The Cage is not the Menagerie

Alan N. Shapiro has written brilliantly on Star Trek's Captain Pike as an early traveler in virtual reality. Pike appears in the Hugo-winning two-part Original Series episode "The Menagerie": horribly disfigured and paralyzed in a spaceship mishap he returns to a planet where he had once been imprisoned as a zoo specimen by reality-shifting aliens. The Talosians want to groove on the violent and sexy adventures they pull out of his mind as they keep him prisoner for his entire mortal life. Earlier in his career they had deemed him too wild to be caged but now that his body is wrecked he chooses their form of escape, in order to give his mind the freest possible reign.
Fans know that "The Menagerie" cleverly remixed Gene Roddenberry's original series pilot "The Cage," wrapping the early... [via Tom Moody]