A Piece of the Action // Star Trek: The Original Series Reaction // Season 2 

8 out of 10 for me. Great comedy episode, but nothing important happens in this. I actually managed to successfully play a game of fizzbin with only a few minor space time anomalies resulting.

Good, lighthearted comedy - 7/10

I think I have always rated it a 9 out of 10. Humor, the pickle of fixing things while trying to not make things worse, getting to see the ship's phasers used over a wide area and learning about yet another early interstellar ship - this time one before the Prime Directive was in effect.

If you like this, you'll love all the parallel society episodes to come. The "what if" episodes as relates to history becomes Star Trek's go-to plots in the future. A Piece Of The Action is at least based on a starship accidentally leaving a book behind that falls into the hands of a very imaginative and creative people. All the rest are not. Star Trek is very entertaining but very short on historical knowledge. Like The City On The Edge Of Forever based on one woman's pacifist movement. No one seemed to remember Pearl Harbor, when America was dragged bloody kicking and screaming into a war it wanted no part of. Edith Keeler could no more stop Pearl Harbor than she could fly. And she could not stop Hitler declaring war on us a few days after Pearl Harbor and immediately beginning unrestricted submarine warfare against our navy and coast guard. So the whole episode was based on a false understanding of a minor detail like Pearl Harbor. And that episode didn't dare mention all the Jewish physicists and engineers Hitler kicked out of Germany. And Mirror Mirror? Ever see Das Boot? Or how the Soviet Army conducted itself during WW2? The front lines of the most oppressive tyrannies' armies operated the same as front line armies everywhere. Evil Kirk is Captain because he is effective and popular. But get ready for more entertaining and silly parallel societies that throw logic to the wind in favor of increasing the ratings on a poorly rated episodic show. Who knew Star Trek would ever become popular? Not the producers of the 60s show. They just wanted another season. Entertaining but silly. So get ready.

7/10. Good comedy, but they needed to take those books back and leave a different book, maybe a book called "The Finest Cuisine and Vacation Paradises of the World", and then they can have starships stop there for R & R.

"the best defense is a good Ofense" ~the cook on Alice

LOVED that few seconds scene!!

💯

Also known as "sleeping with the fishes". 😆

Hey,my ex-wife did this to me,you mean she was trying to kill me the entire time ???? Go figure. She told me she was teaching me how to swim more effectively.

I'm not sure it ever happened in real life. It did happen in the Untouchables series.

There's a Frank Sinatra crime movie called "Lady in Cement" and if you look up ad art from that movie you can see what the phrase means.

@@Kunsoo1024 Correct. It would be much easier to just tie a large stone or some other heavy object to them.

@@MarvelX42 what is tied can be untied. What's set in cement is..well, set in stone. Cement heats up as it sets, so cememt overshoes add the physical torture on the mental battering.

@@MGower4465 Nah man. The person is thoroughly bound, then placed in a barrel or burlap sack then either something is tied to the sack or something is placed in the barrel to weigh it down.

That isn't the same dentist from a particular 'Fans' movie who made his office into a tribute to all things Star Trek, would it?

@@jupreindeer No, I saw that documentary movie too. I think it was called "Trekkies." I'm sure the owner of "Starfleet Dental" would have mentioned it, if he was the kid actor.

In Colorado

The more absurd the situation you face, the more important it is to keep your sense of humor...Fizbin, anyone?

Except at night...

😁

She'd needs to watch old pre-60s gangster movies that this episode draws from. The gangster movies that usually get reacted to (The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Departed) wouldn't have the same cliches that this episode includes.

Of course, the crown jewel of these movies is "The Sting".

Thanks for explaining!

@@richardb6260 Hate to barge in, but just can't help commenting, that if you wanted something both really serious and really early for Bunny to watch, the TV show "The Untouchables" with Elliot Ness, played by Robert Stack, should receive an honourable mention.

Side note. The show "The Untouchables" was one of Desilu's (Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball of 50's sitcom "I Love Lucy" fame) first successful TV series. They later also created Star Trek. Lucille Ball was the one who approved both the first and second pilots of Star Trek.

I enjoyed it to, for the reasons you mentioned, and Bunny is right, you can't take this one to seriously, just ride with the fun I actually laughed when Kirk explained Fizzbin and asked Spock the fictional calculations. Sorry Bunny.

