"Shore Leave" - Season 1, Episode 15
Relaxation is an order as the Enterprise visits space Disneyland
Television has changed. Much has been written about the shortening season orders, rising serialization, and streaming delivery schedules that have reduced episodic storytelling across the medium. In some ways, this has mirrored the development of mass-market American comics. Comics began as a stylistically diverse medium playing across genre only to become dominated by superheroes over the course of the 1900s. Television, at least when scripted, was dominated by episodic styling due to its technical realities, only to become more experimental as it developed. This is a reductive version of history and is probably coded too positively; the rise of serialization and streaming economics in particular has made glacial pacing and general bloat all too common. Services brim with six episode miniseries stolen from better destinies as two hour movies.
“Shore Leave” is what television has lost in this change. There’s no room for this when you only have fifty minutes runtime to convey five minutes of story.
This episode is a lark. Conveying little of a theme and less of a plot, but giving the audience fifty minutes of the cast they like in a low-stakes, funny story. Some would call it filler. But it’s beautiful in its present rarity.
The typical recap is near pointless: the Enterprise crew is tired after three months of hard work, picks a planet for shore leave, and finds that the planet can generate their thoughts into reality. After many hijinks, including a samurai attack, a literal tiger, a strafing run, and a fifteen minute long fight scene between Kirk and a recreation of his old bully, the crew learns from the planet’s Caretaker that this was simply a technological accident. The planet is Disneyworld, “an amusement park” as Spock explains. It can construct whatever the mind desires, and when it’s under control, it’s the ultimate toy. Kirk decides that there’s no hard feelings: the crew gets vacation here after all.
The time in-between is entirely bits. McCoy flirts with Yeoman Barrows, fighting off Don Juan, facing down a jousting knight, and acting dashing prince to her literalized princess after she finds an old Victorian dress. Kirk relives his college days, flirting with a re-creation of an old flame (“Ruth”) and being tortured by an old prankster, Finnegan. Hell, the episode begin with McCoy being taunted by a large, Irish-accented white rabbit in an extended riff on Alice in Wonderland.
McCoy’s tormentor: the White Rabbit. The Rabbit was played by Billy Blackburn, who often wore costumes and performed as a background extra in the show. According to Blackburn, the costume triggered undiagnosed claustrophobia, causing him to rip its head off before they finished the take. Costume designer Bill Theiss had been given the costume from the Ice Capades and sewn the head to the body for unclear reasons.
The scattered approach stems from scripting troubles, as perceived by Gene Roddenberry. Theodore “Ted” Sturgeon is the credited writer here but that tells less than half of the story. Sturgeon was an established, if somewhat niche, science-fiction writer by the time Roddenberry recruited him to write for the show, and had no experience in television scripting. As discussed in a prior piece, the old guard writers Roddenberry recruited often turned in scripts that were inventive but considered unfilmable by production. Accounts of Sturgeon’s original draft describe it as “too surreal” with an emphasis on relationship between fantasy and relaxation. One can only imagine how it must have read given what ended up on screen.
Producer Gene Coon did a second pass on the script but Roddenberry remained unsatisfied, as he often was with rewrites. However, by this point Star Trek was well behind schedule and in danger of missing production deadlines; “The Menagerie” had been a two-parter to buy them more time. Thus, Roddenberry was forced to rewrite as they filmed, leading to the scattered and disjointed “plotting,” largely a collection of scenes involving the costumes on hand. An appearance by an elephant and a scene where Shatner wrestles a tiger were cut. The crew went a day over schedule anyway.
Ted Sturgeon, who wrote the script’s first draft. Sturgeon mostly worked in magazine-published short stories, but wrote 11 novels and multiple scripts for Star Trek as well. Sturgeon was also friends with writer Kurt Vonnegut, who used Sturgeon as the basis for his recurring character Kilgore Trout.
Some of Sturgeon’s influence survived this chaotic production. In particular, while Sturgeon himself was not gay, much of his work included homoerotic subtext that was rather progressive at the time. Sturgeon himself stated, somewhat hyperbolically, that he “wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality,” specifically The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey. In “Shore Leave,” this predilection for queer themes is restricted to a single scene where Kirk mistakenly believes that a massage being given by Yeoman Barrows is actually being given by Spock. The Captain then prematurely cuts the act off when he realizes his mistake. While Sturgeon can’t take full credit, romantic interpretations of Spock and Kirk’s relationship remain extremely popular and were popular at the time as well. Roddenberry’s biography includes an entire chapter explaining his attempts to shut down expanded universe Star Trek novels that dealt with these themes. These efforts were undertaken for what Roddenberry would call “brand protection,” but read as insecure now. Roddenberry’s social progressivism often found its limits in these situations; the man was unquestionably in favor of legal and social equality, but often fell back into stereotypical or regressive portrayal within his idealized worlds and attitudes. He dressed the women of Star Trek, after all.
