The Corbomite Maneuver

Written by: Jerry Sohl
Watch online on CBS.com

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ was the first episode of Star Trek as a regular series.

Premise

While mapping an unexplored region of space, the Enterprise encounters a cube-shaped alien device that homes in on the ship and starts emitting lethal radiation. After destroying the object, the Enterprise crew presses onwards in search of the device’s owner. They soon encounter a starship immensely larger and more powerful than their own, commanded by a being named Balok, who threatens to destroy them. 

Themes

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ is a story about deceptions and misunderstandings and moving beyond them.

The mind: Intellect vs emotion

As usual, intellect and emotion—more specifically, instinct or ‘gut’—are portrayed in opposition. As in the previous episode, this is expressed through a chess metaphor. In this case, poker is invoked as the opposite of chess.

What it means to be human: Irrationality

Spock’s reason leads to an almost literal dead end. Threatened with destruction by a far superior force, he is forced to conclude:

SPOCK: In chess, when one is outmatched, the game is over. Checkmate.

KIRK: Is that your best recommendation?

SPOCK: [...] I regret that I can find no other logical alternative.

It is then up to Kirk to think laterally and find an irrational solution to their problem, by lying to Balok and bluffing him out of destroying the Enterprise.

The mind: Mind vs body

Star Trek’s familiar dualism is evident both in the puppet that Balok initially uses to represent himself, and in his true appearance. The puppet has proportions similar to the Talosians of ‘The Cage’—a hugely enlarged head and a slender, frail body.[1]

When Balok’s true form is revealed at the end of the episode, the dualism is even more profound: Balok has the appearance of a human child, portrayed with a shaved and polished head. This style draws attention to his cranium, which is further accentuated by the headgear he wears. His voice is overdubbed with an adult, male voice. I do not think that we are meant to understand Balok as a juvenile of his species, but that the advanced nature of his species has gained tremendous intelligence at the cost of a punier physical body.

Benevolence

Addressing his crew, Kirk explicitly states an assumed correlation between a species’ advancement and its benevolence: ‘In most cases we have found that intelligence capable of a civilisation is capable of understanding peaceful gestures. Surely a lifeform advanced enough for space travel is advanced enough to eventually understand our motives.’

This assumption does not need to connote any particular morality, however. It could simply be that there is a self-selecting quality to the observed phenomenon to which Kirk refers. Spaceflight requires the harnessing of tremendous energies, and it could be that overly-aggressive civilizations tend to use those energies to wipe themselves out before they get a chance to explore the galaxy. The Drake Equation implicitly contains just such a notion when considering just interstellar radio communication, let alone starflight.[2]

What it means to be human: Fallibility

As Lt Bailey cracks under pressure, he represents a rare example of Star Trek attempting (however heavy-handedly) to portray a character reacting in a psychologically credible way to the events unfolding around them. The story’s conclusion provides an explicit acknowledgement of human fallibility, as Bailey prepares to join Balok for a time (emphasis mine, in bold):

BALOK: Ah. You represent Earth’s best, then.

BAILEY: No, sir, I’m not. I’ll make plenty of mistakes.

KIRK: But you’d find out more about us that way, and I’d get a better officer in return.

Kirk observes that humans are not what we are despite our flaws, but because of them.

Ethos: Mercy

Balok’s final test for the Enterprise crew is one to assess their mercy. After the Enterprise breaks free from the tractor beam of his ‘pilot vessel’, his ship appears to lose propulsion and life support. It transmits a distress signal so weak that Uhura doubts that Balok’s mother ship can hear it. Despite the Enterprise having been attacked by the buoy and repeatedly threatened with destruction by Balok, Kirk’s immediate reaction is to mount a rescue mission:

‘First Federation vessel is in distress. We’re preparing to board it. There are lives at stake. By our standards, alien life but lives nevertheless.’

He reminds McCoy:

‘What's the mission of this vessel, Doctor? To seek out and contact alien life, and an opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean.’

De-escalation

There are two separate and striking de-escalations of conflict in ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’. The first occurs after the Enterprise has destroyed the device that had pursued and irradiated the ship. Kirk discusses his next move with Spock:

KIRK: Care to speculate on what we’ll find if we go on ahead?

SPOCK: Speculate? No. Logically, we’ll discover the intelligence which sent out the cube.

KIRK: Intelligence different from ours or superior?

SPOCK: Probably both, and if you’re asking the logical decision to make

KIRK: No, I’m not. The mission of the Enterprise is to seek out and contact alien life. [...] Navigator, set a course ahead.

Protagonists in adventure series routinely encounter and overcome obstacles in pursuit of some goal. However, the goal here is of a fundamentally different kind from traditional adventure fare: Kirk is not seeking anything other than peaceful contact with a new civilisation. Now that the immediate threat has been removed, the conflict is thoroughly de-escalated and Enterprise continues on as if nothing has happened. There is no grudge here. I suggest that this is highly unusual in an adventure series, even today.