Anthony Caruso enjoyed being in this episode so much that he wrote a Thank You Letter to Star Trek's producers.

Star Trek was produced by Desilu, the independent TV studio co-owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. The jewel in Desilu's crown was the crime show The Untouchables, about federal agent Eliot Ness' ongoing battle against organized crime during Prohibition. This episode benefited from being able to film on the Untouchables backlot and use a lot of that series' costumes and props. And Anthony Caruso, playing Bela Oxmix, had a recurring role on the Untouchables as Al Capone's right-hand man Frank Nitti. In fact, he's basically playing Oxmix as Nitti on another planet.

@@user-mg5mv2tn8q You know I almost forgot that The Untouchables was a Desiku Production, didn't even think about them using the same props and background. Great information. 👍

I always thought it would have been cool when they made the 1980s Untouchables big-screen movie with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, if they had allowed Shatner and Nimoy to make a momentary background cameo, just for the heck of it. Perhaps Shatner could demonstrate that Kirk was still incapable of driving a car properly.

Yes! Harlan Ellison wrote 'The City on the Edge of Forever' (not Tomorrow) and named the character Rodent. You only see the name in Ellison's script or in his articles about his experiences. He created a bigger role for Rodent as a WWI vet with a back story.

City on the Edge of Forever, you mean.

They also were destroyed soon after.

@@robertcringle4865 Imagine bravely venturing out into the unknown universe in such primitive ships. Finding room to bring books, at that. Granted, my Nintendo DS has a cartridge that packs a lot of classic books into one cart. And a modern SD card could probably hold a medium library in digital form. And, even from the show's perspective, those micro disks that are inside the TriCorders pack a whole lot. (Granted, this knowledge is sourced from outside the show's typical supply of information.) And they are akin to the real life variant, Crystaline Discs. (Which I prefer to call Superman technology. It's an interesting read on these fingernail sized discs that can pack... was it Terabytes of data using multiple data reading lasers... if memory serves. A vastly superior way of storing information over some Solid-State Drive, which is just somewhat less volatile than common RAM.) Still... the show suggests that they had copied physical books and made it their bible to the ways to live their lives.

Plus, my sense has always been that the book being left was accidental, and it was the people on the planet who took it upon themselves to treat the book like a "bible." It's noted that they are very imitative. The show MAY in the near future explore a more intentional form of cultural contamination ...

You mean the dancing Klingons on Strange New Worlds or the dancing crew from SNWs ????

Thanks!

Kiss my grits! That show is where I learned the pejorative " dingbat " as a kid from mel insulting Vera. I use it now in reference to our Vice President.

I wish Enterprise had been on the air long enough to tell this story.

@@PenneySounds A good prequel show.

@@treetopjones737 A rare example of a true prequel, that fits the universe of the original instead of reimagining it. I made a prelude episode for it that's on my channel.

@@PenneySounds I remember the producers of Discovery saying it was set between Enterprise and TOS an insisted it was part of the original continuity. That's when they lost me.

@@richardb6260 Yup. Don't make a reboot and tell us it's canon like we're idiots. Somehow it works on people though. It's like they're hypnotized. I've even shown people side by side images of the Enterprise from TOS and the one from Discovery and SNW, and they'll say "Looks the same to me". When the latter is 3 times the size and looks completely different.

Sadly, the Enterprise was a prototype and was never launched.

​@@Serai3 Yes, it was created only to test the landing process after separating from it's 747 carrier jet. It was not space or re-entry capable.

@@michaelbruno1666 Yes, I know. Being a Trekkie since the 70's, I followed that development. My point was it would have been more of a tribute if they'd used the name for one that would actually go into service, instead of one that got mothballed almost immediately.

@@Serai3 I remember being very frustrated at the time that the prototype shuttle Enterprise! On the other hand... as hard as it was to lose Columbia in 2003, it would have been even harder, as a trekie, to lose the Enterprise.

@@gospyro True enough. :)

It does make me ponder from a reality point of view that when our great grandchildren... (or great... great grandchildren) reach out across the stars, will classic shows like this give them the wisdom to go forth and avoid contamination with lesser societies or not? (Granted, I see far more value in sending out automated probes and keeping Humanity on closer planets that can study and learn about the universe... as the challenges of space journeying truly are overwhelming until we overcome some technical limitations. But that is a discussion for science fact videos about real life warp engine design concepts, worm holes... and all that.)

