Star Trek (1966) 1.15

Shore Leave

Doctor McCoy and Lieutenant Sulu are part of a four person landing part on a planet that seems to be devoid of animal life. Sulu is analyzing some of the plants when McCoy sees a human-sized white rabbit followed by a blond haired girl. Minutes before they were talking about Alice in Wonderland.

McCoy contacts the Enterprise and tells Kirk what he saw. Kirk thinks that he's talking crazy but goes ahead and beams down with Yeoman Barrows. The now six people on the planet experience more strange encounters. Two of them are killed, McCoy by a knight who runs him through with a lance. Lieutenant Angela Teller is killed by a Japanese fighter airplane from World War 2 that guns her down. 

Kirk fights a classmate from the Academy more than once. Yeoman Barrows is attacked by Don Juan. She later finds a dress that she tries on.

They eventually learn that machinery within the the planet reads their thoughts and creates whatever it is that they imagine.

Thoughts

Lieutenant Teller was played by Barbara Baldavin who played Angela Martine in 1.14 (Balance of Terror). I didn't recognize her in this episode until after I did some research about this episode. Her hair was styled differently in this episode. She wore a gold uniform in Balance of Terror and a blue uniform in this episode. Memory Alpha seems to have some contradictory information about Teller. In at least one place it seems to indicate that it is Martine in this episode. Baldavin appeared in two more episodes of Star Trek but one of those appearances was cut and does not appear in the final version of that episode. It only lives on as a DVD extra for The Space Seed.

This is the only episode in which Yeoman Barrows appeared. She also appeared in Star Trek stories in other media, novels and comic books. Barrows and Doctor McCoy seem to have a thing going in this episode. I'm not sure what the age difference is supposed to be for the characters but DeForest Kelley was 18 years older than Emily Banks, who played Barrows.

There's a scene where Kirk, McCoy, and Barrows hear shots being fired and go running to see what's going on. Kirk and McCoy are both carrying phasers. Barrows does not have a phaser. Why not?

This is a fairly bland story in my opinion. I'm positive that I've seen it before but it has been a long time since I last watched it. I remembered it as being better than this but I don't have any clear recollections as to why. The whole episode seems to turn on the fact that Kirk and the others don't know what's going on. The reveal didn't add anything to the episode. There are no real character moments that I could discern. Not a complete waste of time but this feels like a lesser episode of this season.