Aliens!
Yes, the
Trek universe was chock-full of them. You couldn't move without bumping into an Andorian or annoying a Klingon, and that spot of light on the wall could be a malevolent intelligence from a far distant galaxy. Here, there's a mixture of decent and quite crappy aliens.
Talosians: The aliens who lured the
Enterprise here, and who capture and experiment on Pike, are good for the time. They're much taller than humans, have large heads somewhat akin to lightbulbs and their gigantic brains are laced with a tracery of veins which can be seen from the outside. They also communicate telepathically, something which I think was a first for science fiction, at least on TV, and they have such low regard for Pike that they view him as something less than a lab rat. They're cleverly made up too, that their flowing robes cover their feet and so when they move they seem almost to glide.
(um, never named I think?): The enemy Pike faces in the dreamworld, however, is pathetic, nothing more than a tall man with a beard and some blacked-out teeth. Oooh! Scary!
Reasons not to be cheerful!
So why did the pilot fail? What was it that led to the network rejecting it, and what was it in the second one that caught their interest? You'd have to say that a lot of it lies in the characterisation, or I should say, lack of it. The main thing here is that you can't really care about anyone, from the captain down to the annoying
Happy Days-like navigator. Nobody interacts with anyone. Nobody seems to be related or have anything to do with anyone. Number One is cold, almost mannish, obviously fiercely defending what we can assume to be the first, perhaps only, position of a female second-in-command on a starship, if what Pike says is true. The Doctor seems more interested in getting the captain drunk, and even Spock is hard to care about, though you can see his leadership qualities beginning to surface even this early.
And what of Pike? He plays the role so straight-laced, so lantern-jawed and with a constant scowl of derision on his face that you sort of hope he gets killed. There's nothing attractive about him: oh, as a man I guess he's handsome and strong, but there's no ...
charisma about him. It's hard to believe that this is a man whom others would follow into battle, and his self-doubt about his own position does nothing to endear him to us, unlike Benjamin Sisko in the pilot of
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 decades later. He never smiles, he never relaxes, he never seems to be “off”. His commands are given with an almost scathing authority, like a sergeant major, whereas when Kirk, later, commands, it always seems like his crew are happy to oblige. It's their job, their duty, yes, but they always seem like it's no trouble and there's no resentment there. Pike, to me, does not carry the mantle of authority on his shoulders in the same easy, affable way that Shatner as Kirk would later. Even when Vina vanishes, screaming of being punished, his eyes betray barely a flicker of emotion. He doesn't shout “Leave her alone! Take me!” as we know Jim Kirk would in his place. To be honest, the only time we see him show any genuine emotion is when the Talosians punish him, making him feel like he is on fire.
But it's not just the cast, though they really are not up to this task at all. The story, too, is a little hard to follow, or would have been, for audiences spoonfed on the likes of
I Love Lucy, Dragnet and
The High Chaparral, series that really required little or no thought, and in which everything that needed to be explained was explained. If Little Joe went off the Ponderosa to track down Indians, you knew what he was doing. If Lucy got in an argument with a traffic cop, it was simple and straightforward. But here, not only does Roddenberry begin in the middle, as it were - the
Enterprise is supposedly heading home after a disastrous mission - he spends no time introducing the characters, even naming many of them, and expects us to know who they are. Who is the guy in the
Happy Days hair? Who is the doctor? Nobody knows. Or, indeed, cares.
Then he brings in the idea of telepathy and humans being used as experimental animals. It would have been a hard concept for the American television audiences of the sixties to grasp, and though he tries to explain it through Pike, Jeffrey Hunter just does not possess the screen magnetism to make people listen to him. Though he's the central character, most of the time he seems to be almost muttering to himself, and his facial expressions don't help; this is not the face of a man you really want to listen to, much less trust. He's also way too All-American-Blue-Eyed-Boy. When the girl offers to “become anything, be anyone” he wants, he stands there, jaw jutting out so far you could build a pier on it, eyes steely and straight, rejecting the idea out of hand. He doesn't even consider it. What man would not, if even for a moment, waver in the face of such fantasy? But Pike is untouchable, unreachable, cold and hard and unflinching, and he is not as other men. Now, put Kirk in that situation...