@@jupreindeer I should think it can be a challenge to gauge a society's tech level. Do they not have space travel because of tech limits, or because they choose not to? My personal thought would be to plant satellites disguised as asteroids way outside a target system to monitor all the electronic noise a civilization generates. The raw data could cre a's te a linguistic base to learn the local languages and, once we can understand what they're saying, we could understand their technology levels and, probably, if they might not be accepting of off-world visitors. Charging in and beaming down certainly seems like the wrong approach. If one assumes there are 10 million intelligent species in this galaxy, how many of those are at a level of tech we would be at when we take our first steps? Maybe a tenth of 1 percent, with most well below or far above, maybe? The advanced ones would, probably, avoid us for the same reason we should avoid the lower tech worlds. That means its going to probably be really hard to find other people to visit that don't pull in the proverbial welcome mat whenever the grumpy, mostly hairless apes pass nearby. I have always said its just about certain this galaxy is home to huge numbers of civilizations, but the ones *able* to come here because they have a version of warp drive don't *want* to, because humans are their example ofva species that does everything the wrong way and succeeds only from a combinstion of luck and blind stubbornness.

Hey,my ex-wife did this to me several times in the past during our marriage,except she called it: Getting my feet wet.

@@kerry-j4mGood one. LOL.

Doesn’t sound like a good way to go 😭

@@bunnytailsREACTS It isn't,I almost died on my 4th journey to the bottom of a near by river,lucky for me my ex-wife doesn't know how to tie proper rope knots.

@@kerry-j4mit sounds like you guys had a true Morticia-Gomez type martiage, full of love and violence.

"Star Trek: First Contact," on the holodeck, used by Captain Picard on Ensign Lynch. Though I don't remember precisely, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some Thompsons in the Voyager episode "The Killing Game."

@@benjauron5873 Remember the Thompson can have a stick magazine instead of the big iconic drum. Also there are some dressed up Thompsons as future space energy guns.

Those were mobsters of the 20s not the 30s (going by the book). Even De Kelley, born in 1920, would still have been rather young. Al Capone's heyday ended by the time Shatner was born. But no doubt they saw many of the cars and maybe some carryovers of the way people dressed in their childhood and teenage years. And as you say they most likely knew how to drive a manual.

My dad was born in 1925. By the 1980s he was no longer comfortable with a manual transmission.

Oh yeah!

I have no idea how to play them either! :D

It's possible that's an intentional gag to show that Bela is imitating without understanding.

Absolutely

This episode has always been one of my favorites,the humor and antics are-PURE-entertainment.And I LOVE gangster films from the 30,the style of dress,the lingo,etc,etc,..

YES! This particular aspect, and the general concept of unintended negative consequences of cultural exchange, are the intellectual underpinnings of this story.

See you next week!

Great movie!

More of a tribute than you may realize as, according to some, the Iotians went from copying gangsters to copying Starfleet personnel by the time the next starship visited them. Not sure that Galaxy Quest's main premise wasn't directly inspired by that idea.

A lot of film noir from the 30s to the 50s introduced the country to the stereotypical gangster apparel, slang, and brooklyn accent. And true, the word "gangster" no longer means the Mafia type shown here

That IS him! He's taking a risk being around McCoy again. Be funny if he took McCoy's phaser once more and vaporized himself AGAIN.

ALICE ran for a number of years and was a great sitcom.

I'm just as lost in the 21st century as well!

Very good point

Also, although this episode was filmed well before the rise of the NRA and our current opinions on gun rights, it was prophetic. The brief text of the 2nd amendment has caused the gun rights controversy which we now enjoy. The deeper meaning of this episode is that it is a mirror intended to show how Earth civilization is shaped by books and text.

Gangster movies were a staple from the 30s on. Related is the detective genre, often with plots involving gangsters. Of course TV gave us Robert Stack as Elliot Ness in The Untouchables (1959-64) so the ST audience was well versed in these things.

Well with the que ball the "book" may have been lacking detail on shooting pool. To me, that scene always highlighted their "imitator" way of life rather than being originals.