Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "A Piece of the Action"

I've mentioned in some of these commentaries that the writers of Star Trek had to have been high when they came up with some plots.  Well, when they cooked up this week's episode, "A Piece of the Action," the writing staff was snorting crack with Tenzing Norgay from Sir Edmund Hillary's cleavage on the sharpened pencil tip of Mt. Everest.

We learn at the start of the show that a ship 100 years before contaminated a culture on a planet so remote that it has taken a radio signal a century to reach the Federation.  Contact was lost with the ship way back then, and until the signal finally reached Earth no one in Federation HQ thought it was worth sending a newer, faster ship out to see what happened to their comrades in arms.  No man left behind is apparently not part of Starfleet game plan.  I recently saw video footage of a dog on the highway who refused to leave the side of its doggie pal who'd been hit by a car.  When the chips are down and your ship is lost and drifting in the emptiness of space, it's nice to know these stalwarts of the 23rd century can't be counted on as much as a mutt on the street.  Hey, Starfleet, boldly go to a dictionary and look up "loyalty."  

So Kirk has been ordered to visit the last planet the other ship visited, and he's told by the planet's "boss," Bella Oxmix, to beam down near the yellow fireplug on the corner.  Yes, that's right.  It's been a long time coming, but we've finally reached Planet Gangster, and I'm finally challenged by a Star Trek episode so monumentally stupid in concept and so spectacularly awful in execution that it's nearly impossible to mock.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a Paramount backlot where two dozen extras march around carting machine guns.  The men wear pinstripe suits, the woman all look like Betty Boop B-girls, and no one bats an eye when three guys in yellow and blue pajamas suddenly materialize in their midst.  Kirk and the boys are immediately taken captive by two machine gun-toting goons who take the landing party's phasers and communicators.

One of the kidnappers talks a lot, the other is mute because Paramount has to pay extra to actors who speak, and anyway Darryl is only there to get shot moments later by more gun-toting toughs, these ones in a passing car.  Once Darryl is gunned down, Kirk has an easy opportunity to knock Larry out and take back his stuff but, eh, why bother?  Evidently he can't work up any more energy for this stupid plot than me.

The landing party is taken to Oxmix's headquarters, and we learn that the gangsters of Planet Gangster have patterned their whole society on a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, left behind by the starship crew of 100 years before.  Of all the books to pack for a long space voyage, this seems a pretty unusual selection.  No Shakespeare or Dickens or even The Complete Works of John Grisham?  Actually, bringing an old-fashioned paper book at all seems kind of strange to me, although maybe Kindle takes forever to download when you're fifty-billion light years from Amazon.  It's lucky the old crew didn't leave behind Drawing 'Cathy' by Cathy Guisewite or Kirk and Spock would have spent the rest of the episode trying on bathing suits.  It's also lucky that the book wades deep enough into its subject matter that it apparently has phonetical instructions on how to speak in Edward G. Robinson 1940s movie dialect.  This is some book.

Kirk is told by Oxmix that there are twelve major bosses who run the whole planet, so apparently those guys who shot Daryl drove their Model T over from Africa.  Will someone please buy the Star Trek staff a globe?

Oxmix wants Starfleet "heaters" to take on his enemies, and Kirk finally begins to realize what they're up against, saying that "gangs nearly took over" in old 1920s Chicago.  Thank God we passed through those dark times and that Chicago is now a gang-free paradise that is teaching us all the ways of peace and brotherly love.  Kumbaya, my Loop.

Kirk and co. are turned over to some goons in a warehouse to give him time to decide what he's going to do.  That old book wasn't just a dialect coach, it apparently covered everything right on down to how to build the pinball machines that line the walls.  Kirk challenges the head thug to a card game and makes up the rules as he goes along in a zany scene that's as whacky and lighthearted as the Bataan Death March and twice as long.  He calls the game "Fizzbin," and arches his eyebrows and hams up his ridiculous dialogue and finally drops a card on the floor which is the cue for the good guys to knock out the bad guys.

Kirk sends Spock and McCoy back to the ship, then runs down an alley and jumps over a box.  No, really.  There is a tiny little box sitting in the middle of the ground for no reason whatsoever, and rather than go around it Kirk jumps over it.  

After his harrowing, box-jumping stunt, Kirk is taken hostage again and brought to see one of the planet's other bosses, Mel the short-order cook from that crummy old sitcom Alice.  Since there are only twelve bosses on the whole planet, I assume Kirk's captors took days to drive him to South America and it only seems like they've just driven around the block.

Mel wants phasers too, and Kirk tells him to kiss his grits, so Mel puts him in a little room from which Kirk escapes by employing a trash can, a blanket and a piece of wire that makes a cartoon "boi-oi-oing!" noise.

Aaaayyy!  I'm just practicin' for when we beam down to planet Happy Days, Mr. S.

 Across town, Spock and McCoy beam back down to Oxmix's office, the untrustworthy guy who kidnapped them before.  Did they teach military strategy or even Common Sense 101 at Starfleet Academy?  Spock could have beamed to the roof or the basement or the room next door.  Instead he beams right back into the same exact spot where guys with guns held him hostage before and of course the same guys are there with the same guns to take him hostage again.  I'm starting to think that Spock got his genius reputation the same way a certain resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue got his, because there is clearly nothing going on under this guy's Vulcan hood.

Kirk shows up and saves Spock and McCoy.  He's getting the hang of the joint now, and starts talking in a funny gangster voice.  He calls Spock "Spocko."  Spock, also getting into the swing of things, says to the gang leader, who is hesitating following Kirk's telephone orders, "I would advise youse to keep dialing, Oxmix."  One of the other gang leaders Kirk orders Scotty to transport over to Oxmix's office pleads "mother" in a comic fraidy-cat voice as if he's been beamed over from terrorizing Alfalfa in an Our Gang short.  God help me, I watched this whole godawful train wreck.

Kirk says into his communicator, "Hello, Scotty, this is Koik."  I can get through this, it's almost over...

Kirk puts the murdering thug Oxmix in charge of the whole planet, makes Mel from Alice his lieutenant and tells all the other gang leaders to kiss Starfleet's grits to the tune of 40% of "the action," which I guess must be something like planetary GDP.  Problem solved and violent dictator firmly in place, the Enterprise sets sail.

Not quite.  McCoy admits on the bridge that he left his communicator behind, and Kirk and Spock tell him that it's the basis for all their fancy-pants technology.  Rather than turn back around to get back the piece of equipment that could corrupt the planet's culture even more than the book that started the whole mess, Kirk cracks wise and has a hearty laugh.  I guess he figures he won't be alive in a hundred years when Planet Gangster becomes an intergalactic threat thanks to him, so why waste gas?