The second de-escalation takes place at the episode’s conclusion, after Balok sends his distress signal and Kirk leads a rescue mission to his ship.  In Star Trek’s signature style, what began as confrontation finishes with the former adversaries holding hands. In the case of this episode, quite literally!

Kirk doesn’t even seem to mind that Balok has been misleading him all along. The bluffs in ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ go both ways. Kirk successfully bluffed Balok out of destroying the Enterprise—or at least, thinks he did. When he finally gets to meet Balok, he learns that he himself has been duped. Most obviously and trivially, the visage they have come to know as Balok is a deception. More significantly, Kirk learns that  Balok has been testing humanity to verify the non-belligerency of our species. This means that Kirk might well have been fooled about almost everything Balok has said: Did he ever really intend to destroy the Enterprise? Was he really towing the ship to a First Federation planet (or just through deep space to see if Kirk would try to escape)? He was certainly lying in the distress call that Kirk treated as genuine. The episode concludes with a protagonist who has been thoroughly misled, but who still extends the hand of friendship.

Romancing the ship

The episode contains an explicit reference to the captain’s romantic relationship with the ship:

KIRK: When I find the headquarters genius that assigned me a female yeoman—

MCCOY: What’s the matter, Jim? Don't you trust yourself?

KIRK: I’ve already got a female to worry about. Her name’s the Enterprise.

Later, Balok identifies in Kirk a kindred spirit. At the episode’s conclusion, he says:

‘Now, before I bring back the Fesarius, let me show you my vessel. It is not often I have this pleasure. Yes, we're very much alike, Captain. Both proud of our ships.’

A captain’s relationship with their ship is cross-cultural in Star Trek.

As science fiction

The bluff at the heart of ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ relies on an encounter between groups of people who do not know each other’s capabilities:

‘Two groups of people meet. The more powerful group threatens to destroy the weaker. The weaker says that any attempt to do so will unleash a tremendous force that will destroy the attacker.’

For the premise to work at all, the more powerful group must believe that such a force might conceivably exist, and have no easy way of testing the claim without risk. The nature of the force is essentially unimportant: it could be magical, technological, or quite mundane (‘My uncle commands three legions and will avenge our deaths!’)

The strongest science-fiction element of ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ is actually in its meta-narrative. Kirk’s bluff—that there is an undocumented destructive material and device incorporated into his ship’s hull—is science fiction. Unable to match Balok’s power, Kirk relies on what we would now describe as social engineering to provide protection for his ship.

‘Dangerous, savage child-race’

Balok accuses humanity of savagery:

‘Your vessel, obviously the product of a primitive and savage civilisation, having ignored a warning buoy and having then destroyed it, has demonstrated your intention is not peaceful.’

I think it’s hard to make any charge of savagery stick to any part of this episode. On encountering the alien device, the Enterprise crew takes no aggressive action whatsoever; they simply wait and observe it. When it does not seem like there’s anything left to learn, they attempt to navigate around it peacefully. Only when the device actively pursues them and emits lethal radiation do they destroy it. Then, even after the device’s hostile actions, Kirk remains committed to making peaceful contact with the device’s builders. Kirk’s explanation of his actions rings completely true:

‘We destroyed your space buoy as a simple act of self-preservation. When we attempted to move away from it, it emitted radiation harmful to our species. If you've examined our ship and its tapes, you know this to be true.’

If anything, it is Balok’s (or, at least, his civilisation’s) motives that are morally suspect. The ‘buoy’ (if that is truly the purpose of the device) does not broadcast any kind of warning message, it pursues the Enterprise when it tries to withdraw peacefully, and it emits radiation lethal to life forms similar to those of its makers. Balok then goes on to terrorise helpless captives. Of course, this is all done in the context of ‘testing’ humans, but these are tests that would be unlikely to impress even a 21st century ethics committee.

Conclusion

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ offers the Enterprise crew plenty of provocation to offer violent resistance to Balok, but they never give into it. Indeed, they offer Balok assistance when they think he needs it.

Literary and mythic references

Balok explicitly refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He describes his menacing-looking dummy as ‘Mister Hyde to my Jekyll’. This cultural knowledge was presumably derived from Balok probing the Enterprise’s computer records earlier in the episode.

Other notes

Thank you to D for pointing out that the Cuban Missile Crisis was recent history when this show was written and aired. In ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’, Kirk dares Balok to find out whether the Corbomite device actually exists. The real-world superpowers knew each other’s destructive capabilities did exist, but dared each other to find out whether their opponent was truly willing to use those powers. Could this have been the real-world stimulus for this episode?

