STAR TREK
"A Piece of the Action"

From Wikipedia:

"A Piece of the Action" is a second-season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series first broadcast on January 12, 1968. It was repeated on August 30, 1968, the last episode to air in the 8:30 pm time slot on Friday nights. It is episode #46, production #49, written by David P. Harmon and Gene L. Coon, and directed by James Komack.

Overview: The Enterprise visits a planet with an Earth-like 1920s gangster culture.

More here.

While not as great as last week's "The Immunity Syndrome," "A Piece of the Action" definitely deserves to be recognized as one of the great Star Trek episodes. It's a straight up comedy, and coming some weeks after "I, Mudd" and "The Trouble with Tribbles," both uproariously funny, it is clear that everybody involved with the show had completely perfected their approach to comedic science fiction: this is better, I think, than its two comedy predecessors, funnier and with a tighter narrative--indeed, it's paced like the best dramatic episodes, rampaging forward like a freight train, which is well suited to humor.

What's most amazing about "A Piece of the Action" is that it's all variations on a single joke, the incongruity between two radically different genres, futuristic sci-fi and the old Hollywood gangster flick. I mean, this is the kind of tongue-in-cheek hybrid that Quentin Tarantino and others made a billion dollars with years later. But Star Trek appears to have done it first.

Being a mobster piece, the episode is populated with wise-cracking thugs, dunderheaded tommy gun wielding psychopaths, trashy party girls, and mob molls. I mean, they just pull out every cliche they can think of. But what really makes the whole gangster thing work is using a couple of great character actors to play the rival mob bosses, Anthony Caruso as Bela Oxmyx and Vic Tayback as Jojo Krako. Both actors jump into it head first and never come up for air, creating mobster characters every bit as memorable as Tony Montana, Vito Corleone, and Tommy DeVito. They're that fun.

But they're even more fun when they're visited by Star Fleet.

Kirk and crew come to Sigma Iotia II in search of a ship, the Horizon, which was lost a century earlier, shortly after it visited the planet. Because the Prime Directive did not exist at that point, the Enterprise fully expects to find rampant cultural contamination of the Iotian civilization; they do not expect to find a world that has modeled itself on Chicago Mobs of the Twentieth Century, a book from the early 1990s that the Horizon had left behind. A great deal of the first third or so of the episode's humor comes from various crew members' confusion about the resulting Mafia planet.

Indeed, much of the story's arc is about Kirk's learning curve. At first, he's as befuddled as everybody else, and easily taken advantage of by the local mobsters--again and again, he finds himself held hostage, machine guns at his head. Then he starts to figure it out, escaping captivity by concocting a card game, in the classic and brilliant "Fizzbin" scene, to distract the thugs holding him, Spock, and McCoy on ice. When his science officer declares the overall situation to be totally illogical, Kirk finally has the permission he needs to go native and really get things done.

This one really is laugh-out-loud funny. The whole cast appears to be truly enjoying themselves, which makes watching it all the more fun. Go treat yourself.


Kirk and Spock using their "heaters" to subdue a couple of Krako's henchmen.

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