A top ten betrayal if there ever was one. Given that Sturgeon’s draft is described as surreal and did not feature Kirk’s old flame “Ruth,” one wonders what Spock and Kirk would have been imagining on the planet together in that unrevised work.
Little moments like this throughout “Shore Leave” emphasize the benefits large episode orders and episodic writing lent to old television, and can lend to good television now. There’s no overarching theme here and little of an overarching plot. What there are instead are fifty minutes spending time with the characters and allowing them to be characterized through encountering much sillier obstacles than even the smallest crisis on board the Enterprise can allow. Sulu gets to show off a love of botany and an interest in old world firearms when the planet prints him a revolver. McCoy’s interest in classic literature allows him a chance to Prince Charming. Kirk gets a redux on his college days, where he was a dour romantic tormented by a lighthearted prankster. We know everyone a little better and understand who they are now more by the end.
No other medium, except maybe monthly comics, can afford this luxury. Movies are expensive to produce and roughly limited by 180 minutes. Within those monetary and temporal budgets, a good film has to tell an entire, satisfying, and hopefully thematically coherent story. Novels can uncap their space and are cheap to produce, but are limited by being one thing by their nature; any diversion is likely to subtract unless it serves what’s within the wider covers. Television is airtime. It exists solely to provide a reason to get you to watch advertisements, or to pay $15 for a broader “channel.” The stakes are lower. There’s almost always another week and, in the 1960s, you often got twenty of them even if you were bad at the job. Given all that time to fill, why not relax a little, take some shore leave, and relax with some of your friends?
As the Enterprise first approaches the planet, Kirk declines his own leave. He claims he’s too busy, he’s got too much responsibility, there’s plenty to do in service of the mission. It takes a trick by Spock to get the man to slow down, as he presents Kirk with his own medical results and asks the Captain what should be done with this tired, burnt out “crewman.” If “Shore Leave” has anything to teach us, it’s that television these days is overdo for such a trick. It’s ultimately a lot less stressful to play to your strengths. So relax a little. Chill the hell out. Let these characters breathe.
Stray Thoughts
For part of the episode, the crew believes McCoy to be dead. When he reappears, it is in this exact shot, which is one of the better jokes in the episode:
Kirk and Finnegan’s fight scene lasts for no less than five straight minutes and spans a commercial break. I was reminded of the fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David in John Carpenter’s They Live, which is similarly long but at least carries thematic subtext regarding racial solidarity in repressive economies. Kirk and Finnegan mostly just are punching each other.
The episode at one point jumps from two crewmen threatened by a tiger, to those crewman outrunning a strafing run by two World War II fighter planes, to Sulu dodging a samurai’s attack, to Yeoman Barrows fending off a literal Don Juan. Delirious, but a funny parade of story tropes.
The episode was mostly filmed outside at “Africa USA",” a private animal training preserve in southern California that often doubled for “exotic” locales in early television. The cinematography gets a lot out of the wide open sets though. Whereas shooting on the Enterprise is compact and stiff by necessity, here we get a lot of handheld, POV, and tracking shots that give it a dynamism most episodes don’t have.
Angela Martine, apparently unbothered by her recent widowing in “Balance of Terror",” reappears here. That peace might be because the script originally did not call for Martine to appear. Her actress, Barbara Baldavin, was supposed to play an entirely separate character before someone on set noted that she had already appeared, named, in the previous episode.
Photo Credits
The crew around McCoy: https://explaining-errors-in-star-trek.fandom.com/wiki/Shore_Leave
Rabbit: https://www.startrek.com/database_article/shore-leave
Kirk, Spock, and Barrows: https://per-ineptia-ad-astra.tumblr.com/post/182553659530/star-trek-episode-115-shore-leave
McCoy with the two dancers: https://per-ineptia-ad-astra.tumblr.com/post/182553659530/star-trek-episode-115-shore-leave