Mission objectives

This episode takes place entirely aboard the Enterprise and Balok’s pilot vessel, with no worlds visited, let along explored. Balok and the First Federation are, however, a first contact for humanity, and Spock explicitly states, ‘We are the first to reach this far.’

Objective	This episode	Series so far
To explore strange, new worlds	0	1 (33%)
To seek out new life and new civilizations	1	2 (67%)
To boldly go where none has gone before	1	2 (67%)

Previous episode: ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’
Next episode: ‘Mudd’s Women’

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Footnotes

[1] Indeed, Balok resembles the Talosians so much in general form that the action figure that toy company Mego released in 1975 to represent ‘The Keeper’ had a head and robe clearly modelled more after Balok’s puppet than the Talosian.

[2] The final variable in the equation, L, represents the length of time during which a technological civilization transmits radio signals into space. Carl Sagan called attention to the way that a civilisation’s tendency to self-destruct was necessarily a limiting factor on the value of L. Roddenberry was certainly aware of the Drake Equation as early as 1964, but I have not seen direct evidence that he had reached the same understanding of L that Sagan developed. On the other hand, if he had developed such an understanding, it could explain the assumption of generally benevolent aliens that forms a core part of the series’ ethos.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

Written by: Samuel A. Peeples
Watch online on CBS.com

‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ was Star Trek’s second pilot episode, commissioned by NBC executives who felt that the series showed promise but who wanted to see another story before making a final decision. Most of the cast who would become regulars on Star Trek appear in this pilot. Desilu Studios sold Star Trek to NBC on the strength of this episode.

Premise

Exploring the edge of the galaxy, the Enterprise comes in contact with an energy field of unfamiliar type. The ship’s exposure to the field kills several crewmembers, and causes two others—first officer Lt Cdr Gary Mitchell and psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Dehner—to develop powerful clairvoyant, telepathic, and telekinetic abilities (collectively called ‘esper’ abilities in the show, for ESP).[1]

Themes

‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ is the story of ‘absolute power corrupting absolutely,’ as Kirk himself notes.[2] The crewmember most affected by the energy field is Mitchell. As his power grows, his humanity slips away and he loses all empathy with his colleagues, threatening to ‘squash [them] like insects’ if they get in his way.

The mind: Intellect vs emotion

As part of the changes from the first pilot, the character of Number One was dropped. Her persona of dispassionate intellectual was transferred to Spock and made part of his (as-yet-unnamed) alien culture. The crisis in this story—what to do with Gary Mitchell—revolves entirely around the opposing demands of intellect and emotion. The primacy of this theme is foreshadowed in the opening scene of the episode, where Kirk beats Spock at chess with an ‘illogical’ move.

As the Enterprise crew watches Mitchell’s power grow geometrically and his empathy appear to decrease in proportion, Spock explains the cold equations to Kirk. After a briefing with the senior officers, Spock presents two options: strand Mitchell on a nearby planet (Delta Vega) or ‘Kill Mitchell while you still can. [...] It is your only other choice, assuming you make it while you still have time.’ The first scene of the episode seems to be setting up a climax where Kirk’s heart will lead him to a solution that Spock cannot see. However, the story subverts this expectation: Spock is shown to be absolutely correct and Kirk is forced to kill Mitchell to stop him.

Ethos: Self-sacrifice

Early in the episode, the Enterprise finds a marker buoy from another Earth vessel, the S.S. Valiant, that encountered the same energy field at the edge of the galaxy. As Spock retrieves the data from the buoy, it becomes clear that members of the Valiant’s crew underwent similar transformations to Mitchell and that the captain ultimately ordered the self-destruction of his ship. Spock explicitly references this later in the episode as an alternative that Kirk would wish to avoid. Implicit in this is the idea that self-destruction to contain a greater menace is something that Kirk would contemplate in the first place.

When Kirk believes that stranding Mitchell might still be sufficient, he places him in a holding cell in an automated refinery on planet Delta Vega. As an added safeguard, he has Lt Lee Kelso ready a detonator that he can use to destroy ‘the whole valley’ should Mitchell escape from his cell. Kelso appears to understand the importance, practicality, and implications of this plan.

Finally, when Dehner eventually turns on Mitchell, his counter-attack mortally wounds her. She buys Captain Kirk the opportunity to kill Mitchell, at the cost of her own life.

The mind: Mental power

As Mitchell’s mental power grows, he is presented not only as more powerful, but as a more evolved human. Dehner says, ‘A mutated superior man could also be a wonderful thing. The forerunner of a new and better kind of human being.’ Mitchell agrees and goes further, suggesting that such new humans would supplant the old: ‘Man cannot survive if a race of true espers is born.’ Dehner amplifies this again when she says: ‘Before long, we’ll be where it would have taken mankind millions of years of learning to reach.’ So again, Star Trek correlates greater mental ability with more highly evolved.

