YMMV / Star Trek S1 E0 "The Cage"

• Harsher in Hindsight: A mild example: Vina, played by Susan Oliver, was the survivor of a starship crash. Her actress, who had previously been aboard Pan Am Flight 115 when it went into an uncontrolled dive in 1959, would later be in a Piper Cub crash in 1966 when the plane's pilot clipped some wires while hot dogging (both Oliver and the pilot survived unharmed). The flight had been part of Oliver's preparations for a solo trans-Atlantic flight that she completed the following year.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Just after the women beam down, Vina attempts to insult Number One by comparing her to a computer. Majel Barrett, who played Number One, went on to voice the Federation Computer in every Star Trek production up to Star Trek (2009).
  • Captain Pike, Kirk's predecessor, annoyed with his crewmates, says, "What are we running here, a cadet ship?" This was hilarious in hindsight as far back as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: the Enterprise was meant to be on a training cruise before flying off to deal with Khan and was largely full of cadets.
    • It becomes Harsher in Hindsight given that Pike's later injuries occurred while he was inspecting a cadet ship.
  • It's fitting that Christopher Pike's successor would one day be played by the very similarly named Chris Pine.
  • The music for the escape scene would be used as the now famous theme music for Mission: Impossible.
  • Following their extremely popular portrayal in Season 2 of Discovery, it was announced in 2020 that a new series featuring Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock serving aboard the USS Enterprise would go into production. Several people have observed that technically, this version of the series finally got picked up, (albeit with everyone recast), in what is probably the longest amount of time it has ever taken for a pilot to get a first-season order.
  • Pike infamously commenting that he can’t get used to seeing a woman on the bridge becomes even more ironic after the release of Strange New Worlds, in which his bridge crew is mostly comprised of women.
• Mis-blamed: Gene Roddenberry claimed that a lot of women objected to seeing a woman in a position of authority (Number One, played by Majel Barrett), and the fact that the female crew members wore pants. However, the problems with the pilot had nothing to do with a female in a powerful position; it had more to do with who was playing her. Women in leading and strong supporting roles on TV, sometimes playing clearly powerful characters and sometimes being middle-aged to elderly women who were not sexualized, were not completely unheard of at the time. When the pilot was first pitched, the network was concerned because Barrett was involved in an extramarital affair with Roddenberry at the time, and their relationship was quite well-known in the industry. Additionally, some of the Star Trek creators believed that Barrett was just not a very good actor back then. She seemed to improve with age, as she was eventually given more complex material to work with than just "she is in love with Spock".
  • This may be viewed as a little Harsher in Hindsight as at the end of the third season Roddenberry was adamant that Dr. Janice Lester (the Turnabout Intruder) could not command a starship because she was a woman and not (for example) because she failed a psych profile, or washed out of the Academy, or some other non-gender-specific reason.
• Padding: In an indication that the hour-long version of the episode is probably a workprint that was never intended to be broadcast as-is, there are a number of superfluous scenes where the characters either point out the obvious or recap what the audience already knows, bits of dialogue that are repeated with minor alterations a few minutes later, and special effects that just add to the running time. Had this version of Star Trek gone to series, chances are it would have been edited down to the 50-minute length that TOS episodes usually ended up being.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Fortunately averted in the end, but during makeup tests for the Orion make-up (Majel Barrett being used as the test subject), the footage kept coming back with no indication of the different skin color, leading to makeup dressing her up with various shades of green, all with the same results. After three days of this, the makeup artists learned that the film processing lab had been decoloring her, not having realized that she was SUPPOSED to be green. This is actually referenced in an issue of Fantastic Four when photos of a topless sunbathing She-Hulk are color-corrected because the photographer forgot to tell them the subject was meant to be green.
  • Captain Pike's vision of Hell? Surrounded by flames...in a pit full of oatmeal.
• Values Dissonance: The fact that Captain Pike has some trouble over having a woman on the bridge (other than his female first officer who implicitly seems to be treated as One of the Boys, and is somewhat resentful of the fact) is pretty jarring to modern audiences used to more inclusive iterations of the franchise.
• Values Resonance: Number One being a woman in authority was quite progressive for the time. Avoiding many of the stereotypes for time, she's a competent commanding officer, taking effective charge of the situation when Pike isn't present.
• The Woobie: Vina was in a wreckage, disfigured and dying, and was so tortured that she's developed Stockholm Syndrome, just happy to be in a illusion.

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