6.6/10. If I have a recurring complaint that applies to even the better episodes of Star Trek so far, it’s that a lot of times, even an episode is centered around a cool idea, they don’t have enough plot to go for a full hour, so they end up stalling for time or repeating things over and over.
That is “Shore Leave” to a tee. The notion of a planet where anything you think of magically appears is a pretty neat one, or at least, could have some neat applications. But my god, it takes our heroes forever to figure out what’s going on, let alone respond to it in some way. In the meantime, we jump from person to person and figment to figment with little rhyme, reason, or momentum.
Now some of that is perfectly cool. It’s nice to see the crew go somewhere other than a foam-rock land once and a while, and seeing the gang fighting tigers and samurai and black knights is fun. There’s a real loony quality to this episode, which you might expect from such a fantastical premise, with as much comedy as there is drama. But it gets to be too much after a while, with the crew never really figuring out the obvious thing that is happening.
But there is at least some nice direction and framing. The shots of Kirk, Bones, and Yeoman Barrows running through the field had a kinetic feeling of motion that’s not always present in the show. And the shots where the characters are framed by the little metal antennae of the mind-reading ray were inventive as well.
It’s also nice that we get to learn a little more about Kirk. The notion that he has a lost love that haunts him a bit, or a bully from his days in the academy add a little depth, or at least backstory to the seemingly unimpeachable captain. Seeing his regrets humanizes him a bit. Though that said, his fight with Finnegan also went on forever. It stretched through a commercial break and had the sort of lame fights that felt like a low-grade WWE (nee WWF) imitation.
And then there’s the weird deus ex machina ending. I was fully expecting that Spock or someone would figure out that the planet was some sort of lure, meant to bring ships in and while they’re blissfully unaware thanks to its temptations, sucks their energy away to fuel itself. The reveal that it’s just some hyper-amusement park is, again, kind of fun, but doesn’t really explain much, or why the old guy running the place thought everybody would just know that. It renders the whole mystery kind of moot.
Plus, we basically just did this sort of thing with “The Menagerie” and it was treated like a horrible danger whereas this is fanciful lark. Sure, the circumstances are a bit different, but it’s going back to the same well pretty quickly.
But I take it the point wasn’t to really have a coherent episode so much as it was to just have an entertaining flight of fancy. If this episode had been a half hour, they might have succeeded. As it was, there was a lot of enjoyable stuff (Spock tricking Kirk into ordering his own shore leave was a hoot) but “Shore Leave” started spinning its wheels rather quickly, and came up with a pretty lazy ending on top of that. Some fun stuff, but not one of the better episodes.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-01-19T17:24:03Z
6.6/10. If I have a recurring complaint that applies to even the better episodes of Star Trek so far, it’s that a lot of times, even an episode is centered around a cool idea, they don’t have enough plot to go for a full hour, so they end up stalling for time or repeating things over and over.
That is “Shore Leave” to a tee. The notion of a planet where anything you think of magically appears is a pretty neat one, or at least, could have some neat applications. But my god, it takes our heroes forever to figure out what’s going on, let alone respond to it in some way. In the meantime, we jump from person to person and figment to figment with little rhyme, reason, or momentum.
Now some of that is perfectly cool. It’s nice to see the crew go somewhere other than a foam-rock land once and a while, and seeing the gang fighting tigers and samurai and black knights is fun. There’s a real loony quality to this episode, which you might expect from such a fantastical premise, with as much comedy as there is drama. But it gets to be too much after a while, with the crew never really figuring out the obvious thing that is happening.
But there is at least some nice direction and framing. The shots of Kirk, Bones, and Yeoman Barrows running through the field had a kinetic feeling of motion that’s not always present in the show. And the shots where the characters are framed by the little metal antennae of the mind-reading ray were inventive as well.
It’s also nice that we get to learn a little more about Kirk. The notion that he has a lost love that haunts him a bit, or a bully from his days in the academy add a little depth, or at least backstory to the seemingly unimpeachable captain. Seeing his regrets humanizes him a bit. Though that said, his fight with Finnegan also went on forever. It stretched through a commercial break and had the sort of lame fights that felt like a low-grade WWE (nee WWF) imitation.
And then there’s the weird deus ex machina ending. I was fully expecting that Spock or someone would figure out that the planet was some sort of lure, meant to bring ships in and while they’re blissfully unaware thanks to its temptations, sucks their energy away to fuel itself. The reveal that it’s just some hyper-amusement park is, again, kind of fun, but doesn’t really explain much, or why the old guy running the place thought everybody would just know that. It renders the whole mystery kind of moot.
Plus, we basically just did this sort of thing with “The Menagerie” and it was treated like a horrible danger whereas this is fanciful lark. Sure, the circumstances are a bit different, but it’s going back to the same well pretty quickly.
But I take it the point wasn’t to really have a coherent episode so much as it was to just have an entertaining flight of fancy. If this episode had been a half hour, they might have succeeded. As it was, there was a lot of enjoyable stuff (Spock tricking Kirk into ordering his own shore leave was a hoot) but “Shore Leave” started spinning its wheels rather quickly, and came up with a pretty lazy ending on top of that. Some fun stuff, but not one of the better episodes.