The mind: Mind vs body

As Mitchell’s mental power grows, his hair becomes progressively more grey, connoting that mental power is developed at the cost of physical decrepitude. This is typically dualistic for Star Trek.

Transcendence

Implicit in Mitchell’s and Dehner’s remarks is the recognition that humanity’s own evolutionary journey is not complete, and that we are still changing and developing as a species. Mitchell and Dehner are depicted racing ahead of the rest of the species.

What it means to be human: Fallibility

The problem, as Kirk understands it, is that Mitchell is growing up too fast and not gaining the wisdom that humanity would have accumulated when allowed to evolve at its own pace. Kirk asks Dehner:

‘What will Mitchell learn in getting there? Will he know what to do with his power? Will he acquire the wisdom?
[...]
[L]et’s talk about humans, about our frailties. As powerful as he gets, he’ll have all that inside him.
[...]
You were a psychiatrist once. You know the ugly, savage things we all keep buried, that none of us dare expose. But he’ll dare. Who’s to stop him?[2] He doesn't need to care. Be a psychiatrist for one minute longer. What do you see happening to him? What’s your prognosis, Doctor?’

Ethos: Power corrupts

Kirk expressly draws Dehner’s attention to the corrupting effect of power on Mitchell. Since gaining his advanced powers, Mitchell has toyed with the Enterprise’s systems for amusement, has murdered Lt Kelso, and announced his plan to murder Kirk.[3]

Ethos: Mercy

Before reaching Delta Vega, Kirk asks Mitchell what he would do if their roles were reversed. Mitchell replies: ‘Probably just what Mr Spock is thinking now. Kill me while you can.’ Even so, Kirk remains committed to sparing Mitchell if at all possible. 

As Mitchell’s power grows to the point where the holding cell on Delta Vega can no longer contain him, he mocks Kirk: ‘You should have killed me while you could, James. Command and compassion is a fool's mixture.’

Kirk points this out to Dehner later as evidence of how inhuman Mitchell has become: ‘Did you hear him joke about compassion? Above all else, a god needs compassion.’

At the climax of the story, Dehner, now showing similar powers to Mitchell, turns on him. She weakens Mitchell enough for Kirk to engage in fisticuffs with him. At one point, having gained the upper hand in the fight, Kirk is in a position to crush Mitchell’s skull with a rock. However, he hesitates. This moment is enough for Mitchell to regain his strength. Kirk is ultimately able to defeat Mitchell only after a renewed attack by Dehner.

This episode is interesting in that, although it advocates for mercy and compassion, it does not shy away from demonstrating that these traits can come at a high cost. Had Kirk killed Mitchell when Spock first advised him to, Kelso’s life would have been spared. Further, showing Mitchell mercy nearly cost Kirk his own life, and also jeopardised the Enterprise’s chance of containing Mitchell before he reached a highly populated area.

As science fiction

Reduced down, there’s little science fiction in ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’. ‘A person suddenly inherits tremendous wealth and power. They soon lose touch with their former friends and become a tyrant’ is a plot that could be relocated almost anywhere and anywhen.

Add ‘Their former best friend must choose whether to stand by them or to murder the newly-minted tyrant for the common good’ and we have the plot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

The specific nature and scope of Mitchell’s power (godlike) adds a speculative fiction element to the story, but this would work just as well as fantasy or even horror.

If there’s science fiction here at all, it’s in the way that Spock bases his assessment of the threat on his observation of Mitchell and extrapolating the rate at which his powers are increasing. Indeed, Spock is the only character who displays any sense of great urgency about what is happening to Mitchell, possibly because he understands exponential growth in a way that humans innately do not. In that sense, the story functions as a parable that demonstrates Albert Bartlett’s point about human population growth and resource depletion: ‘The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.’[4]

‘Dangerous, savage, child-race’

The degree to which this episode says something about human savagery hinges on whether Kirk is correct in his belief that it is external actors that compel a person into moral behaviour. He refers to the ‘ugly, savage things we all keep buried, that none of us dare expose.’ Mitchell’s behaviour seems to endorse Kirk’s view. So how does a 23rd-Century man with unlimited power behave, when he has nobody left to stop him?

• He assaults Kirk and Spock
• He murders Kelso
• He humiliates and tortures Kirk, seemingly for nothing other than sadistic pleasure
• He murders Dr Dehner

That question aside, Kirk and his officers do not seek to use their scientific and technological resources to reverse (or at least, attempt to reverse) the effect on Mitchell. Such a solution is also missing from Spock’s analysis of Kirk’s options. Realistically, it could be that any such solution is not possible within the timeframe within which Mitchell’s powers are growing, but in the compressed timescales of TV, Star Trek researched and implemented miracle cures like this on other occasions. To consider and dismiss the possibility of curing Mitchell would have considerably strengthened this episode for me and have been a defence against a charge of leaping immediately to a violent solution.

