Season 1 Episode 16 ('Shore Leave')

Delightful episode. I thought it was going the way of earlier eps, but it ended up being exactly what I hoped it would be! Pleasant, no one is evil, hilarious, and good fun. It kind of peaked at the beginning, with McCoy's brief Alice-In-Wonderland-interlude, but it remained good fun throughout.

The Enterprise finds a planet devoid of life and considers letting everyone off the ship to hang out and chillax for a bit after their trying experiences of the past 15 episodes. Then McCoy sees a human-sized rabbit who's running late, and a blonde girl who's chasing after him, and they end up getting wary. There's a mixture of various fantastic things going on, with fighter pilots doing strafing runs and black knights threatening fair maidens, and when they kill McCoy, you think "Oh, shit, I guess it's a bunch douchebag over-powered mentalists trying to exterminate humanity again," but it ends up being not-that.

When the credits rolled, and I saw 'Written by Theodore Sturgeon,' it all made sense. I'm not super-familiar with his work but my brother wrote a thesis on the guy, and I think he was the real-life basis for Mr. Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, so it would make perfect sense that an episode he wrote would buck the banal trends and be a thoroughly fun experience. It would also make sense that it fit firmly within the pulp-sci-fi tropes that were well-established by the time of Star Trek, but I'd rather see a cliche well executed than anything outside of a new cliche being born (which innately involves solid execution).

Random stats: A week after my brother cancelled his NetFlix account before I found someone else I could piggyback off of for this blog, 3 shots of New Amsterdam gin that confusingly taste of chocolate, 1 big rush to get this typed so I can go watch X-files with my roommate, and 100% satisfaction at being able to continue this blog, after thinking I was going to have to let it die.