With the exhausted crew of more than four hundred and thirty people in dire need of quality leisure time following months of especially strenuous missions, advance landing parties, one of which is led by Dr. McCoy and Lt. Sulu, scout an uncharted Earth-like world in the Omicron Delta region of space to ascertain its degree of holiday suitability. Although sensor probes and detectors indicate that the planet is uninhabited and does not even host animal life, the locally surveyed territory is plush and has a temperate climate. It is endowed with an abundance of trees, flowers, multifarious vegetation, and grassy meadows. Beautiful forests, rivers, and lakes are within perceptible range. The ship’s Medical Officer and Helmsman gape at the area’s breathtaking blue sky. They breathe its fresh, pleasantly-scented air and feel its warm sun and cool breeze. The sensation of peace that the area provides is “almost too good to be true.” The first weary Starfleet personnel who beam down enjoy a sense of privilege at having discovered a pastoral utopia. But this satisfaction is short-lived. It is disturbed by a sequence of unexplainable and hazardous happenings which “accidentally” intrude upon the waking dream of paradise.
McCoy casually mentions to Sulu that the place reminds him of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” The Dutch version of the episode is called Vakantie in Wonderland, or Vacation in Wonderland. A four-feet tall white rabbit appears, wearing a waist- coat, and carrying an umbrella and a gold pocket watch. The rabbit announces that, my paws and whiskers, oh dear, I shall be late, yes, late for a very important date. Alice herself then appears. She runs into the clearing and asks McCoy if he has seen a large rabbit with white gloves. The Doctor is dumb- struck, but manages to point her in the right direc- tion. She thanks him and follows the startling creature with pink eyes into the thicket and down into a hole in the ground.
Lt. Sulu, who is a gun collector, finds a 20th century Police Special revolver, just like the one he always wanted, lying on the ground. It is in beautiful condition, and Sulu starts to shoot target practice with it.
After transporting down to the planet’s surface, Captain Kirk lapses into a reverie about his younger days as a first-year Cadet at Starfleet Academy. While walking along with Dr. McCoy, Kirk reminisces with bitterness about the “devil” who constantly picked on him, and who had the “absolutely grim” freshman Jim Kirk wound up into such a state of nervousness that he never knew when or where his shadowing rogue antagonist was going to strike next. A grinning, broad-shouldered, twenty-year old Irish lad, clad in an upperclassman Cadet’s shiny uniform, appears leaning against a tree trunk. The mischievous Finnegan, played by Bruce Mars, was Kirk’s personal nemesis during the Captain’s early Academy years, ceaselessly making fun of him and taunting him with practical jokes. Finnegan has not aged since the two last met more than fifteen years earlier. He is still in the prime physical shape of his youth. “You never know when I’m going to strike ya, ah Jim?” Finnegan uncannily recapitulates. Repeatedly calling the Enterprise Captain “Jimmy boy,” the wily prankster tries to bait Kirk into fisticuffs. “Go ahead, lay one on me, because that’s what you always wanted, isn’t it? Come on, come on!”
Kirk also encounters an old girlfriend named Ruth, played by Shirley Bonne, whom he knew intimately and was in love with, a few years after knowing Finnegan, during his Academy graduation year. She is unchanged, exactly as he recalls in memories. Her apparition issues from one of those abiding psychic impressions that you vaguely think about all the time, stirred to visibility for Kirk by the scent of a particular flower. She wears triangular earrings, and a long robe vertically divided between a white half and a side that is near black and adorned with real carnations.
Yeoman Tonia Barrows, played by Emily Banks, who beamed down with Kirk, is accosted by a bearded Don Juan, after she was thinking about him in a way that you imagine “someone you’d like to meet.” The cloaked nobleman rips the tunic of her Starfleet uniform.
Lt. Esteban Rodriguez of McCoy’s landing party sees flocks of birds in the sky and is menaced by a snarling Bengal tiger. Sulu is attacked by a sworded Japanese samurai warrior. Rodriguez and Specialist 2-C Mary Teller (Ensign Angela Martine) are fired upon by the vintage artillery of a Sopwith Camel World War II fighter plane with Japanese insignia, which descends upon them ominously in a “strafing run.”