When Kirk finds Mitchell at the story’s climax, he shoots him on sight. Only when the phaser has no effect, he again tries to reason with Dehner.

Against all this, Kirk did consistently try to find a non-violent, non-lethal solution; arguably leaving the confrontation way too late and endangering himself, the Enterprise, and perhaps even whole other worlds through his reluctance to take the necessary action.

Conclusion

Mitchell shows us that humanity’s heart hasn’t changed. Kirk shows us that at least by Star Trek’s time, a violent confrontation might be a last resort.

Literary and mythic references

This episode also recalls the story of Genesis. In this rendition of the story, Mitchell plays three parts: God, Adam, and the serpent. (Thank you, D, for this observation)

• God: Mitchell calls himself a god, and demands that Kirk pray to him as one. He plants a garden in the desolate wasteland of Delta Vega, complete with a (Kaferian) apple tree. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:8–9)
  His command ‘Let there be food’ recalls the words of creation, beginning with: And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:3)
• Adam: Mitchell and Dehner have both talked in terms of a new race; they are necessarily its Adam and Eve.
• The serpent: Mitchell tempts Dehner, with an apple no less and tells her ‘You'll enjoy being a god, Elizabeth.’ In Genesis, the serpent says to Eve, of the tree in the centre of the garden: “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5)

Other notes

Mitchell is a bit of a sexist pig here. His lack of professionalism when discussing Dr Dehner with a co-worker on the bridge, and his using a crisis situation as an opportunity to hold hands with a female crewmember are reprehensible.

I really enjoyed the trilogy of prequel novels that deals with the early days of Mitchell’s and Kirk’s friendship: My Brother's Keeper: Republic, My Brother's Keeper: Constitution, and My Brother's Keeper: Enterprise, all by Michael Jan Friedman. They are among the Star Trek novels that I’ve liked best of all.

Mission objectives

The only world visited is Delta Vega, which is so not new that it has a refinery complex built on it. No new life forms are encountered. On the dialogue of the episode alone, it’s actually slightly ambiguous whether the Enterprise succeeds in probing further out of the galaxy than the Valiant did. However, I’m assuming that was the intention of the story, and allowing it.

Objective	This episode	Series so far
To explore strange, new worlds	0	1 (50%)
To seek out new life and new civilizations	0	1 (50%)
To boldly go where none has gone before	1	1 (50%)

Previous episode: ‘The Cage’
Next episode: ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’

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Footnotes

Still from Return of
the Jedi copyright
Lucasfilm

[1] They also gain the ability to shoot lightning from their hands, in a manner that prefigures the ‘force lightning’ of the Star Wars saga twenty years later:


[2] The phrasing here suggests a direct reference to Lord Acton’s letter on papal infallibility in 1887, although the idea is at least as old as Plato’s Republic (c.380 BCE). Indeed, Kirk’s assumption that Mitchell will be corrupted by the simple fact that there’s nobody to oppose him is the point of Plato’s discussion of the Ring of Gyges legend.

Gary Lockwood as
Frank Poole.
Copyright MGM

[3] There’s a fun parallel with 2001: A Space Odyssey here. That story depicts three transcendent events: the dawn of human sentience, the dawn of machine sentience, and the transformation of David Bowman into the star-child (whatever it is)—the dawn of some other kind of sentience. In the first two of these transformations, the transcendent event leads to murder, as it does in ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’. However, at least in the 2001 novel, the star-child uses mental powers like Mitchell’s to avert a human catastrophe. Gary Lockwood, who played Gary Mitchell in ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’, also played astronaut Frank Poole in the film version of 2001.

[4] ‘Arithmetic, Population, and Energy’

The Cage

Shot in 1964, ‘The Cage’ was Star Trek’s pilot episode. While the format of the show is the same as the series that it spawned, it features an almost entirely different cast, led by Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike. Spock is the only character carried over. In Trek lore, the events of this episode took place thirteen years before the famous five-year mission commanded by Captain Kirk. Although this pilot was not enough to sell the show, it inspired executives at the NBC network to commission a second pilot for further consideration.

Premise

After beaming down to planet Talos IV, Captain Pike is captured by telepathic aliens who can project perfectly life-like illusions into the minds of other beings. Pike is imprisoned with a woman, Vina, who had survived a spacecraft crash on the planet eighteen years previously. Later, the Talosians also capture Pike’s first officer (never named, but simply referred to as ‘Number One’) and his yeoman, Colt.

