Sturgeon's Folly

“90 percent of everything is crap.”

That’s Sturgeon’s Law and it’s a brilliant little nugget of bumper sticker wisdom. If you keep your default expectations calibrated to this standard, you’ll always either have the smug satisfaction of being right, or you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I owe a debt of gratitude to Theodore Sturgeon—pulp science fiction author of no small repute—for this, so I’ll do him the courtesy of not actually saying that his script for this week’s episode, “Shore Leave,” is 90% crap. No indeed, people. It’s 10% great.

When I was about 15 some local UHF station¹ somewhere at the far north end of the dial—between the Kmart baroque stylings of a 700 Club clone and a public access station airing VHS tapes of people noodling for catfish in filthy leech-infested swamps in Mississippi—ran a Star Trek marathon: 24 episodes in 24 hours. I nested in a stinky pile of blankets and pillows for the whole thing, noon to noon, bolting out of the room during the credits and commercial breaks to grab hunks of meat and cheese and gulps of Coca-cola direct from a two-liter bottle. I couldn’t give you a list of the 24 episodes now but I know for sure that “Shore Leave” was on it. You can’t unsee this episode.

The action opens with a moist ripple of flatulence. Kirk is sitting in his captain’s chair² griping about his back very much in the manner of a man who has never had back pain and has only ever seen other people on television pretending to have it. We're given to understand that captain and crew have been putting in extra hours for several weeks and they're all tired, but no quantity of sore backs or aching joints—yea even should they be hacked off and piled in their scores in a great bloody pile in the middle of the shuttle bay—will stop you from involuntarily gasping when Yeoman Tonia Barrows, eye-candy of the week, reaches with her actual arm between Kirk’s back and the sweat-moistened Corinthian faux-leather of his boxy throne to massage the various knots and bulges and whatever other mythical beasts roamed the high seas of his porcine torso. It's a remarkable moment, grabbing the viewer by the nape of the neck to boozily whisper directly into into recoiling faces, “Stardate 1968, fucker.”

The point they’re awkwardly making is that the Enterprise is a tired ship, and shore leave is the cure. Nevermind that historically “shore leave” is more or less an old navy euphemism for what happens when several hundred hormone-soaked young men, isolated at sea for months, are suddenly let loose upon a foreign population with pockets full of gold and a gnawing hunger for intoxication and debauchery. This is the Enterprise, so shore leave will more likely consist of couples in stupid casualwear walking demurely through amber fields and lush forests, along lanes lit with huge plasticky orbs mounded on plaster columns in weird shapes that may have signaled “future” to people before it became apparent that the future was actually going to be, well, 90% crap. C’est la vie.

So they go to work checking out a candidate planet in the Omicron Delta system, which a) sounds like a new Covid variant and b) suggests a pattern of solar system nomenclature supporting a maximum of 529 names.³ The place is congenial to human existence but is without any animal life. Sounds like a boring vacation to me, but down goes an advance party consisting inexplicably of Barrows and Bones—who seem semi-attached despite the former handing out sketchy favors to the captain⁴—as well as Sulu. So: the ship’s doctor, a navigator, and a red-shirt⁵ sex object. These away parties never make the least bit of sense.

I’m going to skip the blow by blow because “Shore Leave” feels like it was written as they shot it, which is more or less exactly what happened. It could just as easily have been titled “Some Weird Shit that Happened.” Beginning with McCoy watching gape-mouthed as a little girl chases a giant white rabbit with a waistcoat and pocketwatch past him, the away team encounters a series of implausible characters and situations—a Japanese samurai, a medieval knight, a World War II arial dogfight—until Kirk beams down and starts running into his old school chums, which is even duller than it sounds. After a lot of pointless churn a man looking very much like Bob Barker pops out of the woodwork to explain that the whole planet is a sort of amusement park where the amusements are automatically generated based on whatever you are thinking about. Deus ex machina, come on down.

Why McCoy is walking around on this strange planet thinking about Alice in Wonderland is anyone’s guess. Kirk, of course, has a whole panoply of old friends and lovers so we can excuse his musings, but Sulu is responsible for the samurai, presumably because he’s Japanese and that’s what Japanese people think about, and from Barrows we get not only the knight but a ludicrous princess outfit that she not only finds just lying about but puts on because this episode is manifestly unserious.

Who would have guessed a man named “Bones” would harbor dark secrets?

