I get into bed last night, and figure I’ll put the TV on sleep timer and throw something on while I doze off. On Sci-Fi, an episode of Star Trek (the old one) started, so perfect I’ll catch a few minutes and I’ll knock out.
The episode was called THE MENAGERIE - PT 1
Long story short, I get sucked in, decide to stay up, and the damn thing was “to be continued”
I’ve checked their schedule, I don’t see it coming on anytime soon. This is probably the only one I’ve never seen, so can someone tell me how the damn thing ends?
Here’s what I remember.
Spock takes over the ship and puts it in a computer lock only he can release. He gets court marshalled. The ship is headed to some planet called “Talius 4” There is some old captain (actually the previous one for the ENT) dude in some mobile iron lung type of thing with a burned up face, and he can only talk in yes/no beeps. Most of the episode is spent in the courtroom where Spock is showing video of what happened 11 years ago. What happened was they got a distress signal, the went to rescue the people, they found a bunch of old guys and a hot young chick. The chick lured the captain near some rocks, and some humanoid alien guys with huge vein heads popped out and grabbed him.
IIRC, this episode was Roddenberry’s method of reusing the footage from the original pilot episode. He got 2 episodes while shooting only about 1 episode’s worth of new scenes.
Ah wonderful, that’s just what I needed. I had assumed that ST ran at the same time every night on Sci-Fi, and that PT2 would be on tonight. This was not the case.
Wheelchair Pike was pretty creepy, glad to hear he made it back to normal.
Of course, if Hunter returned for the regular series, the history of Star Trek would have been radically different. Hunter died in 1969 and so would not have been around for any movies. Without the movies, there may very well have never been a ST:TNG, DS9, Voyager or Enterprise.
But would Hunter have died if he had stayed on as Captain Pike in Star Trek? His premature death at 42 was caused in part by a drinking problem that started after his marriage broke up not long after he declined to film the second pilot episode that NBC requested; his wife had advised against doing it. Hunter was nearly broke when he died four years later.
Actually, it was an illusion of normalcy. He was still in the wheelchair but perceived himself as healthy, just as he saw the disfigured woman as beautiful.
The hot young chick was played by Susan Oliver, who also was a pilot. In 1970 she and Margaret Mead (a not-so-hot anthropologist chick) won the Powder Puff Derby, a transcontinental air race of women pilots. (They flew a Piper Comanche).
A board full of ST geeks and no one mentions the most important part of the pilot!
Pike’s executive officer, Number One, was played by M. Leigh Hudoc. With short hair and a blonde dye job she became Majel Barrett, better known as Nurse Chapel and Gene Roddenberry’s main squeeze (and later the computer voice in nearly all the later spin-offs and Deana Troi’s mother in STTNG.)
He may well have had a drinking problem, but I have never heard his death ascribed to it. Here is what I’ve heard countless times:
Hunter was in Spain filming a movie, an on-set explosion went off prematurely, and he was pretty rattled and his face was scratched up, but he seemed fine. On the flight back to L. A. he complained of severe head pain, and was carried off the plane at LAX and taken to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a severe concussion. He rallied, returned home, but one day soon thereafter, he collapsed again, fell down hard, was rushed to the hopital and died on the operating table without having ever regained consciousness.
I’ve heard this basic scenario several times, but perhaps it as a cover for a alcohol-related death, I’ve just never heard a whiff of that rumor, though.
In the two-parter, an actor named Sean Kenney filled in as the crippled Pike.
I once read that Majel Barrett has appeared in every single incarnation of Star Trek. As First Officer in the original pilot; as Nurse Chapel in ToS; as a voice actor in the early-70s animated series; in at least some of the movies; as the computer voice and Lwaxana Troi in TNG, DS9. I can’t remember - was she also the computer voice in Voyager? And has she showed up in any form in Enterprise? (haven’t seen a single episode of Enterprise, darn it…)
She’s the voice of all 23rd Century and beyond computers but I honestly don’t know if Enterprise even has a talking computer despite watching for the past year.
She’s been the computer in every incarnation except Enterprise. She doesn’t seem to have even appeared on Enterprise as a guest (yet), but IMDB is notoriously unreliable, and I only have that and my similarly fallible memory to go on. (Google is not often my friend, I’m afraid.)
Well, Hunter’s alcoholism was more than a rumor. His son Christopher was close to tears talking about it on a E! Mysteries and Scandals program devoted to his father’s life and career. And producer-director Sidney Pink, in his memoirs, wrote about the problem Hunter’s drinking caused while they were filming two movies in Spain in 1966. When a woman who appeared on a game show with Hunter four months before his death said offstage that he seemed to be mentally slow, she was told that his drinking was well known in Hollywood. Hunter’s autopsy noted his liver damage. And the daughter of his last wife wrote about Hunter’s drinking in her biography of her mother.
Hunter collapsed in his home due to a cerebrovascular accident, commonly known as a stroke. The risk factors for stroke include heavy alcohol consumption. That actually may have been his second stroke within a month. His earlier and sudden affliction on the airplane from Spain back to Los Angeles also had the definite symptoms of a stroke: sudden numbness or weakness, especially on one side of the body, and sudden confusion or trouble speaking or understanding speech.
The breaking glass incident on the movie set in Spain has been exaggerated. The scene was kept in the movie, and while Hunter flinches, it’s not like he was knocked down unconscious. It probably had nothing to do with his subsequent stroke, but as you said, it did serve as a cover story.
Majel Barrett hasn’t had anything to do with Enterprise. Roxann Dawson’s voice was used for the computer in “Dead Stop,” but it was the one on the alien repair station.
Since you seem to be the resident Enterprise expert, viva, is there any specific reason that Majel Roddenberry isn’t having anything to do with the show? Anything personal?