In the twelfth episode of the first season of Star Trek, Spock finally reveals the reason for his deceit. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Trigger Warning: For discussion of consent and human slavery.
Immense, y’all. This two-parter is truly a demonstration of what made Star Trek such a beloved show. If there’s anything else like this in the original series, I can’t wait to watch it. There are certainly a lot of things to like about the completion of “The Menagerie,” and I hope to cover them. But I came to love this episode because of how well it reflects the purpose of the Enterprise. This ship is out in the galaxy to seek new worlds and new civilizations, and even if Captain Pike was looking to rescue possible survivors of a craft, he did discover a new civilization on Talos IV. Unfortunately, they were a dying civilization, one who were desperate to do anything they could to guarantee that they wouldn’t be wiped out. And while there were a lot of plots to be resolved, the main mystery of “The Menagerie” is the why. Why on earth would Spock lie so readily in order to take Captain Pike back to a place he escaped from?
There’s a complicated answer to that question, and it took the entire episode for me to figure it out. Of course, it’s not hard to believe that Spock is royally screwing up when we find out what happened to Pike upon being kidnapped by the Talosians. The Talosians’ power of illusion is revealed in full, and it’s completely terrifying. Being able to cast intricate illusions? Well, that’s bad enough all by itself. But the Enterprise crew comes to realize how specific the illusion was that tricked them. It was TOO good, and Pike learns that the hard way. Because the Talosians can read a being’s every thought. EVERYTHING. Subconscious thought, dreams, memories, it doesn’t matter: it’s all available to them without any effort at all.
The characterization of the Talosians is immediately hostile, since they torment Pike with manipulations of reality. They are so obviously detached from what they do, and that’s how I figured out the reasoning behind the title. This whole set-up was like a zoo to them. Vina, a woman who was trapped on Talus IV many years before, basically confirms it for Pike. But that’s only part of the terror here. There’s certainly something horrifying about being forced to perform for the entertainment and study of another race, but the entire thing has a much more sinister purpose to it: the Talosians desperately need a species to help repair their own civilization. And they’ll get the workforce they need through forced breeding.
(I should note that while I did appreciate this episode, the Talosian slave reveal struck me as a bit culturally foolish. To indirectly reference the ill effects of chattel slavery on a television show aired in America but include no textual, spoken references to said bit of our history is kind of a mess. Whether the writers intended to reference this or not, it’s something that you can’t divorce from our own history or cultural memory. The forced breeding, the captivity, the breakdown of a person’s sanity, the complete subjugation of one’s will to another, the use of violence and suffering to entertain others… it’s too on the nose to have no reference to it otherwise. The show has referenced the prison system before, and it’s all set with an understanding that America was a major force in creating the Federation. I suppose this is part of a bigger beef I have with science fiction and fantasy. Authors (almost always white ones) love to address social inequality through metaphor, but the people who are the victims in these fictional worlds are almost universally white, despite that said inequality didn’t ever affect them. This is particularly grating when you’re trying to do a metaphor for racism.)
Pike’s struggle on Talus IV is mostly mental, then. He figures out that the Talosians can’t read thoughts they consider “primitive,” and he uses it as his only method of defense. He needs it, too, since we discover the reason for that scene in the first half where Pike confesses that he’s reconsidering being a captain. That’s what the Talosians focus on: showing Pike a version of his life that’s devoid of the fright and stress of traveling the galaxy.
Amidst this, we’ve got Vina, whose story is just the saddest thing EVER. Because she’s used throughout this episode by the Talosians in order to trick Pike or wear him down so that he’ll consent to breeding with her. I don’t remember if it was confirmed on screen how long she’d been on that planet, but it had to have been DECADES. Decades of torture and loneliness and hopelessness, and then Pike is there, and this is her only chance to get validation and love and affection. And yet? She finds out that he’s still got hope. He believes he can escape, and I imagine she remembered a time when she once believed the same thing.
Honestly, it’s so complicated to think about the ramifications of what the Talosians did to Vina. They saved her life after she nearly died from her ship’s crash, but they put her back together wrong. And while she spends a lot of time begging Pike to submit to the Talosians’ will, she ultimately decides to stay behind after the Talosians reject humans. It’s her choice because she’d rather live on Talus IV then have to face the world in her current state. That was the clue that explained Spock’s behavior. He wasn’t taking Pike back to Talus IV against his will; he was giving him the chance to live on that planet within an illusion. Like it was for Vina, this is Pike’s choice, and Spock wanted to respect that. But how could he get Pike to a planet that carried a death sentence?
Well, he constructed an elaborate illusion with the help of the Talosians. How the hell did he contact the Talosians, though? They had to have known what Spock was going to do in order to create the illusion of Commodore Mendez, right? HOW ABOUT THAT REVEAL, BY THE WAY? I NEVER ONCE SUSPECTED IT. But Spock’s goal here was to find a way to get around the numerous obstacles in the way, and goddamn, y’all, he did it. He avoided the death penalty for himself; he did whatever he could not to implicate Kirk in his plot and to make it look like Kirk was always innocent; he got Pike back to Talus safely. There are some weird implications for the story that involve happiness and disability, but I figured that’s a conversation for more qualified folks to talk about. This ended up being a very complex mystery that was creepy and mind-boggling, and SO MUCH SPOCK. SPOCK NOW, AND SPOCK FOREVER.
The video for “The Menagerie, Part II” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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