Trivia / Star Trek S1 E0 "The Cage"

• Billing Displacement: Leonard Nimoy receives the unusually prominent credit of "Co-Starring Leonard Nimoy as Mister Spock" in the original pilot's end credits, ahead of all his co-stars other than Jeffrey Hunter and Guest Star Susan Oliver. (Majel Barrett and John Hoyt share a card, as do Peter Duryea and Laurel Goodwin.) Although Nimoy is prominently featured in the pilot, he really is not any moreso than Barrett (playing the First Officer) or Hoyt (playing the Ship's Doctor). This suggests that Gene Roddenberry planned to do more with him when the show went to series, which of course he did, albeit in a slightly more convoluted route than originally planned.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • In 1996, Grace Lee Whitney cited this as one of her favourite episodes (along with "Charlie X", "The Devil in the Dark" and "The City on the Edge of Forever").
  • In 1997, Majel Barrett similarly named this as one of her two favourite episodes of TOS (the other being "The City on the Edge of Forever") and said that she thought both of them "are more Star Trek than anything else that has been conceived." Of this episode specifically, she enthused, "I thought it was beautiful. People still ask me, 'What is your favorite episode? no question, it would have to be "The Cage" [....] [It] was pure Star Trek".
• Deleted Scene:
  • Inverted. A scene that should have not been used was not cut. There was a line in one of the drafts where one of the slave traders casually comments that the "green Vina" was captured by Pike in an underground tunnel: This is the fantasy scene that is played out for him when he runs out of the harem, turns around and finds the green girl holding a torch. Although given the role of illusions in the story, it still makes sense.
  • At the beginning of the scene involving Vina acting as an Orion slave girl, the Talosians are seen speaking through a trader and an unnamed Starfleet officer, trying to induce Captain Pike to accept their "gift" of an illusory life as breeding stock. Moments later, Vina threatens another servant who pays too much attention to Pike.
  • In the scene following, set in the transporter room, Number One reiterates the danger of the rescue mission and its voluntary nature. There was dialogue filmed but cut from the final print where Number One addresses Yeoman Colt. In it, she points out that Colt is new to the Enterprise, hinting that the yeoman need not join the landing party. Colt responds by saying that she has been trained as any other member of the crew and that she is Captain Pike's yeoman.
• She Also Did: Susan Oliver, who played Vina and the famous dancing Orion girl, was in Real Life also an accomplished aviator, and would go on to be the fourth woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in a single-engined plane.
• Missing Episode: A narrow aversion. Gene Roddenberry kept a 16mm black and white print of the episode, which he used to show at conventions, but the color negative was cut up to use for "The Menagerie". The color clippings were found in a film lab, and were used to restore the full color version of the episode.
• Posthumous Credit: For distinguished English character actor Leonard Mudie, who plays one of the illusory "survivors". (He has one line: "They're men! They're human!") This was the final role in a career which spanned over a half-century on stage and screen. He died in April 1965, making him the only onscreen performer to appear in Star Trek who died prior to the show's first airing.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The episode was not aired on TV until 1988, when it was used as a filler episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation due to a writers strike.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The original script called for the aliens to be crab-like arthropods. Since the budget would not allow this, they were made into humanoids with bulging brains, looking very much like The Greys, beginning a Star Trek tradition of almost all aliens being of a shape that could be easily played by human actors.
• Troubled Production: Despite painting Majel Barret increasingly more intense shades of green, all test films that were sent off to the lab to see what the efefct would look like inexplicably came back with her having a more natural skin tone. Eventually, it was discovered that this was due to one of the technicians believing that the green Orion make up was some kind of error, and manually correcting it to a more natural shade, not realizing it was meant to be a special effect.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Lloyd Bridges was approached to play Captain Pike, but refused because he didn't feel like taking part in an outer-space series. James Coburn was also considered. Bridges would later play a daring starship captain in a two-part episode of Battlestar Galactica (1978).
  • Yvonne Craig was considered for Vina. She appeared in the third season episode, "Whom Gods Destroy", as an Orion, Marta.
  • In the first draft script, the illusory Columbia survivors had more dialogue than they do in the episode's final edit. For instance, it was established that the survivors' distress call had been a directional beam. Harvey P. Lynn Jr., however, proposed that it would be more likely for the survivors' signal to have been a broadcast beam, owing to the increased probability that such a beam would be intercepted. Solar batteries were mentioned by at least one of the survivors too, but Lynn opposed this by suggesting that the illusory Human instead say, "After we could no longer use the ship's power, we switched to automatic batteries and started praying." This dialogue was evidently later cut or omitted entirely.
  • The episode's first draft script had an opening scene in the hangar bay where Captain April, whose character at this stage was a tad older than Captain Pike was later written, is inspecting new crew members. He remarks disapprovingly to the doctor, at one point, about the young age of some of these officers. "Something," Gene Roddenberry later wrote in a memo, "that Jim Kirk, the boy wonder of the Academy, never would have done." In this same scene, April sees a number of badly-wounded crewmen off the ship, onto a space shuttle or taxi from the Human colony of Antares. Among these departing officers is an uninjured former navigator named Crowley who April is sending back in disgrace, because he fired on friendly aliens. The officer argues that they were monstrous in appearance and asks how he could have known that they were intelligent enough to have weapons. These protests are met by a stern but subdued dismissal from the captain, who quietly orders, "Get off my ship, mister."
  • The second revised final draft script indicates, as does the episode, that Spock, José Tyler, and others had been wounded in the fighting on Rigel VII - events which took place just prior to the action in the pilot. The script includes stage directions for Spock to be limping and for Tyler to have a bandaged hand.
  • It was pointed out to Roddenberry that Rigel was probably too far away to be a realistic location for Pike's flashback and it was planned to change the reference to Vega (a much nearer star) but this didn't make it into the final script.
  • Roddenberry wanted to cast DeForest Kelley as Dr. Boyce, but he was overruled by the director, Robert Butler, who chose John Hoyt instead.
• Working Title: The title of this episode was changed in production from "The Cage" to "The Menagerie". However, when "The Menagerie" (which reused almost all the footage from this episode) went into production, the title of this installment reverted to "The Cage".
• Susan Oliver had no experience as a dancer, so worked with a choreographer to develop a series of enticing poses for her Orionese aspect. Her performance is often referred to as "belly dancing" (that is, raqs sharqi), which it is not. The Orions, like other sexy, enticing alien races on Star Trek, are presented with familiar orientalist trappings. In particular, the music has an "Arabian Nights" Days maqsoum beat expressing Vina's theme in parallel fourths, and her musicians, the bald merchant, and Pike are wearing kaftans.
• Following the death of Laurel Goodwin in 2022, this became the first Star Trek episode to have no living cast members.

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