As the one who first observed something aberrational, the two fictional characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dr. McCoy feels guilty about causing the delay in the start of the crew’s vacation time. Captain Kirk hails the bridge of the Enterprise and orders “all shore parties to stand by” until the mystery can be cleared up. The small groups of individuals from the initial landing party become separated from one another, and the transmission quality of their handheld communicators begins to deteriorate. They shout appellations to each other in the woods, wishful cries of convocation echoing back from the surfaces and clefts of unseen obstructions. Kirk, McCoy, and Yeoman Barrows track the footprints of a large rabbit and a little blond girl vanished into the hedge.
After Kirk goes off to look for Mr. Sulu, McCoy and Barrows find themselves alone, walking hand in arm through the forest, drifting into a romantic mood. The female Federation officer conjures up the silk gown of a medieval fairy tale princess to replace her torn clothes, complete with “floaty stuff,” veil, and tall pointed hat. Just as they turn to hold hands, gaze longingly into each other’s eyes, and are about to kiss, Barrows espies the materialized elaborate costume, draped over a plant with wide leaves.
The appearance of ceremonial finery interrupts and postpones the consummation of their erotic desire, as in those non-Western cultures which institute lengthy procedures of enticement and sensuality, long series of gifts and counter-gifts, to preserve “symbolic exchange” and seduction by wrapping and enfolding sexuality, deferring it away from its compulsive urge to be immediately “realized.”
But Dr. McCoy’s disposition in this scene is just at the border between ritualized seduction and crude desire. The Chief Surgeon fancies himself out loud as the pretty Yeoman’s “Brave Knight” or intrepid protector from the lurking dangers of the enigmatic locale, ready at the drop of a handkerchief to fight off the dagger-toting Don Juan and all legions of “coarse enticer” rivals. Seeing Tonia wear the “fairy tale” dress heightens his feeling of chivalry, but also intensifies his desire as well as his frustration at these frequent intrusions by mysterious characters which are derailing his drive for libidinal satisfaction.
Interspersed with camera shots of the mortally perilous growl of the roving Bengal tiger, a heavily armored Black Knight on horseback emerges from the farthest point of the glade. He charges towards McCoy. The unarmed Doctor defiantly steps forward into the path of the oncoming jousting lance, dead set on convincing himself that the visitors are mere figments of the imagination that can do no actual harm. “These things cannot be real,” he declares. But the “hallucination” of the dark mounted soldier stabs McCoy through the chest with his piercing tournament weapon while galloping at full speed and in full reality.
The apparent death of his ship’s third-ranking officer and personal friend vividly brings home to Captain Kirk the earnestness of what a perilous situation he and the other Starfleet crew members are in on this strange world. An incomprehensible energy field emanating from below the planet’s surface has also rendered the transporter and all ship-to-surface communication inoperable, leaving the scattered remains of the original landing party cut off from contact with the Enterprise.
Alice jumped into the rabbit-hole without considering even for a second how she would get out again. She fell very deeply and for a long time, wondering if the well had an ending at all. She thought that she might be approaching the centre of the world, or that she might even “fall right through the Earth,” arriving at an antipodal country where people walk upside down. When she looked up after finally landing she saw only darkness overhead.
Dr. McCoy’s trajectory of engagement with the chimeras of his own imagination becoming physically manifest begins with the obscurity of Alice’s descent and ends with the deadly consequence of his vehement sexual desire towards Tonia Barrows. When the physician experiments with the images of amorous arousal in his own head, he comes directly into contact with the logistical mechanism of an ardent energy seeking release that has little to do with the nuanced or seductive play of appearances. “When I peek, it’s in the line of duty,” the medical doctor quips to the Yeoman after she warns him away while she is undressing behind a shrub. McCoy’s fantasies of erotic passion propel him forthwith into an exchange nexus of possession of the woman as object or special effect, exemplified in Don Juan as the emblematic figure of that “vulgar seduction” which seeks endless accumulation of “conquests” without loss. It is at the very moment of picturing himself as sovereign subject in this one-way economy of yearning and ownership that his mind summons Death, in the corporeal form and obvious iconography of the Black Knight, risen up from the “depths of his subconscious.” Stepping out in enervation from the artificial light of his daily rational responsibilities, McCoy shows himself to be totally clumsy in his relation to the symbolic and happily superficial universe into which he has wandered, and in whose “reality” he is hardly able to believe. Failing to handle the situation with the strategic or ritualized behavior that is warranted in a symbolic economy of annulment and reversion, he instead falls into the obsessive logic of instant gratification and frontal confrontation with the imaginary sphere. Instead of improvising a dramaturgy of fanciful illusion, he insists that he will either believe in it entirely or not at all. He shows no subtlety in his exchange with fantasy and death, claiming to be superior to them both due to his “scientific reason,” making the fatal mistake of opting to challenge head-on the mortality which awaits us all. He craves being done with death’s interference once and for all. He does not grasp that safety from death is achieved by creatively knowing how to seduce death, how to “send it away,” as a child might say, by turning it away from its “truth.”
