Star Trek: “The Cage”
Still Just a Pilot in a Cage
1965’s “The Cage” is a complicated story to start the television series, the franchise, and the cultural juggernaut that we call Star Trek. It was the first pilot episode; then NBC rejected it and commissioned a second pilot, which became the third broadcast episode of what eventually became 1966’s Season 1. But even if the start of Star Trek was less a triumphant launch, and more a back-and-forth between Gene Roddenberry and NBC, “The Cage” remains an influential story in the Star Trek canon; its footage and events were re-visited just months later in Season 1 proper, and 55 years later in 2019’s Star Trek: Discovery; and the main characters of “The Cage” were given their own spin-off in 2022’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
One way or another, Star Trek got there.
Different Times and Space
For a story that resonates even generations later, it’s quite an experience to watch “The Cage” now and note how some parts of it have not aged well. Despite, for example, the sheer accomplishment of launching a gigantic spaceship out of the galaxy in humanity’s (then) far future, Captain Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) admits to not being used to seeing a woman (Majel Barret’s Number One) on the bridge. Interstellar faster-than-light travel? Sure, piece of cake. Female in command post? Hold your horses, let’s not get ridiculous (notwithstanding that NBC had concerns about Roddenberry casting his paramour in the role, I’d argue that 1964’s NBC would have had concerns about casting any female actor in such a central role).
But, of course, far future or not, the 1960s was a different time. And even as the infant Star Trek struggled to move past the biases of its creators and its backers, it was clear that Roddenberry had an eye on more to come. There was the good looking captain and his old friend, the ship’s doctor (a dynamic that would be expanded upon in the Original Series and its reboot movie series, and revisited in The Next Generation); there were phasers and transporters, even if the nomenclature wasn’t quite there yet; and the crew was still almost entirely white, but we did have an alien on the bridge, as though Roddenberry was warning NBC that this show would try as much as it could to go where no other 1960s television show would dare to go.
Headwinds Ahead
It was difficult to watch “The Cage” and not think about how much it was Star Trek, even as no one — not Roddenberry, not NBC — knew what Star Trek would become (leaving aside, for a moment, Roddenberry’s ardent belief that his idea had wings). Despite NBC rejecting “The Cage” because it was “too cerebral,” the story of humans and an alien crewmember (perhaps ironically) rejecting utopia suggests that Roddenberry had big intentions for his version of “Wagon Train to the Stars.” He could, after all, have played it safe and submitted a script that ended with everybody happily trekking on to their next adventure.
Instead, “The Cage” ends with Captain Pike musing on the nature of freedom and illusion, of reality and enslavement. It’s heady stuff for a 1960s pilot.
Past, Present, and Far Future
And that’s what stands out about “The Cage,” rudimentary and unaired as it was; how early and clearly it points the way to the brave new world Gene Roddenberry envisioned. Far beyond what was possible in 1964, and much further beyond what he or anyone could have imagined, Star Trek persisted, both because of, and despite, “The Cage.”
It’s easy to think that Discovery and Strange New World revisiting “The Cage’’ half a century later is part of the obsession with nostalgia that has suffocated popular culture — and sure, that’s there — but there’s also truth to the fact that the story seeded in “The Cage” — of humans and aliens, of technology and space travel — is truly timeless. It is why we have Star Trek, and it is why we have Star Wars, and Babylon 5, and Battlestar Galactica, and Stargate, and Firefly, and Doctor Who, and Dune, and Mass Effect, and hundreds, if not thousands, of other science fiction shows and books and movies and games.
It is why Star Trek is thriving in the second decade of the 21st century. And yes, that reason is that there’s a lot of money to be made from mining nostalgia; but watch “The Cage” and tell me that you don’t see it. Watch “The Cage” and tell me that, even 59 years after Roddenberry typed the first words of Star Trek at his typewriter, you don’t feel the door opening to the long, long journey ahead.
