The first ever Holodeck episode...
McCoy's got his bunny girls, but Kirk's the one known as a womanizer.
Good idea. A slowly told mystery story. Could have been told in 30 minutes or less. I mean nobody (except the crew it seems) needs 50 minutes to realize what's going on. Action scenes were not even necessary to tell this story but Kirk enjoys his fists too much. Almost 60 years later execution seems lazy, silly and almost hilarious in a bad way. Like a high school theater class who got their hands on a few costumes they wanted to try. But we learn a thing or two of the suppressed desires of the crew members. PS: Is that the first time we see iconic Vasquez Rocks in Star Trek?
The crew is a little slow on the uptake in this episode. There is a hint that there is a hypnotic effect to the goings on, but it never is much more than a hint. Instead of making the crew morons to drag the plot out, the hypnotic effect should have been leveraged to explain why it takes about 10 times too long to figure out what is happening.
STAR TREK: SHORE LEAVE
WRITING: 65
ACTING: 70
LOOK: 80
SOUND: 60
FEEL: 75
NOVELTY: 95
ENJOYMENT: 75
RE-WATCHABILITY: 60
INTRIGUE: 60
EXPECTATIONS: 55
I love sci-fi stories that play with your mind with bizarre and sometimes inexplicable stories. In that sense, Shore Leave is a great episode. It’s great to get a breather after a string of more intense episodes. Bones gets a bigger part to play, which is nice. The episode struggles a bit to build a coherent story around the strange goings-on and drags as a result. But the idea itself of the manufactured world is fine, as is the way the Enterprise crew interacts with the dangers. The lengthy and mostly pointless fight scene at the end is pretty enjoyable.
70% = :heavy_minus_sign:
Boy was I glad when Kirk beat the crap out of his buddy. So annoying, that guy. But I am glad whenever I get to see the crew run around outside. Fun, goofy episode.
That was very silly, but it was at least good fun. The cast seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Where's Yeoman Rand? Who's this imposter?
I just read about what happened. It's a shame, I liked her on the show. I'll miss that hairdo.
Wow that was bad, though i did like it when the girl ran into the tree. Funniest episode yet.
I have a confession to make: I like this episode. Today even more so. Because it's not the fate of the universe at stake. You're allowed to have some fun from time to time. It's not to be taken too serious and there is no moral I see. It's also nice to see them film on location instead of the usual sound stage. It adds a layer of believability and this episode wouldn't have worked on a small set.
Not the best episode. Between the bloody brawls between Kirk and his Academy nemesis--which brought back bad memories of being bullied in school--the weird plot, and the scantily clad girls in one scene, this isn't quite the series as I've come to expect it.
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.