Themes

Right here at the beginning, ‘The Cage’ already depicts some of Star Trek’s most frequently visited themes. During the story, Pike and the other human captives seek to escape from the Talosian zoo. When they succeed, they discover that in doing so, they have passed the test that is the whole reason for their imprisonment. Escape demonstrates that a species is resourceful and adaptable, and therefore suitable as a slave race to rebuild the Talosians’ ravaged planet.

Ethos: Self-sacrifice

Upon learning of the Talosians’ end-game, Number One sets her hand laser (the term phaser had not yet been coined) to build up to an explosion that will kill all the human escapees. None of the other humans attempt to prevent this course of action. In fact, Vina refuses to go with the Talosians when Pike warns them to get to safety, pointing out that ‘if they have one human being, they might try again’. The humans’ stoic wait for their deaths provides tacit endorsement of Number One’s position and her decision. Pike eventually orders her to abort the overload when it is clear that the Talosians are reconsidering their part in the standoff.

What it means to be human: Freedom

As Number One sets the laser pistol to explode, she tells the Talosians ‘It’s wrong to create a whole race of humans to live as slaves.’ The Talosians confirm this for themselves with historical information from the Enterprise’s computers. They conclude:

‘We had not believed this possible. The customs and history of your race show a unique hatred of captivity. Even when it’s pleasant and benevolent, you prefer death.’

What it means to be human: Work

‘The Cage’ also provides the first of Star Trek’s dis-endorsements of paradise. The Talosians’ mental powers give them access to what we would now call virtual realities. They can live and re-live other Talosian lives ‘left behind in the thought record’, or they can plant illusions in the minds of the zoo specimens and experience their reactions and feelings. Vina describes the result as:

‘a trap, like a narcotic, because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors.’

At the episode’s conclusion, the Talosian ‘Keeper’ agrees with this assessment, saying that humans should stay away from Talos IV because:

‘Your race would learn our power of illusion and destroy itself, too.’

Note that there’s very little[1] indication that there’s anything particularly unsatisfying or unhappy about the Talosians’ ultimate-couch-potato lifestyle—the story just treats it as axiomatic that a life of being productive and creative is better than a life of passivity.

The mind: Mental power

Throughout ‘The Cage’, the Talosians are presented as older, more sophisticated, and more highly evolved than humanity. Certainly, they were capable of warfare that could devastate their planet ‘thousands of centuries ago’ and leave it barren for all the intervening time. The specimens in their zoo are the ‘descendants of life brought back long ago from all over this part of the galaxy’, so the Talosians have been galactic explorers in their distant past. After being forced underground, they ‘concentrated on developing their mental power’. Here, Star Trek correlates the more advanced, more evolved species with the species that has the greater mental abilities.

The mind: Mind vs body

At the time of the Enterprise’s visit, the Talosians are depicted as having hugely enlarged heads (Spock says their brains are ‘three times the size of ours’) and diminutive, slender bodies. To emphasise the split between mind and body, Roddenberry cast ‘slim, fragile’ women to portray the Talosians,[2] had their breasts bound to hide their female forms, and had them fitted them with enormous prosthetic heads, complete with pulsing veins. The Talosian voices were overdubbed by men. The suggestion is that the Talosians developed their mental powers at the expense of allowing their bodies to atrophy. Already, Star Trek’s treatment of the mind–body problem is strongly dualistic. 

The mind: Intellect vs emotion

The theme of intellect opposed to emotion is played out right through Star Trek, most famously in the character of Spock himself as a personification of intellect, surrounded by emotional humans. In this first pilot, the dispassionate intellect was part of the character of Number One.

The opposition of intellect and emotion is highlighted even more in ‘The Cage’. Indeed, it is a major plot point. The Talosians, despite—or because of—their highly advanced mental abilities, cannot read or manipulate ‘primitive’ emotions. The specific examples depicted are Pike’s deduction that the Talosians can’t make him feel hungry, and his discovery that they can’t read his mind when it’s full of hate. And, although never stated directly, they do not seem to be able to place sexual desire in his mind either. The Talosians want Pike to mate with Vina, but have to rely on indirect approaches like putting the two of them in illusory situations where Pike will find Vina attractive:

PIKE: [...] You seem to be going out of your way to make her attractive, to make me feel protective.

[...]

KEEPER: We wish our specimens to be happy in their new life.

PIKE: Assuming that's a lie, why would you want me attracted to her? So I'll feel love in a husband-wife relationship?

The Talosians have achieved their formidable intellects at the expense not only of their bodies, but their connection with their basic emotions too.

What it means to be human: Irrationality

A fundamental paradox in Star Trek is that although intellect tends to be portrayed as more advanced than emotion, it is a reliance on emotion or irrationality that frequently saves the day. ‘The Cage’ contains two reversals on this count:

• The humans’ ‘primitive’ emotional states allow them to defeat a prison constructed by aliens who literally cannot comprehend these feelings.  But:
• The expectation that escape constitutes success is subverted when it is revealed that escape from the cage is part of the Talosians’ experimental design. But:
• The humans’ irrational desire to destroy themselves rather than live a life of servitude to benevolent masters finally secures their freedom.

