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The Enterprise receives a distress call from a planet on which a
starship crashed 18 years ago. The Enterprise's captain Pike (Jeffrey
Hunter) beams down with a small survey crew to investigate, finds a group
of survivors including Vina (Susan Oliver), an attractive blonde, and
before you know it, Vina has lured Pike into a trap and the other
survivors vanish into thin air. It turns out everything was just an
illusion by the enormously brained natives, the Talosians, who want to
make Pike part of their quite accomplished zoo. The Talosians, who are
able to not only create illusions but also read minds, now let Pike live
through various scenarios derived from his subconscious, scenarios that
usually involve Vina, and apparently they want to make him fall in love
with Vina so the two of them mate. At this point, I might want to point
out that Vina is not an illusion but a real human being, who actually
survived the crash 18 years ago - and she still looks like a girl in her
early 20's. Somehow, Pike doesn't fall in love with Vina quickly enough,
so the Talosians beam two females from his ship, the machine-like Number
One (Majel Barrett) and the bubble-brained Yeoman Colt (Laurel Goodwin)
into his cage so he has more choice. Pike meanwhile has found out one
thing, that hatred can cloud his brain long enough to attack the
Talosians, so he starts to hate, overcomes a Talosian, and forces them to
release him and the girls. Only once he has won the upper hand, he learns
that the Talosians had nothing but noble intentions, they wanted Pike to
help them cultivate and populate their planet and in return offered him a
paradise derived from his own subconscious. They just had no proper way to
show their noble intentions ... It all ends happily, the Talosians let
Pike and his entourage leave, while Vina, who is a terribly disfigured old
woman when the Talosians don't use their powers of illusion on her, stays
behind with a Pike-illusion. Leonard Nimoy can be seen as Mr Spock in
this one, but despite his looks, he hardly resembles the logic-driven
Vulcanian he eventually came to be. The very first, long
unaired pilot for Star Trek, that was originally rejected because it was
depending on sources either too costly or too brain-heavy. On closer
inspection though there might be other things wrong with this film as
well, like the script is rather inconsequential, comes equipped with major
plotholes, the finale is pretty much an anti-clim,ax, and the whole thing
is way to much tailored to its lead Jeffrey Hunter, who unfortunately is
neither particularly charismatic nor that much of an actor to carry the
story. I'm not saying this is a total trainwreck here, it's still fun
in a nostalgic sort of way, it's just not nearly as entertaining as a
regular episode of the original Star Trek series.
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