, played by Meg Wyllie, tells Pike via telepathy that this gruesome display comes from “a fable you once heard in childhood.” “Deeper in your mind,” the Keeper adds, “there are things even more unpleasant.”
As the business potentate of the Orion colonies, reclined in barbaric leisure in his rainbow courtyard, Captain Pike wears luxurious silk robes, and is surrounded by fountains, an opulent feast, and intoxicating music. There are bountiful female servants outfitted with exotic physiognomies, body piercings, and scant costumes (designed by William Ware Theiss). Vina is the green-skinned Orion slave girl, with razor-sharp claws for fingernails and a wild lioness’ mane for hair. She is divulged nearly naked with oiled, glistening skin. The nimble temptress tosses her head back, emits an unanticipated shrill, and begins to whirl and writhe rhythmically to the beat of the clamorous music. She traces the legendary Rigellian barefoot dance “which no man can resist.” We sense Vina’s ceremonial movements and see details of her facial cosmetics in a camera close-up. Pike is completely entranced and unable to take his eyes off of her.
The sensual enticement of the Orion slave girl is the culmination of the Talosians’ efforts to seduce Pike into assenting to serve as Vina’s mate in the breeding of a submissive race of virtual reality-sedated planet rebuilders. The Talosians moved underground thousands of centuries ago after devastation from wars left the surface of their world catastrophically uninhabitable. Talos IV is only now “becoming able to support life again.” After concentrating for so long on developing their mental powers, the Talosians have become desensitized and immobile. They feel alive through virtual voyeurism, taking seats as live-along “passengers” inside the “experience vehicles” of captives like Pike and Vina.
Captain Pike has two traveling businessman guests at the virtual banquet table. As Vina’s dance intensifies toward crescendo, one of the male companions turns to face Pike, motions towards her, and poses the question: “Wouldn’t you say it was worth a man’s soul?”
At this moment, the Captain of the Enterprise, holder of the Starfleet Citation for Gallantry and the Palm Leaf of Axanar, is brought back to himself. He rises abruptly from his pillow-chair in the virtual garden and walks away in defiance, summoning all his will power to return to the austere Cage. He puts an end to his participation in the virtual reality goodies proffered by the Talosians.
Captain Pike’s concrete freedom and ontological grounding in the familiar “order of reality” of his physical dwelling in the world are more precious to him than fated reunions with loved ones and pets from his childhood. The intrepid commander of the starship Enterprisewas explicitly designed by Gene Roddenberry to be a space-age Captain Horatio Hornblower. Pike’s instinctual sense of what “the real” is has a strong philosophical-cultural affinity with the liberal-modernist epoch of the “natural world” as robust reference point; the fixity of truths and meanings; the substantiality of “use values;” and the unshakeable self-confidence (or “self-presence” in the terminology of deconstruction) of Promethean or Enlightenment subjectivity. From the humanist epistemic standpoint of an “objectively existing real” and secure physical “embodiment,” Captain Pike refuses the Talosian virtual reality of simulation and fractal “selves.” These cyber-seductions and net immersions already gesture beyond liberal humanism towards the destabilizing circumstances and unsettling questions of the hypermodern or posthuman era. Pike’s sworn duty to get back to his ship is more important than saving the “damsel in distress” of his dreams from monsters in a Gothic castle. A polymorphous perverse prisoner is still a prisoner. Captain Pike has nothing but contempt for his over-cerebrated, sedentary captors. Soon he will summon all his cunning and exhort himself to figure out a way to escape from The Menagerie. “There’s a way out of any Cage,” he declares to the Keeper, “and I’ll find it.”
Long before the VR Holodeck technology of The Next Generation, there was Captain Pike and the VR-inebriated Talosians. The virtuality engine of the underground Menagerie enabled those super-advanced alien beings to offer provocative interactive experiences to Pike. But Pike rebuffs the fantasy-realization cyberspace system as a generator of illegitimate semblances that degrade the real, much as Plato, in the Socratic dialogue of Politeia, denigrated “imitative” poetry and painting as false or inauthentic simulacra.
Pike’s rejection of immersive cyberspace can alternatively be understood as dismay at that techno-cultural project’s betrayal of reality not because it plunges the real into deeper “meaninglessness” or apocalyptically bring about its “end,” but rather because it ironically endangers reality by bringing it to completion. Mainstream virtual reality imperils the world’s equilibrium (on the analogy of an ecological threat) through its over-elaboration of an exorbitant hyper-reality and superabundance of data. It is a hyper-rational yet dizzying project of the disappearance of the real into the codes of digital, genetic, subatomic, and holographic information. The dominant version of VR is at the same time the climax of Western society’s belief in an absolute techno-scientific real and the apex of simulation. It is the scheme of wresting the world from its form in order to deliver it up to its formula. It suppresses the open-ended activity of imitation or representation, eliminating the vital aesthetic illusion necessary to the maintenance of reality. VR is the Holy Grail of a perfectly seamless media technology, dispensing with borders and screens, beyond the dualistic dynamics of television or cinema, with no more separation between viewer and spectacle.
