Star Trek The Menagerie
When I was a kid and first saw the two-part episode of Star Trek (the original series) called “The Menagerie”, it made a major impression on me. There is a certain weightiness to the story about Spock’s mutiny to give some semblance of a life to his crippled former Captain, Christopher Pike. Gene Roddenberry wrote the episode when Star Trek was falling behind on original scripts in the first season and he found a way to incorporate the footage from Star Trek’s original pilot, “The Cage”. Here we see for the first time the depth of affection and self-sacrifice in Spock normally hidden behind his cool Vulcan exterior. It is fascinating to see how much the effects evolved in between the filming of “The Cage” in 1964 and “The Menagerie” just two years later. Spock is the only character to have survived from that first pilot to the ultimate Star Trek series, though the Spock of “The Cage” is almost unrecognizable. Grinning goofily at the sight of quivering plants on Talos IV and barking reports on the bridge of the Enterprise like someone who is overly emotional, rather than the converse, the early Spock bears little resemblance to the character who anchored Star Trek. Pike is moody and reflective in comparison to the upbeat and impulsive Kirk. The second and successful pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, is better than “The Cage”, but the meta-story created by Roddenberry in “The Menagerie” makes for a seminal episode in the collective works of Star Trek.
The original series has been digitally remastered in High Definition, and exterior effects shots have been replaced with new computer generated images. Overall it is brighter and more detailed than we’ve seen Star Trek before. My only technical complaint is that the remastered sound is piercingly shrill. In this special showing in a movie theater, that was only exacerbated.