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Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Menagerie BlahBlah No Thank You, Not Right Now

TOS: Episode 11 (Parts 1 & 2): The Menagerie

The "Oh I am so old and can't keep my mouth closed because this face makeup is actually glue" Captain Pike character

Okay, let's face it: NBC screwed up. They paid all this money on an excellent pilot that they didn't actually use to introduce the series, and as a result, there they are stuck with all this unused footage. Around episode 10, they got lazy and decided they'd just whip together a quick-sode (an episode on the cheap) by retooling the footage from "The Cage" to make it fit into the Star Trek timeline complete with James T. Kirk.

Most of "The Menagerie", then, turns out to be the Enterprise crew we know from The Original Series watching the footage of "The Cage" during a trial brought against Spock. Oh, love, why you gotta be so bad?

NBC gets around the oddness of this set-up by placing the story of "The Cage" footage before the occurrences of Enterprise, and by then bringing in a severely aged Captain Pike. The kid's-craft-paste-on-the-face "Oh dear lord I am old so my skin looks like this" stage makeup is used to resolve the fact that the actor that played Pike for the pilot not only ditched the series but up and quit his acting career too. With Pike looking like he's got papier mache paste for skin, and Spock looking like the handsome, brilliant, young hotness that he always is, we discover, then, that Vulcans, that is, Spock, live a dang long time without obvious aging.

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