Captain Pike works out a cogent double-strategy, or two-sided defense of reality, foreshadowing an appropriate response to the hybrid cultural system of the model and the series. In The Cage, Pike acts as a liberal Enlightenment subject and man of the natural law of value. He defends existentialist or humanist reality against its forsaking by the rule of simulation. The “framing” story that filled out the two-part episode takes place thirteen years later, with Captain Kirk in command of the Enterprise. At the end of The Menagerie, Part Two, Pike changes sides to an anticipated new order of creative simulacra and defends reality again, but this time by paradoxically embracing the virtual reality of the Talosians.
In both variants of his attitude towards cyberspace, Pike avoids the widely accepted view that mistakenly assumes that liberal humanist reality remains untarnished by the effects of the vast resources invested every day into making the Holodecks of the world just like reality. Nor is reality in any way diminished, according to this prevailing position, by the consequences of extracting limitless information of every stripe from every nook and cranny of reality. This was the viewpoint espoused by Chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft in his book about cyber-consumerism, The Road Ahead (1996). According to Gates’ vision, cultural citizens will soon work, learn, make friends, shop, explore cultures, and be entertained from the privacy of their homes, and without leaving their armchairs. On the post-Web Internet, which Gates calls the interactive network, they will enter total immersion cyber-environments via high-bandwidth connections. We will be up to our android eyeballs in cybernetic prostheses and virtual excavations of the strip-mined real. Yet we will still firmly believe, in adhering to an antiquated order of simulacra (or stage of the “production of value and meaning”), in the bounded coherence of our liberal individualism and the “rational pursuit of our enlightened self-interest.”
In the doubled story of Captain Pike, a much later and conclusive stage in the regime of the endless production of meaning is invoked. It is the unconditional worship of simulacra, a final phase emblematized in digital media’s “cyberpunk” synthesis of synthetic four-dimensional video and the jacked-in nervous system.
Having completed the first pilot in December 1964, the producers of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and Robert H. Justman (and their patrons at Desilu Studios and NBC) immediately realized that they had given birth to a Captain whose precocious engagement with virtual reality disqualified him from serving as the model for a sustainable sequence of media commodities.
In their non-mainstream subversive forms, the fully achieved simulacra of VR threaten the stability and profitability of the consumer cultural system of simulated differences. This is why Pike, who was too far ahead of his time, had to be shunted aside in favor of the valorous Kirk. A fully accomplished virtual network, such as the one which beckoned Pike, endangers the primacy of the model and the dissemination of its lingering aura in the interminable substitutions and rearranged set elements of the series. The logic of the enchanting media model and its propagated array of “differences” was essential in assuring the sense of uniqueness and individuality of each consumer of shared media spectacles. The displacement of this system by immersive or spinal-neurological joining with holographic environments portends a potentially reversible endpoint to the history of images and simulacra.
When NBC Vice Presidents Mort Werner, Jerry Stanley, and Grant Tinker saw The Cage at a private premiere screening in Los Angeles in February 1965, their impassioned reaction was that it was “the most fantastic thing we’ve ever seen.” The executive television programming decision-makers were completely “blown away.” They watched the 78-minute, 35-mm print of the film over and over again, as in a trance, becoming more fascinated with each viewing.
In spite of this enthusiasm, NBC rejected the first pilot and the character of Captain Pike. The Original Series did not make the cut for the 1965-66 network television Fall Schedule because the executive committee perceived that the chronicle of Captain Pike was “not a story that properly showcasedStar Trek’s series potential.” The encounter between Pike and the Talosians was too cerebral and literary. In the words of Production Vice President Herbert F. Solow and Associate Producer Robert H. Justman, “No one previously had ever attempted to film a complicated television script like The Cage.”
NBC did make the decision to finance the production of a second pilot film. To do so after the failure of an already underwritten pilot was a move unprecedented in television history. The actor Jeffrey Hunter was unwilling to continue in the role of the Enterprise Captain. Hunter feared that the repudiation of The Cage by NBC authorities presaged a shift in Star Trek‘s concept toward repetitive formulae of characterization and plot that would be harmful to his already prosperous career and solid reputation as a Hollywood movie actor. From a different perspective, the star of Kingof Kings (1961) and No Man Is An Island (1962) was seen as having been let go by Roddenberry for making “excessive demands.” (Leonard Nimoy) Hunter died on May 27, 1969, as the result of an accident suffered while shooting the film Viva America! on location in Spain.