The unhappy memory of Finnegan is so troubling to Captain Kirk that he irrationally holds the rapscallion Irishman accountable for Dr. McCoy’s death and for the general inscrutability of what has been happening to the Enterprise landing party since their arrival on the planet. Kirk declares that he “want[s] some answers” from the youthful sprite. Just after the second apparition of his arch-competitor, Kirk races through the glade where McCoy was felled by the Knight and into the woods in Finnegan’s Wake. The chuckling hooligan plays hide-and-seek with him in the trees. Mocking laughter, echoing through the forest, seems to be coming at Kirk from all sides. The two foes run onto the expanse of barren rocks and precipices at the outskirts of the resplendent grove. The upperclassman is on a low plateau of the desert-like area. He is suddenly on top of the highest rock. He is leaning on his elbow, posing insolently on a ledge. His instances are all over the canyon, disappearing and reappearing, his voice reflecting everywhere as he roams and leaps with boundless energy. “Find me, can’t you see me, come on and get me, here I am.”
He is like a powerful adversarial system or “significant other,” moving freely around the mind, its imposing strength resounding in the most clandestine recesses and rifts. As he at last faces the boastful Finnegan standing derisively above him, Captain Kirk has absolutely no idea how this individual from more than fifteen years ago could possibly have gotten here, how he could possibly be appearing right now in front of him. Captain’s Log, Stardate 3025.8: “We are seeing things that cannot possibly exist, yet they are undeniably real.” The complete indeterminacy and suspense of the encounter with Finnegan, the lack of explanation for why he is there, underlie the artistic and existential richness of this moment. Kirk feels mysteriously drawn to the unknown status and elusive “real” of the reappearance of his nemesis, whom he owed a day of reckoning that had been put off far too long.
“This way Jim boy, that’s the boy… Old legs givin’ out, Jimmy boy? Ha-ha-heeheehee! I’m still twenty years old. Look at you, you’re an old man!” An all-out brawl ensues.
Although inferior to his opponent in physical strength, agility, and endurance, Kirk wins the fight by dint of sheer resentment and determination. After connecting with a few good punches, Captain Kirk hears Finnegan complimenting him on his martial technique. “Not bad. Kind of makes up for things, huh Jim?” As he pounds the prostrate younger man uncontrollably with his fists, Kirk discharges his deep exasperation both at the troublemaking Finnegan’s past badgering of him and at the unfathomable circumstances which have engulfed the Enterprise landing party on this planet. Through psychological transference or the crossing of neural pathways, Kirk has come to hold Finnegan personally responsible for the misfortune of his people. In fact, the tribulations and collective state of distress of the Captain’s crew are the result of their misrecognition of the procedures and operations of the immersive virtual reality entertainment system of the Amusement Park Planet. In Japanese dubbing, the episode is called Okasina Okasina Yûen Wakusei, or Very Funny Amusement Planet. Kirk beats Finnegan into unconsciousness, landing a final, decisive blow to his face.
