Ron Tracey and the Prime Directive

[Captain Robert April]

The Prime Directive didn't come along until Gene Coon came on board (as did the United Federation of Planets), so I suspect that the script that Roddenberry wrote back in '65 probably bore a much stronger resemblance to "Heart of Darkness", with Kirk going up against Tracey because he was clearly and demonstrably wrong in setting himself up as a feudal lord, not because he'd violated some overarching regulation.

 

[Timo]

Yet Tracey's take on "feudal lord" seems awfully benevolent. The only thing he gets out of it is self-survival, and he gets that without taking anything away from the villagers. He doesn't have the usual nubile concubines with the grapes and lyres - hell, we don't even hear whether the villagers give him a warm meal every day. And instead of saying "My liege! My liege!" and bowing dirt deep, they barely listen to his suggestions.

Kirk is piously annoyed by the fact that the Kohms know about "fireboxes", and agitated ("The fool!") when he learns Tracey has been killing Yang hordes with those. Not once does he suggest that Tracey's position within the Kohm community would be objectionable; the slaughtering of the Yangs is the issue that makes him think Tracey has flipped. Being an unpaid mercenary of the Kohms is pretty far from the Mr. Kurtz thing IMHO.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

It's a safe bet the thing got rewritten more than a few times before actually getting the green light.

 

[T'Girl]

Soon, the landing party bodies begin to collapse into piles of white crystals, and the entire crew, including the CMO, are dying. The CMO records his "whoever finds this" message, just before collapsing.

Off subject but, this is from TNG's Unnatural Selection:

RIKER: Lieutenant, initiate the quarantine transmitters on the Lantree and activate her marker beacons. We'll need to find her again.

Would not something like that have make sense, quarantine transmitters initiated by the CMO as the the crew began to die?

 

[Captain Robert April]

Might depend on just how fast everyone's dying, including the CMO.

 

[Timo]

...And I could actually imagine the CMO not being quite as empowered to activate the beacons as Riker was. Since the TOS computers generally don't take verbal commands on key issues of ship operations (for whatever reason) but are operated by buttons, it might be difficult for the CMO to verify his authority and fire up the systems in the time he had.

Or then he planned to attach his warning words to the signal to be transmitted, and overestimated the time he had for the task.

The third possibility is that he told redshirts Late, Gann and Mornd to do it, and none of them stood a chance.

Timo Saloniemi