In the zoo on Talos IV, Captain Pike is at first as valorous as Captain Kirk eventually will be. He discovers a bug in the Talosians’ system, a flaw in their security software. They have not accounted in their human resources package for the emotion of raw hatred. When Pike concentrates all his feelings on his loathing of the Talosians, their telepathic ability to read his mind is blocked out. He throws the hand phasers belonging to Number One and Yeoman Colt to the ground near the concealed sliding wall panel entrance to The Cage. Pike then lies in wait for the Keeper to fall into the trap. Believing that Pike is crouched asleep against the wall, the Magistrate enters the incarceration room to retrieve the phasers. Pike grabs him by the arms and rings his hands around the Talosian leader’s neck. Firing one of the phasers (which appeared to be drained of power due to mental deception) at the holding cell’s front transparency, the Captain opens a large hole in the processor-generated force field surrounding the chamber. Pike and his fellow officers dart out of The Cage and flee in the elevator back to the surface. After this outburst of hatred, the Talosians are only too happy to let Captain Pike go. They admit that they underestimated the human species’ aversion to confinement. “The customs and history of your race show a unique hatred of captivity,” the Keeper concludes following a belated scan of all Enterprisecomputer library records. “Even when it’s pleasant and benevolent, you prefer death.” Extreme phenomena like violence and hatred were not considered in the Talosians’ software design. In most cases, proper software engineering instructs that reality is a bug to be fixed in the next release. But a radical passion like hatred necessitates more than a version patch. To the Talosians, this vehement human potentiality is like a rogue virus which threatens to bring down their entire planetary network.
Captain Pike is reunited with the Enterprise crew, and Talos IV is classified as an off-limits planet which all Federation ships are prohibited from going near, on penalty of death. But thirteen years later, Pike is involved in a terrible, disastrous accident, a fiery explosion which leaves him nearly dead.
After completing his tour of active duty as a starship Captain, Pike was promoted to the rank of Fleet Captain, and became an Instructor at Starfleet Academy. After the baffle plates aboard his Class J training vessel ruptured, Pike risked his life to save the lives of seven Academy Cadets, but was exposed to nearly lethal Delta radiation in the process.
His body, aside from a brutally scarred face, was destroyed, and his consciousness or soul was transferred into a stationary box or “housing unit” without prostheses. His only means of communication is the simplest digital code of beeping (and flashing a light-emitting diode) once for “yes” and twice for “no.” Faced with this reduced, diminutive existence, Fleet Captain Pike is reminded of the virtual paradise offered by the Talosians where he can be “able-bodied” once again. He now wishes to return to The Menagerie.
By this time, Kirk has taken command of the Enterprise, and he sees it as his duty to enforce the injunction against visiting Talos IV. Mr. Spock is Pike’s loyal Science Officer from thirteen years back. Spock places his career at risk by commandeering the ship without Kirk’s knowledge in order to bring the “homuncular” Pike back to the zoo planet. Spock is the only officer to serve under the Captainships of both Pike and Kirk. For the quasi-comatose Talosians, thirteen years was just a nanosecond, and they are waiting to greet Pike with as much revelry as their atrophied funny bones can muster.
For Captain Pike, the appeal of virtuality is relative. Compared with the able-bodied, open-spaced conditions of vitality, mobility, and irreducible language, mainstream VR is a sham. It is a pale facsimile of life, and Pike will have no truck with it. But compared to the degraded conditions of immobility and digital inarticulateness, reduced to the unraveled binary code of communication, a certain form of VR is preferred. From the standpoint of spatial, quadriplegic, and semantic incapacitation, an alternative and self-aware virtual reality is accepted and embraced. As long as Captain Pike has a body, he is not seduced to make the leap beyond the screen to the full achievement of simulacra. Once he no longer has a body, he is ironically ready to put on his full-body DataSuit, head-mounted display, and PowerGlove. At the dawn of James T. Kirk’s term as Captain, and the seminal confusion of Kirk’s status as original or copy, we have a powerful statement about the new “interactive networks.” It is only from the position of an already debased spatial immobility and urban hyper-concentration that we are prepared to adopt the doubled or substitute world of virtuality. Fellow homunculi, as the ubiquitous Microsoft advertising slogan might ask, where do you want to go today?
