In The Naked Time, when Riley announced that “there will be a dance in the ship’s bowling alley”, do you believe there really WAS a bowling alley? Or that Riley was just babbling under the influence of the Psi2000 water?
Yes, the ST blueprints show it. I know, I have a set (doesn’t everyone? ;)). But still. Does the Enterprise have a bowling alley?
Because it seem so…blue collar. Bowling alleys are where hard working guys went to suck brewskis after work. It never seemed like something enlightened people that played tri-dimensional chess and watch minimalist Shakespeare plays would partake of. It doesn’t seem like a good game on a vessel subject to sudden unexpected gravitational changes. (Whoops! The ball went off the overhead. Again!)
It also seems like it would be difficult to dance in a bowling alley. You can’t (or shouldn’t at least) exactly walk on oiled lanes, let alone dance!
If you read the novels it’s even worse. They have multiple gyms, swimming pools, zero-G rec areas, the works.
But it’s not totally implausible. NCC-1701 is 947’ long, a bowling lane is 97’ (I’m rounding), we could guess there’s only a couple of lanes, it’s not going to take up that much space on the rec deck.
As for blue-collar, there was a crew in addition to the officers. They probably had their own rec desires even if the captain never wanted to play 10 pin. But I think the idea that bowling is blue collar only isn’t accurate. A lot of colleges have bowling alleys and plenty of white collar guys like to get a brew and throw a ball around too.
Plus, it’s not like crewman Steve is going to be bowling when the ship is under red alert. Yea, there are some unexpected bumps, but you just work around those.
As for the dancing, I’m putting that one on the Psi2000 stuff.
Keep in mind that, like most of the sets used in TOS, areas on board a ship can be rearranged to suit a variety of needs. It would be no problem to convert a bowling alley into a ballroom, a transporter room into a chapel, a gymnasium into a theatre, and so on.
So far as I’m concerned, if Riley said it and it’s on the blueprints, the ship has a bowling alley. And I also disagree that only Ensign Six-Pack would enjoy bowling. I’ve never considered it to be blue-collar and have always enjoyed it myself.
Nothing wrong with being blue collar. And even though I’m not, I like bowling. But the Enterprise “crew” is (per Roddenberry) all officers. There isn’t the equivalent of enlisted personnel per se.
It just seems such a weird sport for a starship. Much space-intensive specialized equipment. Unsupported open spaces that need to be in a highly stressed enclosure. What happened if a nearby explosion or a warp 14 turn caused twisting of all that open area? It could cause hull failure!
Though it would be fun to see an episode where all the regulars are there. Kirk, of course, bowls in the high 280s. Rand probably bowls in the 50s and falls down a lot, but it a totally cute way. McCoy bowls in the 150s, but his score drops off the more he drinks. Scotty, on the other hand, gets better the more he drinks. Uhura takes her game very seriously and bowls in the 190s, but only Spock gives her any respect.
It would be easier on the Enterprise-D. Holodeck bowling takes less room. You don’t need to store all that equipment. But they never let Data play. He rolls a 300 every time.
I imagine in 1960-whatever, it seemed obvious that people would still be bowling in the future, since they were doing so then, but now fifty years later, it’s not a very popular sport.
Space is a lot more blue-collar in TOS. There’s all these grizzled old space miners, space barkeeps, space teamsters, space factory workers, space mail order brides, space grifters, and so on. No actual literal space cowboys, but the characters in TOS are directly out of westerns and WWII.
And so the space sailors of TOS drink space rum, get in bar fights on shore leave, engage in sodomy, and go bowling, just like sailors from the golden age of sail. I guess they reserve the lash for the Mirror Universe, though.
I was a little confused at first. I thought that, sure, USS Enterprise might have a bowling alley but actually using it for bowling would be a bitch, what with the motion of the ocean and such. Then I thought new crewmen are sent to find the bowling alley in the same sense that they are sent to find buckets of propwash and rolls of flightline.
In the 50s and 60s, bowling was tremendously popular in the U.S.; it was something that crossed social boundaries.
My parents were solidly upper-middle-class in the 1960s (my father was a sales executive, and my mother became a real-estate agent once the kids were a little older). They were both avid bowlers, as were most of their friends (nearly all of whom were similarly white-collar types). My parents were in a couples bowling league, and then each of them also participated in solo leagues.
I would imagine that serious intellectuals (“longhairs” in that era’s parlance) might not have been into bowling, but it was definitely more than a pastime for blue-collar workers.
Having actually served on board the real USS Enterprise, I was also confused.
I can confirm that CVN-65 did not have a bowling alley, but that didn’t stop people from sending new sailors looking for it. It’s a testament to the size of the ship that people found it believable.
I think this is something that has continually evolved over the course of the years in television SF. Twilight Zone astronauts were almost hilariously blue collar – just working class guys from Brooklyn who happened to crew starships. It probably wasn’t until the space program really geared up that we got the notion of astronauts as highly trained professionals and/or highly educated geeks. Red Dwarf riffs on the notion by observing that even the most sophisticated starships are going to need some slob who goes around and services the vending machines.
