It’s Saturday, which means my project of re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of finding ideas—scenario seeds—useful for those playing Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. 

Today’s episode?

The Menagerie (parts one and two)

Engage.

The Menagerie (TOS Season 1, Episodes 11 and 12… or 15 and 16?)

Okay, this is the only TOS two-parter, and it’s one of the most unique uses of a failed pilot I’ve encountered, and while I know it was basically done to both recoup some financial losses, using the original Star Trek pilot episode to make a completely different story building on the plot thereof using the characters of the successful show and treating it as a historical event?

I mean, it’s really clever. More than that, it set the stage for Discovery and Strange New Worlds to show us some of the past with this original pilot (which I really enjoyed) folded into canon after all. Also, Jeffrey Hunter walked so Anson Mount could run.

I mean, again, Trek knows how to hunk, no?

Have they built the rec deck yet?

Ahem. Okay, so the set-up for this two-part episode is pretty choice: Spock basically kidnaps his badly wounded former-captain, Christopher Pike, fakes orders to get out of orbit in command of the Enterprise, and hot-wires the starship so it won’t respond to anyone but him, and Kirk (and Commodore Mendez) take a shuttle and try to give chase and eventually Spock has to pause to let them on board, at which point he maneuvers everyone into giving him a court martial.

Oh, and somehow has meticulous records in watchable detail—as though recorded for some sort of entertainment broadcast or something—of the only planet where beaming down (or even approaching) where the death penalty is still on the books.

And he won’t turn the ship around.

What we learn from watching these records (which Spock doesn’t explain, but Captain Pike beep-beeps an affirmative to the direct question “are these records accurate?”) and this is one of the few sticking points I have about this episode that—even when I re-watched it for this project—really annoyed me.

When they’re all trying to figure out what the hell is up with Spock, McCoy says something like, given Pike can only say yes or no, “they could question him for days—weeks—before they stumble on the right thing!”

So… Pike can communicate in a binary, triggering a “yes” or “no” response via his motorized chair. He has access to a literal binary mode of communication. He could yes/no Morse Code. Or, if that’s too tiring for him, someone could just, y’know, offer up letters?

Like, this is something Jean-Dominique Bauby did in 1997, using a French language frequency-ordered alphabet being spoken to him, and him blinking when the correct letter came up. I mean, okay, that’s long after the episode aired, and yes, to be remotely smart about this otherwise would have been plot-destroying, but it’s annoying as heck. These are smart people. They should be freaking capable of figuring this out.

But, again, plot. Fine.

Basically, what we learn about Pike’s command of Enterprise, and a particular mission to the Talos Star Group. If you’re here, you probably know this story: Captain Pike and the Enterprise pick up a distress signal, find a group of old men survivors (and one blond woman who was “born as they crashed”) and then—ripple effect—everyone vanishes, the Captain has been lured into an underground bunker by throbbing-headed aliens, and it turns out this is a kind of zoo where telepathic aliens create so-real-it’s-like-reliving-it-in-real-time memory/telepathic illusions in their captured aliens.

Why? Because they need breeding stock to create a working class/slave caste to rebuild/terraform the surface back to liveable (something went very wrong) and they’ve picked humans. Pike figures out hate blocks them out (at least temporarily), he and Vina (the blond woman, who it turns out is real and did, in fact, live through the crash of the old earth ship decades ago) eventually connect, and then the various shoes drop: the aliens are basically addicted to experiencing other people’s experiences and are on the decline/trapped in their own way, the crew—including a super-smart Number One and a younger (far more smiley) Spock—figure out that their weapons are working, they’re just being telepathically told they’re not (and set a laser to overload) and basically, Pike manages a jailbreak, gets out with Vina and then—at the last moment—Vina won’t go with him.

Because when she crashed, she was horribly disfigured, and while they put her back together again, they had no “instructions” and so she’s only able to feel normal in their telepathic illusions. So Pike leaves—getting a promise from the telepaths they’ll let her be happy—the planet gets cordoned off, and that’s that.

Back to Kirk and Spock and the trial, and it turns out there’s more illusions going on: the aliens are the source of the signal, and this whole shebang has been about Spock “repaying a debt” to Pike and he’s determined to deliver Pike to the planet. Oh, and also there’s no actual trial after all, it was just the telepathic aliens keeping Kirk busy, and Mendez never joined Kirk in the shuttle, so… sorry ’bout that.

They beam down Pike, and we get a shot of him walking back into the distance hand-in-hand with Vina, both of them living in a telepathic illusion where they’re hale and hearty and able-bodied and pain-free, and ultimately Starfleet is all, “Well, given Pike’s service, we’re letting this drop.”

Credits.

Damn, it makes a good duet. It’s telling that the weaker parts are the Kirk-era bits—the original pilot was so damned smart, and one of the reasons I was so in love with Strange New Worlds in season one was how we finally got Number One back—I cannot tell you how much I adore her—and while Pike comes off a bit… wound tight, there’s some great romance of competence.

What I can say for the Kirk-era bits (other than that blip with “we can’t talk to him because he can only say yes or no”) is how wonderfully Leonard Nimoy plays a Spock willing to do anything—break the rules, endanger his very life and even the career of Captain Kirk—for his former captain. Loyalty, I’m sure he’d say, is only logical.