So Pike, the true firstborn, was whisked away into virtual reality and replaced by the changeling Kirk. There was, of course, another way forward for Captain Pike, but the scriptwriters of The Menagerie were unfortunately ignorant of the basics of writing operating systems wetware drivers for peripheral devices. Pike’s bio-rehabilitation programmers already resuscitated at least one controllable nerve impulse from his consciousness (his “brain waves,” to which his wheelchair is constructed to respond). Since the flesh machine developers succeeded in connecting the discrete signals of this impulse across the synaptic gap to an output device (the beeping and light flashing for “yes” or “no”), additional layers of software to drive more sophisticated output devices and sound cards would be possible. From the single binary registering of a 0 or 1, an entire operational-transactional language can be devised. One merely has to enumerate and combine varied sequences of 0s and 1s as discrete identifiers in an infinitely permutated system. The only drawback would be that Pike’s consciousness would always remain at the level of the lowest machine language, forced to perpetually master and will the lengthy binary number sequences in order to express himself! He would literally be the autonomous machine and its finally awakened artificial intelligence.
At the end of The Menagerie, Part Two, the Keeper famously says to Captain Kirk, telepathically and through the medium of a viewscreen: “Captain Pike has an illusion, and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant.”
But it is a mistake to so simplistically (or lucidly?) describe, as the Keeper does to Kirk, the new attitude that Pike intends to have towards The Menagerie’s virtuality engine during his second stay on the Forbidden Planet. The German version of The Menagerie is called Talos IV:Tabu, or Talos IV: Taboo. The Talosians have been wrong before in their expectations regarding the behavior of the noted twenty-third century space explorer. Pike did not accept customary Disneyland-style VR before. It is unlikely that Fleet Captain Pike, in spite of his new honorary diplomatic designation as Advisory Federation Ambassador to the eleven planets of the Talos star group, is going to make an unprincipled about-face and enthusiastically welcome what he previously had scorned. Pike’s turnaround is instead going to be of a more reputable sort. He will carry out his two-sided defense of reality by switching to creative partaking in the new cybernetic order of technology-mediated simulacra, while keeping his own transformational and illusionist goals uppermost in mind. Having tragically lost his biological body, and having just intimately confronted the sobering fact of his own death, Pike is venturing back into cyberspace in acute awareness of the disappearance of the concrete phenomenology of his immediate here and now and of the vanishing of his own physicality. His life circumstances are analogous to the conditions of social existence which have spawned the “interactive networks,” and which the latter, in their most influential forms, further catalyze. Pike is not going online to conduct a commonplace search for the satisfaction of his desires; not to have good times, sex, and rock ‘n roll. He is returning to Talos IV to inventively regain and extend his severed proximate lifeworld contexts and environs. He goes back into the Talosian cyber-matrix, not as an eager consumer of techno-wares seeking cool experiences, but as a hacker-philosopher or wetware recoder of the system. He is looking for ways to regather his dissipated orientation and undone materiality. Pike is going to employ Talosian prostheses to make outrageous, diverting, and poetic uses of their fantastical technologies. He is going to artistically undermine the virtuality engine of The Menagerie to find a certain acceptance of the reality of his disability. He will stake out a new practice of real “embodiment” and dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines.
There is a clip of virtual Pike on the surface of Talos IV, strolling hand in hand with virtual Vina up the slope that leads to the elevator leading down to the underground Menagerie. At the end of The Menagerie, Part Two, this strip of film is used to show the spectral Pike, just lifted out of his wheelchair-bound body, rejoining Vina after a thirteen-year separation. Moments later the Kirk-commanded Enterprise warps out of orbit.
But in the 1986 video release of The Cage, we see that the same footage was originally used in a different way.
The first modernist Pike has just said “no” to Talosian virtual reality and is standing near the rocks, preparing to be transported back to his ship. Number One and Yeoman Colt have already gone on ahead. To appease the heartbroken Vina, who cannot leave with Pike because of the terrible physical deformity of her real body (“the female’s true appearance,” as the Keeper says), the Talosians create a double of Pike. The clone walks up the incline with Vina while the “real” Pike gazes approvingly at them. One of the twin Pikes beams out. The other one reenters cyberspace with his female companion. “[She] has an illusion, and you have reality,” the Keeper says to the departing Pike, instead of to Kirk in reference to Pike as at the end of The Menagerie, Part Two. “May you find your way as pleasant.”
In this montage double-image from the “suppressed” version of The Cage, the resolution of Pike’s desire for virtual Vina is a more provocative and literary one, raising the philosophical questions associated with the double, cloning, and the transporter. What is undecidable in this scene is which of the two Pikes has ontological primacy or can be considered to be the original. In Portuguese dubbing, The Cage is called Jornada nam Estralas: onde tudo comecou, or Star Trek: Where Everything Began.