That is not the brave Captain of the starship Enterprise, that is... Who is that? The actor playing the very not Captain Kirk is Jeffrey Hunter. Hunter played several secondary roles throughout the 50s and 60s, appearing in films like The Longest Day with every other actor at the time, and most notably John Ford's The Searchers. If you don't recognize Hunter from The Searchers that's okay, because in the above picture he hasn't been painted a slight shade of brown to make him look half Indian.In the pilot Hunter plays Captain Christopher Pike, the unremarkable captain of the USS Enterprise whose clean chin and chisled hair leads a team of adventurers you don't recognize to the far end of the Galaxy. Basically the pilot episode feels the same as every other episode of TOS; it has the bad costumes, the poorly constructed sets, the broad technological terms , and most importantly, women painted green. The main difference between the pilot and the rest of the series falls solely on the crew and their lame ability to lull the viewer to sleep. There's the frigid female first officer, the ship's doctor whose only perscription is alcohol, and several young nameless actors who stumble around the set and stiffly say things about technology that they don't seem to understand. It really felt as if most of the cast read their lines phonetically. "Sen-sores read a dis-tress sig-nal from the Tal-oas sys-tem, Cap-tan." At least Spock is there.
In the episode, Pike goes on a reluctant rescue mission for a crashed spacecraft on an unexplored planet where he gets captured and put into a zoo by a race of telepaths with pulsating heads the size of basketballs. What is it with telepaths and pulsating super brains? Last time I checked brains don't pulsate. Look it up for yourself, nothing on that page mentions anything about pulsating.The episode trudges along with various escape attempts with a couple of crappy looking monsters thrown in to make things interesting. Pike's cell also makes a delightful *boing* whenever he crashes against the space glass. The telepaths torture Pike throughout the episode by surrounding him by beautiful women, sending him to a pleasure world, treating him to a picnic, and having him fight a 7 foot Viking wearing a silly hat and one furry shoe that sounds like a drowning dinosaur. Cruel. Oh, they also send him to a smoldering lava/acid world for a few seconds, but being held prisoner can't always be picnics and sex slaves.
By the end of the episode you find out that the girl prancing around Pike for the entire episode actually is a survivor of the crash, but is actually just extremely busted looking. Which is perhaps the cruelest joke played on Pike by the telepaths--They try to hook him up with an ugly chick. At least they seem to understand how superficial humans can be--but it still basically makes the entire plot of the movie like the 1999 gem She's All That. Save for the fact that there's no prom, it takes place in space, and it doesn't involve Freddy Prinze Jr. Although it might as well with Jeffrey Hunter running around.I can see why NBC scrapped the pilot based solely on the characters. Captain Pike isn’t so much a character as he is a pretty face. Every so often when a scene changes I think that Pike might actually be Kirk, but then my hopes quickly melted when I saw Pike’s empty stare yet piercingly… hypnotic blue eyes. The entire cast seems hopelessly stiff and they have a complete lack of cheek that the later episodes has in droves. Even Nimoy doesn't seem comfortable in his pointy ears. Pike comes across even worse, and he feels like the antithesis of charisma. He almost seems angry to be in the show--funny considering that his pent up rage ends up saving him from inprisonment. He's reluctant to go on a rescue mission, he isn't interested in the green chick, and he's pretty much just kind of a dick. Captain Pike sucks and I hope something bad happens to him.
.... ooooh.
This is Star Trek:
Lots of dumb things happen in Star Trek, here's a small collection of dumb things that happen in this episode:
When two twentieth century tennis players walk down the coridor of the Enterprise:
When Spock and Pike pick space flowers together:
The back of the telepaths' heads look like butts:
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