Scenario Seeds

For a two-part episode, you’d think I’d have a bunch of references I could draw upon to come up with ideas for tabletop Star Trek Adventures games and you’d be… wrong, actually? Part of that is I kept sliding into the narrative and enjoying the flashback parts, and part of it was there’s not a lot more going on. It’s almost a bottle episode in the Kirk era. The entire episode is framed around the (excellent) flashback to the original pilot, and the rest—once Spock hijacks Enterprise—is basically a courtroom scene.

So, I sat with it a while, and what I eventually came up with was the powerful motivation Spock is showing, or, put another way: Why would a valued officer steal a starship? Another seed that I did find from a throwaway line was the Talosians referring to “thought records.” Telepathic memories they could relive, which they’d stored and used in their addicted/lost/endlessly self-indulgent way—but didn’t know how to maintain their machinery, which meant they’d eventually break—and it occurred to me since we know about Katric Arks and the like, other telepathic species could have done something similar.

Seed One: Hijacked

Taking the player’s ship away from their control isn’t something you should be doing on a regular basis, nor should it be easy, so it might take some groundwork to really make this plausible. “The Menagerie” had Spock hijacking Enterprise, requiring some major computer finesse and the aid of powerful telepathic aliens, and the extra weight of the moment is absolutely due to it being Spock breaking the rules to hijack the ship, so picking (a) a character the crew would never consider capable of this, and then (b) coming up with a path for said character to accomplish the feat as well as a motive. It’s a lot.

This Isn’t Supposed To Happen—One way a starship could easily be hijacked is simply by much better technology. Like, say, technology from the future. In this scenario, the player’s ship is diverted from its course and aimed elsewhere, at high warp, and the ship’s computer refuses to respond to anyone other than a trusted member of the crew (ideally, choose a Support or Supervisor Crew the players have worked with multiple times). This crew member won’t explain beyond asking them to trust they’d never do this without a good reason, and the crew’s attempts at regaining control of the ship should fail until the ship arrives at the site and sensors reveal a growing temporal anomaly. At that point, the crew-member in question comes clean: they’re from about three days in the future, their counterpart is unconscious in their quarters, and this future version is the only survivor after the destruction of the ship when it attempted to stop the same anomaly from destroying an inhabited planet three days from now. None of this was supposed to happen, according to the temporal agent who managed to send the crewperson back with the hijacking device to try and stop this from happening, and the agent was clear there was someone on board working against the crew. Of note, the temporal agent barely managed to pass the equipment and the barest extra information to the crewperson before themselves vanished in a temporal wake, which means in some way, this adjustment to the timeline, the destruction of the player’s ship, would have disastrous effects on the future of the temporal agency itself. Who are the enemies who created this anomaly? Why are they targeting the player’s ship at this particular time? Who—or what—is so important to the future aboard their vessel? Time will tell—assuming they can avert the temporal event without blowing themselves up this time.

Seed Two: Telepathic Records

The memories of others, left in accessible records is a staple of sci-fi, and there are great examples of this sort of thing in Trek, too (one of my favourites being the Troi-re-experiences-a-murderer’s-state-of-mind-through-her-own-lenses we get in TNG’s “Eye of the Beholder”). This is a great thing for narrators to shine a light on the telepathic characters in the group, allowing them to sense whatever is happening to others (or themselves) as the core driving force toward a solution. If you’ve got willing players, you could also put them in the role of the telepathically influenced, perhaps by passing them ever-clearer notes as more “memories” become clear.

Reliquary—The crew are performing an archeological mission on a newly discovered site where a member of the Away Team locates a series of stored objects that have clearly been placed on shelves in reverential positions. They’re not marked in any way, and appear to just be simple cylinders of solid, rather unremarkable rock, and the Away Team member in question had to catch one when it fell off the shelf when he accidentally released the panel hiding it. Unknowingly, that physical contact has activated the purpose of the cylinder and transferred telepathic memories to the crew person, who, over time (a) begins to have intuition-like understanding of the site around him as a historical archive of some of the more important elders of a species that knew they were doomed but didn’t have the technology to stop the planetary destruction. The crew member begins acting less and less like themself and more-and-more like some sort of guardian or curator for the site—cumulating in being unwilling to beam back to the ship and claiming they belong here, and seemingly telepathically controlling the entire facility to defend itself, raise shields, and otherwise keep the entire Away Team here—and eventually attempting to get others to hold cylinders of their own to “restore the Reliquary” and to “begin our society anew.” Or, (b) the intuitions lead the crew person down a different path, one of warning the crew that the devastation that visited this planet is cyclical, a parasitic-like, incorporeal telepathic being that absorbs neurological energy before going dormant in a hibernation cycle, then waking to split and seek new sources of feed to repeat its cycle, and while the elders knew they were doomed and didn’t have the technology to stop the destruction, they could do this much to warn future species of the danger—one due to wake up in a feeding cycle any day now from within the planet’s core.

Have your players ever lost control of the ship? Have you had telepathic influence strike the crew? Let me know.