A dignified middle-aged gentleman with white hair and a broad smile, wearing a flowing green garment decorated with gold paisley patterns, walks into full view and enlightens Captain Kirk in plain English about the virtuality engine which the Enterprise landing party has stumbled upon. The Disneyland-style fantasy ambience was built for the recreational pleasure of the super-advanced alien species to which the reassuring Caretaker, played by Oliver McGowan, belongs. “The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play,” Kirk is quick to observe. “We’ve only just discovered that you do not understand all this,” the Caretaker laments. “These experiences were intended to amuse you. Here you have to only imagine your fondest wishes, old ones which you wish to relive, or new ones, anything at all. Anything that pleases you can be made to happen.”
“That still doesn’t explain the death of my ship’s surgeon,” Kirk angrily tells the apologetic Dreamworks superintendent. But from behind him, the Captain unexpectedly hears a familiar voice. “Possibly because no one has died, Jim,” utters the Doctor with more than a trace of ecstasy and good humor. McCoy is feeling fit again, with a Las Vegas-style showgirl hanging from each arm, replicas of two chorus line members from “a little cabaret I know on Rigel II.”
The remorseful Caretaker is so eager to make amends for the distasteful “accident” that Captain Kirk and his entourage regretfully endured that he later launched an ultimately successful campaign for the entry of the Amusement Park Planet into the United Federation of Planets. The official Federation Travel Guide (Friedman 1997) nowadays lists the planetwide imagination factory as a three-star galactic attraction, run by friendly, super-evolved aliens, “equipped with sophisticated subterranean [sic -- we are not on Earth] equipment capable of reading the minds of its visitors, then almost instantly creating whatever the visitor is thinking about.”
The underground complex of virtual environment technologies is so advanced that its biomechanical manufacturing and repair facilities are capable of bringing the deceased Dr. McCoy (and Ensign Martine, ‘killed’ by the Sopwith Camel) back to life, using Artificial Life “multicellular casting” techniques for organ, tissue, and skin regeneration. The plants, trees, and grass of the area’s lovely scenery are also fabricated from this same basic biotech cell structure.
Kirk hails the Enterprise on his once again functioning communicator, and tells Lt. Uhura to inform the whole crew to get ready for “the best Shore Leave they’ve ever had.” They are invited by the Caretaker to enjoy his virtual reality entertainment system, so long as they “use the proper caution.” The Captain strolls off with the avatar of his old flame Ruth, who told him earlier that she would be waiting for him after he finished “what he had to do.” Kirk will delight in the normalized transactions of the virtuality engine, now that the curtain has fallen on the real fascination of the episode, which was the “surprise” of virtual reality.
From VR’s surprise to its later hyper-reality, the tension between the real and the imaginary is replaced by the effacement of their difference. Finnegan is the focal point of the tension between real and imaginary that the story brings into sharp relief, convincingly demonstrating that the unexpected appearance or surprise of cyberspace is more fecund than its routine functionality. The mischievous scamp, a figure suggestive of Puck from English folklore or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, haunts Kirk, but in a way that is obviously more fertile than McCoy’s destructive confrontation with the Black Knight. Without a sense of artful or theatrical creativity, an appreciation of the rules, advanced technological imaging systems leave the complex mind without a road map for navigating the demons that exist deep within the “unconscious.” The duel relationship with the demon or double, as in Kirk’s ritualized showdown with Finnegan, is a mise-en-scène that detours the inevitability of death, playfully deviating it in small doses, a healthy expression available to us through ceremony and artifice. The encounter with Finnegan is enacted in the shallow realm of allurement, as opposed to the travails of Dr. McCoy, whose interactions take place in the strata of depth psychology. The duality of Kirk and Finnegan is not a configuration of the psychological subject or the pent up energy of his hidden fantasies and desires, as in a libidinal economy or consumer society of “abundance.” It is rather the energetic Finnegan who is the acknowledged “master” of an eminently reversible system. This powerful system must be dealt with strategically and deflected from its “truth.” The choreography of the fight scene between Kirk and his nemesis meticulously stages a succession of maneuvers, suckering tactics, feignings, and counter-punches. Kirk plays skillfully with the apparition from his own mind, allows himself to be seduced by it, and comes out of the experience genuinely transformed in a positive way.
The surprise or accident of virtual reality, as depicted in Shore Leave, is interestingly contrasted with the virtual reality technology of the Holodeck, which later assumes such a major role in Star Trek television series like The Next Generation and Voyager.