Look at Spock too. When he realises there is no way to get down to the planet, does he put that superior Vulcan mind into overdrive? No. He decides to bail on the captain and first officer, and tries to run. He rationalises it as “the safety of this ship is paramount”, but isn't this a case of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”? Yeah, but Spock, the Spock we came to know, would never abandon his captain, at least, not without a plan to return and save him. Again, Spock gives no indication that he has any friendship with Pike, that he cares about him any more than any other member of the crew. And if these people don't care for each other, how can we be expected to care for them? This is something Roddenberry addresses quickly in the “re-pilot”: from the off, we see not crewmembers but friends, not subordinates but comrades. Kirk genuinely cares for his crew, and they respect and admire him. Pike? He can just **** off: nobody cares, including me.
Oops!
Even after the failure of the first pilot, fame could have been Jeffrey Hunter's for the taking. I personally think his wooden acting in this pilot should have precluded him from any future episodes, but it turns out that he was required to reprise the role should the network pick up the series. As they rejected it though, he was not expected to take the role in the second, more successful pilot which led to the series being taken up. Although Roddenberry was said to have no animosity towards Hunter, the wife of the man who could have been Kirk seems to have been the main obstacle standing in his way, declaring haughtily “Jeffrey Hunter is a film actor: he does not do
television!” Stupid bint by that single statement deprived her husband of what could have been, in effect, immortality. Who does not, after all, recognise the name James Kirk?
But Hunter stuck to his guns and, even though he went against his wife's wishes a year later and wrote a pilot for another thriller series which the network passed on, he ended up with parts in mostly foreign B-movies, (though he did play the ultimate role, that of Jesus in
King of Kings, in which he was, I have to admit, quite excellent - but then, how can you f
uck up playing Jesus Christ really?) and he died in 1969, just as the series he had initially helped to get off the ground, if stumblingly, was beginning to find its space legs. It's ironic that, had he sat for the second pilot, it too may have been rejected and
Star Trek never been, as I really feel that much of the antipathy directed towards the pilot was down to his mechanical, deadpan acting, something that belonged more in the
Flash Gordon and
Buck Rogers morning television serials of the thirties, as well as perhaps western series and some detective ones. Emotion was what eventually brought
Star Trek to life and allowed it to stand out from its peers, and become the colossus it did. Jeffrey Hunter was not to be part of that, and though we can feel sorry for him for having missed what was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, I personally can't say I'm sorry, as I felt he brought nothing to the role.
In what could have been a blunder of monumental proportions, the network advised Roddenberry to “get rid of the guy with the ears”, little realising that it would be Spock who would come to crystallise the idea of
Star Trek and represent the series, as Nimoy grew into his rewritten role and became not only the new captain's indispensable right-hand man, but also his fast friend.
Star Trek without Spock would have been good, but with the Vulcan it was great and destined to become a true classic.
Messages
One of the core differences between
Star Trek and other series at the time was Roddenberry's intent of delivering important social and political messages through the medium of his show. Although his view of the future turned out to be a little too Utopian, too rose-tinged for reality - as later partially addressed by its successor series,
The Next Generation and more widely by its descendant,
Deep Space 9 - he did channel some important messages, such as the need to resist tyrants, the importance of keeping one's integrity and a basic compassion for all life, no matter its race or colour.
Which makes it all the stranger that here, it is the reliance on strong, brutal, primitive emotions that proves to be the one weapon the Talosians cannot control. When Pike fills his mind with images of hate, murder, anger, he can block the telepathic influence of his captors. This leads, to me anyway, to an uncomfortable conclusion: that the more primitive emotions are what make man unique and help him survive, and there's no doubting that: timid cavemen did not last long. But in this enlightened future (I believe no time is specified, but we know from later episodes that the series takes place in the 23nd century) you would expect such imperatives to be less, not more important. As a matter of fact, Roddenberry and his writers would address this, or I should say redress it, in season three's "Day of the Dove", where a malevolent alien intelligence, intent on pitting the humans against their enemies and each other, finds itself defeated by ... laughter.
That's more like it.