Return of the Jedi

Alright, let’s get right into it. Yes I’m sure you might want to know how it came to pass that a September off became five months. Sadly, I have nothing to say on the matter. Not that I haven’t thought about it, or even written about it, but trust me, it’s like talking about bowel movements—a wee squirt of funny followed by a lifetime of regret. Let’s just put it down to Fletch being Fletch and move on to grittier matters.

But first we gotta file some paperwork. Form A-stroke-B-Zed-12 details what you’ll be seeing on this electronic stripper pole over the next year. I’ve got some larger non-RCB writing projects in the works and I need to save some of my limited magic-language dust to turn those potatoes into pot roasts. Mainly what this means for the Bestiary is that I need a fixed topic to carry me through several months (at which point I will choose another). I ain’t got the juice to be thinking shit up all the time like some heartless text-generating algorithm hellbent on stealing your job. As it happens I had a topic a little while ago that could potentially span seventy-nine essays, and—yes I can hear many of you quacking¹ in your boots—that topic is the hoary old cheeseball television science-fiction juggernaut, The Andy Griffith Show.

Oops sorry wrong card. I meant Star Trek, the original series. Apologies to folks who don’t like Kirk and the gang—I’ll write a forty-page essay on the topic of your choice for one million dollars.

The other matter concerns those of you waiting for Bestiary cards: the presses are rolling again. Watch your mailbox.

I gave up on Star Trek what is it, six, seven months ago now? I came looking for the bones of the show—the deep intellectual reasons for its continued survival, only to come up empty. The series is coated in such a thick agglomeration of both money and myth, it’s hard to see it for what it was when it was canceled in 1968—weird, occasionally interesting, often cringe-inducing, always cheap-looking, and above all, a commercial failure. I guess it’s different from what surrounded it but it’s hard to know because memoria praeteritorum bonorum—we remember only what was best, or at least most impactful, from that time.

Anyway I liked something about this show once upon a time. Liked it quite a lot. Of course when I was six the colorful glimmering lights and chunky buttons on the various control panels had an exotic appeal; everything else on TV was mundane: forks and knives and basketballs and couches and bowls of dish soap in which dismal women soaked their fingers for some reason. Trek looked different. Some of that is still weirdly charming. Watching Kirk eat his ridiculous food that looked like a boil-in-the-bag dinner of cubed carrots and beets is absurd but it’s interesting to see what the future used to be. And of course when you watch him flip open a communicator or slide a little plastic rectangle into a slot beneath a viewscreen, ya kinda gotta think, how the fuck did these guys know that was coming?

Of course, a lot of engineers and industrial designers were fans, so…

In any event, people love the living bejesus out of this show and judging by the seas of ink that have been spilled on the matter it’s not just a bunch of kids who like Kirk’s pointy sideburns. There is, we’re told, a deep undercurrent of philosophy in Star Trek. Watching it isn’t just a way to kill an hour—no, it’s a regular education. The show, claim legions of academics and authors and documentary filmmakers, was downright edifying, like Sunday School but on Friday nights.

I’m skeptical, but that’s at least in part what I’ll be looking for (what I’ll continue looking for) as I grimly march through the 65-odd episodes I have left, and I trust you’ll be right there at my elbow, nodding and chipping in a dig or two of your own. Or perhaps just waiting until it’s over so we can move to another subject.

“The Menagerie,” the 11th and 12th aired episodes, is the answer to a good many Star Trek trivia questions, so if you find yourself being pelted with such, shouting the title repeatedly is guaranteed to win you a point, eventually. The pair of episodes was a bow to expediency—the ten episodes to date had strained the limits of the production team, especially those tasked with completing the special effects. As they had an unseen pilot² still on the shelf, writer (and the show’s creator) Gene Roddenberry worked out a way to use it to create breathing room for the crew—two golden weeks off, more or less.

The solution Roddenberry contrived was to situate the events from the pilot, originally titled “The Cage,” into the Enterprise’s pre-series past, as the subject matter of a court martial hearing. “The Menagerie” mostly consists of a group of characters—Spock, Kirk, a pasty-faced admiral, and the previous captain of the Enterprise, the grievously wounded Commander Pike—sitting around a room doing court martial business. The room is bare except for a table and some chairs and a screen. The most work-intensive prop is the fully enclosed mobility scooter containing the moribund Pike; a box with wheels I could probably make in my basement tonight out of plywood scraps. Pike communicates solely through a single amber light on the front of the thing—one blink for yes, two for no—which must have been a relief for the electrical crew. The group spends a few minutes chatting about the matter at hand, in which Spock has commandeered the ship and sent it off to visit a forbidden planet at the risk not only of his career but his life, and then they, like us, just sit and watch “The Cage.”

