Synopsis: Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy beam down to a planet that has patterned itself after a book on the lives of Chicago mobsters of the 1920s.
In “A Piece of the Action” the Enterprise is sent to Sigma Iotia II, a planet that was visited a century earlier by the spaceship Horizon. This was before the Federation’s non-interference Prime Directive was in place, and the mission is to try to determine if contamination was made by the earlier visit, and if so, to try to mitigate it.
Not realizing if there was contamination or if so what type, Captain James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy are unprepared when the “reception committee” sent to meet them by Boss Bela Oxmyx turns out to be men armed with machine guns, dressed as if they were mobsters from the 1920s. When the landing party is brought to Oxmyx, they find a book “Chicago Mobs of the Twenties,” published in 1992, that was left behind by the Horizon and has now become the “blueprint for an entire society.” Kirk understands that the society that has now formed on the planet is the Federation’s responsibility, and as in other episodes in which Kirk is dissatisfied with the cultural development of a planet, he aims to fix it.
I have already discussed in past posts on such episodes as: “The Return of the Archons,” “A Taste of Armageddon,” “This Side of Paradise,” and “The Apple,” how Kirk often embodies a disruptive force to a culture which he feels is not progressing in a way that he feels is appropriate for human development. In this episode, along those lines I would argue that he is acting in a disruptive force much in the same way that Carl (C.G.) Jung did for religion for “modern” men, and James Hillman did for depth psychology. Jung felt that the monotheistic religions in Western culture, had lost their touch with the soul in pursuit of the spirit, and his concept of Depth Psychology was a response to that – a way of uniting soul and spirit. Hillman, a student of Jung’s, then went even further in his Archetypal Psychology, redirecting Jung’s own theories, to look at how our psychological “pathologies” needed to be “seen through” to find our inner daimon. This is an oversimplification of the ideas of these two men, but it does put across the point that they called to question a societal norm and worked within the culture to change it.
In “A Piece of the Action” Kirk does not completely disrupt the society on Sigma Iotia II as he did to the cultures on the planets of the episodes listed above. Instead, he finds a way to work within the present system to redirect it to the way he feels it should be. A more subtle approach, even if it is done while speaking in an odd Roaring Twenties era Chicago comic flare.
Original post created 24 February 2021
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