This guy was Roddenberry's first choice to play Riker. It's easy to see why. He really is adorable. The Enterprise picks up this Captain Okona who is a very Han Solo-like rogue to assist him with repairs to his ship.
He proceeds to charm everyone on the ship and pick up a couple of different lady officers in the process. His charming, swashbuckling, lady-killer personality was a little over the top and overdone. But I don't mean the acting. He played it just right, it was the character of Okona who is almost a little too much at times.
He also sparks the sub plot of inspiring Data to study humor. I actually preferred the sub plot in this episode. Data was the "Spock" character of the show. Although Spock would often claim not to have emotions, he did and they sometimes emerged. Although he claimed not to understand human humor, he often had a witty retort on hand that was undeniably humor. Data is genuinely incapable of emotion and although we see Data getting laughed at a lot up to this point for unknowingly saying something funny, we never see him learn from it. Character development is so important. This is just a small piece of Data. As the show progressed, he needed less humor references explained to him even though he didn't have the ability to find them amusing. He didn't stay stuck in his own stereotype forever, and it's episodes like this that really help that process.
He gets his advice from a random Holodeck stand up comic played by Joe Piscopo. They originally wanted Jerry Lewis, but Piscopo gets an imitation of him in there, so it all worked out. He tries to school Data in comic timing and delivery which is often as important as the joke itself. It makes for some wonderful and funny scenes as you watch the humor escaping Data at every turn.
As to the rest of the story, you find out that the outrageous Okona is a wanted man on both of the planets that the Enterprise had just happened to be passing through when they found him. The planets are at peace with each other, but it's a shaky peace, so naturally this causes friction since each one wants to claim him. One leader wants him because he had allegedly stolen a jewel which was their national treasure and the other leader wants him because he's sure that he's the father of his daughter's child.
I realize they didn't have the best budgets at first, but they had more than they did in the 60's. I'll bring up Roddenberry's complaint that he wanted to see new aliens, yet most of the time the aliens just looked like humans as it was in TOS. Once in a while okay. But too much repetition of this phenomenon added a bland feel to the show. He should've given up on the Ferengi a little sooner and started throwing out other kinds of aliens out there to see if they could find something intriguing instead of just humans in funny clothes.
Wesley hadn't done much this season, so they use his innocence to make the lovable rogue decide not to keep running from what seemed to be his responsibilities. Just more misuse of poor Wesley
In the end it turns out that Okona is trapped between Romeo and Juliet. Not a surprising twist, but not disagreeable. Benzan, the son of the other leader is really the father of Yanar's child (the other leader's daughter) and he took the jewel himself to give to her. Okona turns out to have been the go-between for the two young lovers for months. Of course, being the 80's the girl has to get in a few whiny lines about not wanting to marry anyone because she's embarrassed and agitated at Okona and Benzan both. But, alas, the love of the children melt's the fathers' hearts and Okona is free to go. Aww. That's the happy ending.
Data's story ends in disappointment however, as he realizes that he's performing comedy to a holodeck audience that will laugh at anything and concludes his experiments to be a failure. This is another clever example of how the holodeck would really work when it isn't going haywire, making the weapons really dangerous, and bringing people to life. And it's a building block in his character.
It's not a bad episode, really. Sappy but likeable. An important developing point for one of the main characters and also a good handling of two plots in one episode. It was just not the best effort ever put into a one-off episode that is never connected to anything else. Three and a half stars.
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