Some would say that’s the point; just a light-hearted jaunt. I would say it looks thrown together, which is bad enough, but in the interest of driving the plot forward the characters completely lose their minds, which is frankly insulting to the 14 episodes that preceded this one. Watching McCoy goggle at the White Rabbit is amusing I guess⁶, if you're drunk or extremely tired. But the appearance of anything on a planet supposedly free of animal life should register more than the slapstick register of a supposed professional. At one point Sulu finds a revolver just lying on the ground and what do you suppose he does? Like a man with a head full of LSD he just picks it up and starts firing. As you do.

There are those who might argue that the away team has been mentally compromised by some mechanism of the planet’s (probably represented by the chimes that sound through the entire episode like audio sandpaper). There’s no other plausible explanation for the gross dereliction of duty. The whole notion that they are exploring an unknown and possibly dangerous world just flies out the window. The characters all engage their finds on their own terms, completely reneging on the mission that brought them to the planet in the first place, as though they’ve completely forgotten the Enterprise and the Federation and all the rest.

Except Kirk of course. It’s one of those characteristics of James Tiberius that we learn early and often, without which he wouldn’t be who he is: Kirk is superhuman.

Even as he engages with the incredibly irritating Finnegan—a school nemesis who shows up to do another leprechaun bit a lá Riley⁷—Kirk always has one eye on the bigger picture, e.g. the safety of ship and crew and all that jazz. Finnegan's mirthful fisticuff's don't knock him off course and neither do the feminine wiles of Ruth, a long-lost girlfriend who appears and tries to kindle Kirk's usually insatiable lust. She comes off a lot like she's made out of wood, and Kirk appears to sense this. His scenes with her are thickly pasted with schmalzy music, but no sparks fly in spite of his insistence that of all the women he's ever seduced, Ruth was the awesomest.⁸ Whatever. Ruth wouldn't sizzle if you coated her in peanut oil and threw her in a white hot skillet.

She isn’t helped by Barrow’s presence. McCoy makes eyes at her the whole episode until, post-mystery-reveal, he dumps her for a pair of “Rigelian cabaret girls” ginned up by the planet’s amusement machinery—an attempt at humor that simply leaves the viewer to wonder what kind of callous sex freak McCoy actually is.

One final note: this episode was mostly shot at Marine World/Africa USA, an animal theme park in Redwood City, California. The park provided a tiger that appears in a scene late in the episode. Shatner lobbied to have Kirk wrestle the tiger but fortunately was talked out of it. This was also the shooting location for a slew of forgettable television shows including Gentle Ben, which I reckon some folks might find less forgettable than I, but which is, let’s face it, 90% crap.

1. For the past-challenged, TVs back in the Triassic were generally sold with two tuners; one with 13 channels in the VHF range, and another with 70 channels in the UHF range. Typically the major players (ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS) would have a local affiliate broadcasting to one of the VHF channels, and if you were lucky there might be one or two independent stations that broadcast on a UHF channel (these were invariably weirder). The remaining 77 or 78 channels broadcast coded signals (“snow”) from alien intelligences explaining how to build pyramids or from secretive government organizations seeking to communicate with their agents in the field.

2. It’s interesting, to me anyway, that Trek took as its model for captaincy something more like a modern craft in which captain and crew are technocrats, bent over computer screens, rather than the Age of Sail, which would have required Kirk to pace some sort of quarterdeck. This is probably a good thing; the franchise occasionally strayed very deep into its metaphors, usually to ill effect—c.f. the submarine-esque stylings of the Klingon ship in the execrable Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

3. There are 23 letters in the classical Latin alphabet. If you name each system with a combination of two letters, going from Alpha Alpha to Zeta Zeta, that’s 23 x 23, or 529 possibilities. This has been your combinatorics lecture for the week.

4. Is this some kind of prima nocta thing?

5. Red-shirts, incidentally, aren’t always marked for on-screen death but the almost never reappear.

6. Bones may be beloved by many but I don’t think it’s nuts to say that DeForrest Kelly is a pretty marginal actor. He’s got an accent and some homespun homilies both likely directly inherited from his childhood in Toccoa, Georgia, and occasionally he pulls some sort of weird face so broad he may as well have the associated emotion stamped on his forehead. Kelly’s last non-Trek film was Night of the Lepus, a low-grade horror flick starring Janet Leigh and a horde of mutant killer bunny rabbits. Not exactly Oscar material. It’s pretty clear that had he not snagged Trek, Kelly would have been just one more of those Brylcreemed middle-aged men playing farm hands in crappy westerns or minor thugs in cop shows like M Squad.

7. See The Conscience of the King and The Naked Time. Or, just have someone yell directly in your ear for about two hours. Same difference.

8. Kirk's shirt comes off again in this episode, but it's Finnegan's fists, not Ruth’s feminine wiles, that do the undressing.