How A Production Problem In The '60s Is Still Influencing…

Star Trek is one of the true television pioneers. It was always at the very forefront of what episodic entertainment could be and the sociopolitical issues it could tackle. It also pushed the boundary of the kind of spectacle that can be achieved on a TV budget.

But being so cutting edge can come at a cost — literally. Despite how campy the '60s Star Trek series might look through modern eyes, it was not a cheap show by any stretch. Creativity was sometimes needed to work around logistical limitations and to keep things from getting even more expensive. One clever cost-saving decision almost 60 years ago inadvertently molded the DNA of the entire show in a way that is still felt today.

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By James Dorman

As It Turns Out, 'Boldly Going' Isn’t Very Cheap

Star Trek: The Original Series was one of the most expensive shows on television in its day, costing almost $200,000 per episode. This was an astronomical fee for the time, well above the average cost for making a TV show. Part of the cost was due to the need for so many special effects shots. This didn’t just impact the budget of individual episodes, but was beginning to have knock-on effects on the delivery of the whole series. Expensive delays in getting special effects completed threatened to upend the production of the entire show. The studio needed some breathing room.

Looking Backwards To Go Forwards

A simple but ingenious solution was conceived — Gene Roddenberry would write a story that would heavily re-use footage from a previous episode. This would significantly reduce costs and provide a less intense production schedule for that particular episode, providing time to right the ship and get the series back on track.

Luckily enough, there was plenty of footage available from a fully completed Star Trek episode that had never, to that point in time, seen the light of day. That episode was called “The Cage”.

Star Trek’s First Steps Included A Pilot That Was Almost Completely Reused

“The Cage” was the first pilot Roddenberry filmed for his seminal space series. It’s an interesting watch in and of itself — a lot of familiar Star Trek elements are in place right from the start, but some things are just a little bit off. Spock is present with pretty much the same iconic look, but he is characterized as far more outwardly emotional than he would come to be in the series proper. There was also someone different commanding the Enterprise in Jeffrey Hunter’s square-jawed Captain Pike.

The studio ultimately wouldn’t pick up the series off the back of “The Cage”, but liked enough of what they saw to commission a second pilot. A few changes were made, the most significant perhaps being replacing Captain Pike with William Shatner’s James T. Kirk, and television history was born. But here was an entire episode’s worth of footage that had never been aired. It was a godsend for the cash-strapped creatives running Star Trek.

'The Menagerie' Resulted From The Production Team Reusing 'The Cage' Footage

Rather than air an episode featuring an unfamiliar captain and crew, potentially confusing audiences in the process, it was decided to cannibalize footage from “The Cage” as part of an entirely new narrative. A simple framing device was needed to tie everything together. The resulting episodes, called “The Menagerie Parts I and II”, see Spock visit his former commanding officer, Captain Pike. In what is now an iconic and much-referenced visual, Pike is shown to have been gravely injured and disfigured in an accident (a creative excuse to have the character under prosthetic makeup as Jeffrey Hunter wasn’t returning) and confined to a black wheelchair-come-iron-lung, able to communicate only through beeps.

Spock brazenly and inexplicably hijacks the Enterprise with Pike aboard and sets a course to a forbidden planet — the planet visited by Pike and the Enterprise crew in the unaired pilot, Talos IV. A court martial then plays out on board the Enterprise, where Spock explains his actions by reviewing the events of the crew’s previous visit to this quarantined planet — i.e., playing footage from “The Cage”. With the main new material being an easily filmed courtroom drama and no need for intricate effects shots, a compelling yet budget-friendly Star Trek story was crafted.

The Two-Parter Was A Significant Star Trek First

Star Trek The Next Generation The Best Of Both Worlds episode

“The Menagerie” has a significant place in the show’s history: it is the first two-part episode of Star Trek. While it is the only two-parter in the original series, it set a precedent that would eventually shape the entire show.

Star Trek has a number of well-known and revered two-part episodes. Indeed, some of the very best Star Trek stories take place across two parts. The most famous example would probably be Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds”, where Captain Picard is abducted and assimilated by the Borg in the season 3 finale, before being rescued (after an agonizing wait for the audience) in the season 4 opener. So successful were these episodes that TNG developed something of a two-parter problem for the rest of its run, defaulting in later seasons to finishing on a cliffhanger, seemingly always trying to recapture the magic of “The Best of Both Worlds”.

The Continuing Legacy of Captain Pike

“The Menagerie” is one of the most memorable and enduring episodes from the original series. Beyond setting the stage for two-part episodes in later iterations of Trek, elements from its story bled into the lore of Star Trek, particularly as it relates to Captain Pike.

Pike sustained his debilitating and life-altering injuries rescuing cadets aboard a stricken training vessel, sacrificing his own safety to ensure theirs. As such, it is established in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that Starfleet’s highest commendation for bravery is the Christopher Pike Medal of Valor. Captain Pike has also returned to NuTrek, played by a scene-stealing Anson Mount, firstly in Star Trek: Discovery and then in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. He is given a vision of his harrowing destiny courtesy of Klingon time crystals in Discovery. Pike, knowing the fate that awaits him and grappling with whether he can, or should, do anything to avert it, was also a big part of the narrative of the first season of Strange New Worlds.

So, one clever bit of production cost-cutting to ensure the show kept on schedule all the way back in the mid-60s has had a lasting influence on the entire Star Trek franchise.

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