 

Benevolence

Star Trek frequently equates the advancement of a civilization with its benevolence. When the Keeper threatens to destroy the Enterprise, Pike replies, ‘I'm going to gamble you're too intelligent to kill for no reason at all’ and is proven correct.

Ethos: Mercy

Despite everything that the Talosians put him through and threaten him with, Pike extends mercy to them at the end, suggesting a relationship of ‘trade and mutual co-operation’ with Earth. The Talosians’ response is merciful too, declining the offer because of the disastrous effect that they know that ongoing contact will have on humanity.

More: the Talosians show great mercy towards Vina. When they realise that humans will not be suitable for their purposes and allow Pike and his crew to leave, Vina decides to stay. Although she has always appeared to Pike as young, beautiful, and able-bodied, her true form is old and disfigured from the injuries sustained in the crash eighteen years ago. Not only do the Talosians restore her own illusion of youth and beauty, they also give her the added illusion that Pike has decided to stay with her.

De-escalation

What began with an assault and deprivation of liberty finishes with the Keeper wishing Pike well. As Vina returns underground to her illusory life, the Keeper says to Pike: ‘She has an illusion and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant.’

Career captain

Being a ship’s captain is a special vocation in Star Trek. We get a first taste of it when Pike, blaming himself for a recent mission that went catastrophically wrong, intimates to the ship’s doctor that he is considering resigning:

PIKE: The point is this isn't the only life available. There's a whole galaxy of things to choose from.

BOYCE: Not for you.

As the series developed, we would see Kirk just as married to his career. Star Trek also attributes some very specific traits to its captains: they
are generally expected to be moral exemplars. Vina comments on this as she is working out how to tempt Pike:

‘I’m beginning to see why none of this has worked for you. You’ve been home, and fighting as on Rigel. That’s not new to you, either. A person’s strongest dreams are about what he can’t do. Yes, a ship’s captain, always having to be so formal, so decent and honest and proper. You must wonder what it would be like to forget all that.’

As science fiction

‘The Cage’ has a strong science-fiction plot that is not easily relocatable to a mundane setting. The basic premise is itself portable: the protagonist must reason their way out of an elaborate prison. This could be the basis of a thriller, and indeed the Saw films share this set-up. However, the motivation for the test is not simply sadistic amusement, but for a purely science-fictional motivation: to select a species to breed as a slave race. The Talosians are depicted as doing science here.

Pike also applies scientific reasoning to his situation: making an observation (the Keeper appeared startled by a sudden act of aggression), forming a hypothesis (wondering if primitive emotions block the Talosians’ thoughts), and testing that hypothesis to establish the limits of the Talosians’ power (threatening the Keeper with a laser pistol that Pike reasons must be fully charged even when it appears empty to him).

‘Dangerous, savage, child-race’

This section is inspired by a friend who is a fan of science-fiction but not of Star Trek (that’s you, D). Having seen the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, he observed that he agreed with Q’s assessment of humanity as depicted in Star Trek as a ‘dangerous, savage, child-race’ that relied far too often on violence as a solution to its problems.

Part of the difficulty of assessing this charge is in the format of episodic television itself. Telling a self-contained story in an hour generally demands that the dramatic unity of time must be disregarded and the story told in a kind of short-hand. Events that would realistically take hours, days, or weeks must be presented in a highly compressed timeframe.

As an example of the difficulty of this assessment, Pike’s first enounter with the Talosians in ‘The Cage’ goes like this (emphasis mine, in bold):

PIKE: Can you hear me? My name is Christopher Pike, commander of the space vehicle Enterprise from a stellar group at the other end of this galaxy. Our intentions are peaceful. Can you understand me?
TALOSIAN: It appears, Magistrate, that the intelligence of the specimen is shockingly limited.
KEEPER: This is no surprise since his vessel was baited here so easily with a simulated message. As you can read in its thoughts, it is only now beginning to suspect that the survivors and encampment were a simple illusion we placed in their minds.
PIKE: You're not speaking, yet I can hear you.
KEEPER: You will note the confusion as it reads our thought transmissions.
PIKE: All right then, telepathy. You can read my mind. I can read yours. Now, unless you want my ship to consider capturing me an unfriendly act...
KEEPER: You now see the primitive fear–threat reaction. The specimen is about to boast of his strength, the weaponry of his vessel, and so on. Next, frustrated into a need to display physical prowess, the creature will throw himself against the transparency.

