The Past is an Alien Shore: Star Trek S1E15, "Shore Leave"
“Shore Leave”
Not a good start: Kirk has a kink in his back, so the female yeoman, Barrows, immediately starts massaging it. Barrows's job is first to nag Kirk about getting some shore leave, and then to be an object of Bones's desire. Along the way, she gets assaulted by Don Juan—twice.
No Plot
In later Trek, we are led to believe that the average person is way smarter than the average person today. Even children talk about quantum mechanics as if it were basic arithmetic.
Not in TOS, though. Sulu finds an antique gun under a rock, just like the one he always wanted for his collection. He is not the least bit concerned about this discovery: he just calls it "a crazy coincidence." This is not the first time that Sulu has come off as impossibly naive, even childish.
But he's not the only one who acts way dumber than a real person would. The episode's conceit is obvious before the opening credits: the things characters think about come to life on this otherwise uninhabited planet. Despite the tired "fantasies come alive" trope in science fiction, it takes about 25 minutes for anyone to even suggest that the odd things happening on the planet may be hallucinations or anything other than what they appear to be.
As it turns out, the Enterprise chose to take shore leave on a planet that just happened to be set up by an alien race as a pleasure planet, where anything you imagine is automatically manufactured instantaneously.
Since the episode's central idea is so simple, we have to suffer through nearly an hour of characters bumbling their way through mild dangers of their own concoction. This is a clear case of content serving form: TV of the era required 50 minutes of time to be filled, and boy does this episode fill that time! Instead of making a more interesting and involved and dramatic story, the episode just repeats the ideas as much as necessary until it's time to wrap things up with a quick explanation.
This method of TV storytelling is thankfully dead or dying, and we can appreciate the ability for streaming shows to vary episode lengths so that they are neither needlessly filling time, nor rushing stories to their detriment.
The pacing issue is not the most painful part of the episode, though.
No, once again, I'm going to harp on the way women are depicted in a TOS episode.
“Sounds like Don Juan.”
Yeoman Barrows evolves over the course of the episode from a nagging mother to an imperilled romantic heroine. First, while exploring on her own, she suddenly starts screaming, and she is found with her shirt ripped, saying that a man attacked her. She had been imagining that the scene was only missing a Don Juan, and then he appeared to assault her.
Not long after, She and McCoy discuss the Romantic scenery of the idyllic planet, and they joke about her going about in a princess's attire. Sure enough, they spy some on a tree.
At this point, the pair is supposed to be investigating the planet—they are Starfleet officers on the clock—yet Bones, the superior officer, insists she try on the clothes. Now they bandy about notions of him being there to protect his princess. We have no indication before now of an existing romance between the characters, but here we are.
It's creepy how Bones can spontaneously hit on his coworker, and she is into it. These romances on TOS form out of nowhere, without context or explanation. It's as if the mere proximity of men and women in a workspace is a courtship dance. It makes me wonder at how naturalized the idea of men and women being made for each other was and is. The notion of female coworkers was novel enough in the 60s, I guess, that writers could not imagine men and women working together without there being constant sexual tension.
Hell, many people still can't imagine it.
It's very upsetting how the men are constantly holding the women close, and how the women lean against the men as if by instinct. Each of the characters is paired off at some point with someone of the opposite gender, and the embraces happen as if it's totally normal for coworkers to hug and lead each other around by the hand while performing their jobs.
Nothing about this is as overtly problematic as "Mudd's Women", but it is full of physical acting that belies subtle ideas that make non-romantic relationships between genders in the 60s as being distinctly foreign. L.P. Hartley famously wrote that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." We see that in "Shore Leave" in the way people of the past imagined the future.
Things are at their cringiest right at the end when Bones, previously slain by a knight accidentally conjured by Barrows, emerges from the kind aliens' secret base with a scantily clad woman on each arm. Barrows cannot contain her jealousy and forcefully ensconces herself in Bones's arm. McCoy's response: sending one of the other women off to cling onto another man. Spock is unattended, so off she goes. The other woman stays with Bones, and Barrows seems to just accept that. When Spock leaves the scene, he hands his woman off to Sulu.
Yikes!
Granted, these are artificial women conjured by desire; the episode assumes that on a planet where fantasies become reality, most of those fantasies will involve sex. The episode conveys that through Barrows and the other women just about as explicitly as possible for 60s television. But the dynamics are disturbing when you consider that there is only a slight distinction between the fantasy women and the very real Barrows. They are treated in nearly identical ways, as objects for male desire and fantasy. To Bones, the fake woman and Barrows are interchangeable.
Oh yeah, then there's the broad Irish stereotype and the clumsy samurai.
Not looking good, "Shore Leave."
Verdict: 3 tigers out of 10