Star Trek: Discovery Is Making The Unaired Pilot More Important
Star Trek: Discovery season 2 is bringing greater significance to
Star Trek's original unaired pilot than ever before. In episode 8, "If Memory Serves", Spock (Ethan Peck) returns to
Talos IV, which will give new context to "The Cage" as the franchise re-introduces its inaugural aliens for the first time since
The Original Series. Indeed, much of season 2 thus far has established a more meaningful bond between the CBS All-Access series and the scrapped 1966 pilot.
In
Star Trek's lore, "The Cage" was more of a curiosity than anything else and it has been mostly forgotten since season 1 of
The Original Series. The first
Star Trek pilot produced by creator Gene Roddenberry, which ultimately became a prototype of the series that finally aired starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, "The Cage" starred Jeffrey Hunter as
Captain Christopher Pike, Majel Barrett as Number One, and Nimoy as Spock, but NBC determined the pilot "
too cerebral" and told Roddenberry to start over. After he retooled
Star Trek(keeping only Spock and the Starship Enterprise), Roddenberry cleverly repurposed "The Cage"'s footage to air as the season 1 two-part episode "The Menagerie", which concluded the story of Pike and Talos IV. Or so fans thought.
"The Cage" isn't really considered a "
must-see" episode of
Star Trek and even in "The Menagerie", the story of Spock being court-martialed by Kirk is arguably more compelling than the footage of the original pilot. However, 53 years later,
Star Trek: Discovery has not only pulled the events of "The Cage" out of the history books, but the series is also successfully recontextualizing
Star Trek's original Captain and the events of the unaired pilot. The results are making "The Cage" more important than they have been since
Star Trek's very beginnings. Here's how
Star Trek: Discoveryseason 2 is shedding new light on the characters and concepts that Gene Roddenberry originally envisioned.
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-discovery-season-2-tos-pilot-connections/