(Which he does). In this extract, Pike has gone from assuring the Talosians of the Enterprise’s peaceful intentions to beginning to make a veiled threat and physically throwing himself at the wall of his cage within the space of a few lines. Pike is either the galaxy’s very worst negotiator, or we have to understand this conversation as a summary of conversations carried out over a much longer space of time. Nevertheless, I will constrain myself to assessing the evidence exactly as it is presented. Supporting a charge of ‘dangerous, savage, child-race’ I see:

• Pike threatens the Talosians with violence within minutes of meeting them.
• When Pike is captured, the landing party’s first response is to open fire on the entrance to the Talosian city with their sidearms.
• We get a view of a recent fight in which the Enterprise crew had been involved, when the Talosians re-create it for Pike to re-live. Pike attests to the fidelity of the re-creation: ‘This is Rigel VII [...] It’s starting just as it happened two weeks ago.’ Earlier in the episode, Pike had summarised his part in the skirmish as: ‘I let myself get trapped in that deserted fortress and attacked by one of their warriors.’ In the re-enactment, we see Pike fight the warrior with various mediaeval-style weapons, and eventually kill him.
• After being tortured by the Keeper, Pike throws himself at the wall of his cage that separates him from his tormentor. He admits, ‘All I wanted for that moment was to get my hands around your neck.’
• After the initial attack on the entrance to the Talosians’ city fails, Number One’s next response is to repeat the attack with heavier firepower. She has a laser cannon beamed down and carries out her plan.
• Once Pike learns that strong emotion blocks his mind from the Talosians, he is able to ambush the Keeper, physically assault him, then threaten him with a pistol against his head. 
• After observing human behaviour for a while, and with access to the data in the Enterprise’s computers, the Talosians themselves conclude that humanity is ‘too violent and dangerous a species for our needs.’

Against that:

• Although Number One judges that the landing party’s only option is to destroy themselves to keep themselves out of the Talosians’ hands, Pike is careful to warn the Talosians to get to safety, out of range of the explosion that she is about to create. He has no intention of taking his adversaries with him, even after they have tortured him.
• When the stand-off is resolved, Pike still extends the hand of friendship, suggesting ‘trade and mutual co-operation’ between their civilisations.

Conclusion

Pike and his officers begin with peaceful intentions, escalate swiftly to violence when they feel that the situation demands it, but de-escalate just as quickly and thoroughly when they no longer feel threatened. This ‘quick to anger, quick to forgive’ is the pattern that I am expecting to find throughout the series.

I suggest that characters de-escalating a conflict in this way is highly unusual in an adventure series. Pike’s telling the Talosians to get to safety is particularly striking, where protagonists might more routinely have threatened ‘we’ll blow ourselves up and take you with us.’

Literary and mythic references

Adam and Eve as the progenitors of the human race depicted in the Biblical Genesis are referenced throughout this episode. Additionally, the Keeper punishes Pike by making him experience burning in a lake of fire that he describes as being ‘From a fable you once heard in childhood.’ and which resembles the Christian idea of Hell described in the Book of Revelation.

Other notes

This episode features Star Trek’s first conference. Number One gathers the senior officers around a conference table to hear their expert opinions on how to recover Captain Pike. Only once she is briefed does she commit to a course of action. Such conferences will be a staple of the show.

Unfortunately, this episode gives Pike a really ugly line of sexist dialogue. He says of Yeoman Colt, ‘I can’t get used to having a woman on the bridge.’ when Number One reacts, he makes things worse by saying, ‘No offence, Lieutenant. You’re different, of course.’ In the context of the series pilot, I think I understand why this line is here: to show a 1960s TV audience that yes indeed women are present on the bridge of a starship, by deliberately drawing attention to them. Whatever the intention though, it comes across as offensive and horribly dated now. This is a pity when, in the character of Number One, the pilot also had a woman in a position of far greater authority than the franchise would depict until The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV, over twenty years later, and then only in a bit part.

Mission objectives

Finally, I thought it might be fun to track how the Enterprise’s KPIs look from episode to episode, evaluated against the famous opening narration from the series proper (that was not actually used in the pilot episodes). I count Talos IV and the Talosians as ‘new’ because the Enterprise crew had no prior knowledge of the world or its inhabitants on arrival. Of course, it later transpires that they are not the first humans there.

Objective	This episode	Series so far
To explore strange, new worlds	1	1 (100%)
To seek out new life and new civilizations	1	1 (100%)
To boldly go where none has gone before	0	0 (0%)

Next episode: ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’

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Footnotes

[1] The Keeper does tell Pike that without the help of a slave race to reclaim the surface of their planet, their race is ultimately doomed. But there’s no indication that this is any kind of pressing problem or that they’re anticipating this any time soon.

[2] Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. (1968). The Making of Star Trek. Del Rey, New York, p.349