“The Cage” in turn tells the story of shipwreck survivor Vina, played by the dazzling Susan Oliver, whose visage as the infamous green slave girl often appears in the show’s end credits. Vina has for forty years been a sort of zoo specimen for a race of subterranean aliens who have developed powerful psychic abilities, abilities they use to create simulated worlds for Vina and presumably other of their pets to inhabit in exchange for the sort of manual labor that they can no longer do themselves, having allowed their physical beings to wither over the generations. But as Noah could no doubt tell you, it’s not enough to have one of every species, so the aliens lure the Enterprise to their planet and attempt to add its captain, one Christopher Pike, to their menagerie.

Me-ow.

Pike, stiff-necked paragon of the human spirit, is having none of it. The episode consists of two threads—one in which his crew uses a series of ever more powerful weapons to try to blast their way into the underground chamber where all of this is happening, and a second in which Pike throws a series of increasingly violent hissy fits about his imprisonment, failing even to allow himself to be seduced by the absurdly tempting Vina in a variety of guises³, including the aforementioned green slave girl. Eventually the aliens realize that owning a human is far, far worse than owning a dog or even a ferret, and they just sort of let Pike go. He splits, leaving a cloud of Aqua Velva and Brylcreem vapor, but not before Vina reveals that she is suffering all sorts of hideous injuries and worse—age, oh my God—so she opts to stay and be beautified by the aliens’ powers.

Honestly the story of “The Cage” never struck me as of any great consequence; probably because though we watch it we don’t watch it on its own terms. At the conclusion of “The Menagerie” Spock reveals that his intent was to bring Pike back to the planet so that he too could continue his life with the illusion of health and youth. The pasty-faced admiral turns out to have been an illusion provided by the aliens and the court martial goes up in smoke. Whatever point “The Cage” was trying to make is swept aside to make room for a happy ending to “The Menagerie” for both Spock—acquitted—and Pike—erected.

Which is odd, because “The Cage” does ask honestly weighty questions about the nature of freedom and whether it can be reasonably exchanged for material gain. “The Menagerie” turns that question into a slightly different one: how much material gain we talkin’ here? Whereas Cage-Pike rejects the offer of paradise with Vina, Menagerie-Pike weighs the option and finds it preferable to life inside a motorized steam sauna playing twenty questions with everyone to get across the simple desire for lasagna or the need to take a dump. The stakes have changed; the equation is different. Points for flexibility of thought.

There’s probably a master’s thesis to be had in the distinction between the titles, “The Cage,” which emphasizes Pike’s unwillingness to be contained, and “The Menagerie,” which is just sort of perplexing. Isn’t desiring to be an exhibit in someone’s menagerie a bad thing? There isn’t really any sense of moral conflict in the title; perhaps the menagerie is Roddenberry’s—a zoo containing this one odd episode.

Whatever the case it’s far more interesting for its place and purpose in the season as a whole than for its plot, and as well for a footnote involving Jeffrey Hunter in the role of Captain Pike. After the initial pilot failed to be picked up, Roddenberry offered the role to Hunter for the second pilot, only to be rebuffed by a man who probably thought he was above this cornball nonsense with the cardboard sets. Like Pete Best, he just missed his shot at fame and fortune. Unlike Best, Hunter didn’t get to enjoy a lifetime of regret. Near the end of 1968 he was injured by an on-set explosion. He recovered without any discernible issues, but in May of the following year he was struck by a sudden brain hemorrhage, fell and conked his noggin, and was dead by the following day.

Funny to think Jeffrey Hunter could have been a household name while this Shatner fellow would have, if he was lucky, become synonymous with T.J. Hooker.

Anyhoo, there’s something about “The Menagerie” that puts it above the episodes that precede it. As much as I gripe about the cheapness of Star Trek, there are definitely instances where the stingy budgets encouraged some amazing feats of creativity. The transporter effect is one—it’s merely a shot of aluminum dust falling in front of a camera, composited by hand over the folks being transported. (The hand-compositing is the reason everyone gets really, really still right before the transporter does its thing.) This is another. The show is often totally risible, but there are things to admire. I hope—especially since I’ve now committed to re-watching the whole run—that this is a sign of joys to come and not just a solitary blinking light on the front of the cage I’ve fashioned for myself.

1. Please. Not a typo.

2. I’ve written about this before but if you’re confused and don’t feel like reading the original essay, the first pilot was a failure but Lucille Ball, of all people, saw it and asked Gene Roddenberry to make a second, which was picked up by her production company, Desilu Productions.

3. Kirk, naturally, would have loved her and left her.