Star date: None given
Summary: In response to a 100-year-old radio transmission from the planet Gamma Iotia 2, the Enterprise is following up on the planet's encounter with the Federation starship Horizon which was destroyed shortly after leaving the planet 100 years before. It is suspected that the Horizon "contaminated" the planet, then on the brink of industrialization, by leaving behind information about the Earth's past. Kirk arranges to meet with one of the planet's leaders, Boss Bela Okmyx. When he beams down with McCoy and Spock, they are startled to find that the Iotians have modeled their society after Chicago gangsters of the 1920's.
Okmyx is the most powerful gangster boss on the planet, and he wants Kirk to provide him with advanced technology --- primarily phasers --- so he can consolidate his grip on power. When Kirk refuses, Okmyx detains them, and radios up to the Enterprise that they have 8 hours to acquiesce or Kirk, Spock and McCoy will be killed. Kirk facilitates an escape by drawing Okmyx's guards into a nonsensical card game, then orders Spock and McCoy to return to the ship while he captures Okmyx. However, before he can reach Okmyx, Kirk is recaptured by gangsters working for Boss Krako, one of Okmyx's many rivals.
Like Okmyx, Krako also wants phasers so he can be the top boss. As with Okmyx, Kirk refuses, and is once again locked up. Once again Kirk escapes. In the meantime, Okmyx contacts Spock on the Enterprise and offers a truce, telling Spock he'll help find Kirk if Spock and McCoy return to the surface. Seeing no option but to trust Okmyx, Spock once again beams down with McCoy, and Okmyx immediately takes them prisoner again. This lasts only moments, however, as Kirk bursts through the door, turning the tables yet again. For some reason, Kirk decides to pay another visit to Krako, this time dressed appropriately; he orders two of Okmyx's lieutenants to undress, so that Kirk and Spock pay their visit to Krako in the height of 1920's fashion. Along the way, we find that Kirk has much to learn about driving 1920's-vintage automobiles.
In the end, using what is presumably a Chicago accent, Kirk manages to collect all of the Iotian bosses in Okmyx's billiards room, and offers them a deal wherein Okmyx will be the head boss with the others working for him, and the Federation will come by once a year and take a 40% cut. The bosses are reluctant to agree, until they see a demonstration of the Federation's might: the Enterprise using its phasers set on stun to knock out all combatants on both sides of a gunfight. Once they have returned to the ship, Spock raises concerns about the Federation's cut. Kirk addresses this concern by proposing that the money will be used to "guide the Iotians into a more ethical system".
Oh, those fun-loving, devil-may-care gangsters! Is there anything more adorable? With their amusing speech patterns and slang expressions --- when you "bag" one of your enemies so you can "put him on ice" or "smoke 'em", and those folksy accents they use! There's hardly anything cuter, unless it's the 10-year-old boy merrily running around the street waving his switchblade knife, or perhaps the prostitutes with the handguns strapped to their hips, complaining about street conditions even after they've paid Boss Okmyx his percentage. And most adorable of all, the way one of Okmyx's boys falls backward into some bags of trash after Krako's boys execute a "hit" on him.
No, wait a minute. That part was supposed to be serious. And perhaps the part with the prostitutes was, too. But the 10-year-old with the switchblade really was meant to be endearing, which is kind of awful.
This show almost has more things wrong with it than I can name, but its biggest problem is that it doesn't know whether it wants to be serious or funny. Let's be clear: organized crime is not funny, it's serious. Prostitution is serious. Kids growing up carrying knives in a world full of guns is serious. Drive-by shootings are serious. Full-blown shootouts between gangs in the middle of the street in the middle of the day are serious. All of these things are presented in this show, but rarely are they presented seriously.
Unfortunately, they are presented seriously just often enough to take most of the fun out of Kirk's gangster impersonation, for example. So while I am willing to give a pass to an episode like "I, Mudd", which never tries to be anything more than fairly corny improv comedy, I can't overlook the really bad writing and treatment of gangsterism in this show.
Let's see --- Kirk, Spock and McCoy are captured. Then they escape. Then Kirk is captured again, by different gangsters. Then he escapes. Then Spock and McCoy return to the surface for no apparent reason other than to get captured again. Then Kirk rescues them. Then Kirk and Spock go visit Krako, where they are captured. Then they escape. Then they return to Okmyx's place and capture all of the bosses, then are captured by them, then finally turn the tables one them on last time. And through all of this, no one is shot or killed. Well, two of Krako's men are hit by phasers set to stun. And one of Okmyx's men is killed, but that occurs at the very beginning of the episode, before the Enterprise crew is really involved.
REALLY? Instead of just, I don't know, telling Okmyx at the very beginning: "I don't know who you think you are pulling guns on us, but we can kill you and everyone you ever knew so stop screwing around."
Then there's the ending, where Kirk leaves the planet still in the hands of gangsters, just unified under Okmyx's control. Yes, this is probably a better arrangement than the one they had before the Enterprise arrived, to the extent that there should be less turf warfare. But the prostitution will continue, and the kids with knives, and probably the other things one associates with organized crime but which aren't shown in this episode: racketeering, drug trafficking, etc. Not that there's an easy fix to a situation like the one on Gamma Iotia 2, but Kirk's "fix" isn't really a fix at all.
I guess my real problem with this episode is that the writers decided to write a comedy about gangsters. And that's fine, so long as your script is totally divorced from the reality of how awful organized crime is. This script was not.
Here's the big payoff, in Kirk's explanation to Spock about what will happen when a Federation ship arrives once a year to collect the Federation's "cut":
I propose that our cut be put into the planetary treasury and used to guide the Iotians into a more ethical system. Despite themselves, they'll be forced to accept conventional responsibilities. Isn't that logical?No Kirk. No it isn't. In fact, it is gibberish.
Other observations about this episode . . .
I get it that this show never really had much in the way of a budget. So we keep seeing episodes where the Enterprise returns to Earth --- or something like it --- at least in part due to the fact that Desilu already had a lot of these sets built. But it is getting a little old, and I see we're not close to done with them.
The whole premise is pretty dumb, too. The Horizon left all kinds of educational materials, but a history book about 1920's Chicago gangs is apparently the only thing the Iotians read. And why are they still stuck in gangster culture? Chicago grew out of it in far less than 100 years, why not the Iotians, who are supposedly "highly intelligent".
Why do Spock and McCoy beam down to Okmyx's office with phasers if they aren't prepared to use them?
I get it that the writers wanted Kirk leading a meeting of gang bosses in a 1920's billiards room, but it would have made hella more sense to beam all the bosses to the Enterprise. That way, Kirk might have been able to broker a resolution that didn't involve perpetuating gangster culture.
The Moral of the Story: Meet the new Boss; same as the old Boss.
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