TWO CAPTAINS DUKE IT OUT ON A FAKE EARTH!

 

Episode Title:  The Omega Glory

Air Date: 3/1/1968

Written by Gene Roddenberry

Directed by Vincent McEveety

Cast: William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk    Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock             DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones”              George Takei  as Lieutenant  Hikaru Sulu              Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura          Eddie Paskey as Lieutenant Leslie                 Bill Blackburn as Lieutenant Hadley       Roger Holloway as Lieutenant Lemli                        David L. Ross as Lieutenant Galloway                                      Frank Da Vinci as unnamed security guard                 Ed Fury as unnamed security guard             Morgan Woodward as Captain Ronald Tracey                       Ed McCready as Dr. Carter     Roy Jenson as  Cloud William          Irene Kelly as          Sirah                    Morgan Farley as Yang Scholar            Lloyd Kino as Wu             Frank Atienza as Kohn Villager               Adele Yoshioka as Kohm Servant

Ships: USS Enterprise NCC-1701, USS Exter NCC-1672

Planets:  Omega IV

My Spoiler filled summary and review: The USS Enterprise arrives in the Omega system and goes into orbit around the fourth planet to find their fellow Starfleet vessel and sister ship, USS Exter already there.   The ship isn’t responding to hails and the sensors aren’t picking up life forms aboard.  Since sensors are not always perfect, Captain Kirk decides an investigation is in order.  He forms an away team of himself, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and Lt. Galloway. 

The Enterprise and the Exter

The four men board the ship via the transporter when they fully materialize they begin to look around.  There is no one on board but they do notice all these uniforms lying around with some strange substance in them.  They find all the shuttle craft in shuttle bay and no transporter logs to account for the entire crew’s disappearance.   Dr. McCoy looks into the “abandoned’ uniforms and with his tricorder discovers a horrible and disgusting truth.   That “substance” around and in the uniforms is the crew.  It’s all that’s left of their bodies when all of the water was removed.    They have seen the human reduced like this before but it was under a controlled environment by the Kelvans.  The Kelvans were at least able to restore the humans to their pervious form, providing that the objects the humans were turned into were not damaged.  This however was just plain ugly death.    

The turn on the final log entry from the Exter’s chief medical officer, Dr. Carter, who warns that if anyone is listening to this message is on the ship then they too are infected.  The only hope they might have is if they beam back to the surface as the Captain went down and seems okay.  The Doctor then dies and Kirk glances over and sees the empty medical uniform next to the command chair where he had been sitting.  

Once a CMO no dust

Not needing to be told twice the away team quickly heads down to planet’s surface by transporter.  As they arrive they find themselves in the middle of an execution, Kirk wants to interfere but won’t do to the Prime Directive.  However the whole thing is called off by Captain Tracey himself.  Tracey explains several things to his fellow Starfleet officers.  First he explains that the virus that killed his entire crew is incurable and they can only survive so long as they are on the planet’s atmosphere. 

Captain Tracey shows them around

Tracey then explains the political situation.  There are two groups down here.  The “Kongs,” who resemble humans of East Asian descent, are peaceful, civilized, and welcoming.  The other groups are the “Yangs” who are brutish and savage.  The Yangs cannot be reasoned with.  They also resemble human Caucasians.  As a Caucasian himself, it took a little while to get the Kongs to trust him.  Right now the Kongs are under heavy threat from the Yangs.

 Dr. McCoy uses the equipment sent down from the Enterprise to research their condition.  They have something bad and it reminds McCoy of one of the plague weapons from the 1990s. (So if they went back to Ceti Alpha V Kahn should be able to recognize it.)  Spock however has developed another more pressing concern.  From his interactions with the Kong villagers, Spock has learned that Captain Tracey has been more than friendly.  He is in fact aiding them in their conflict and has gone so far to battle Yangs using his phaser.  As evidence Spock points to an empty phaser battery that Tracey had discarded near an area where Spock and Galloway were attacked by Yangs.  Upon hearing this McCoy tries to defend him as a captain who just lost a crew and had found hospitality amounts these villagers.   Naturally he would want to defend them from harm.  Spock points out that it doesn’t matter and reminds Kirk of his duty. 

One Captain reveled to be a traitor 

Kirk feels conflicted at first about what he must do.  It is a conflict that he doesn’t need to resolve however as Captain Tracey gets the jump on them with a phaser.  Lt. Galloway tries to pull his on phaser quietly but Tracey vaporizes him.  That’s right he doesn’t stun him, he vaporizes him.  Tracey then takes Kirk’s communicator and calls up to the Enterprise to tell Sulu, who is in command because Scotty is clearly on vacation, that their illness has caused the away team to fall unconscious and they don’t want to send anyone else down here for fear of making it worse.

Tracey then tries to recruit Kirk to his cause, apparently forgetting he just killed one of his men right in front of him.  Tracey points out that the guard Wu is over 400 years old, and his still living father is over a thousand.  Tracey said this planet is the key to discovering a super-immunity that can give them a dozen lifetimes.  Kirk pretends to be interested but it is just a ruse to get Tracey to point his phaser away from him.  Kirk attacks him using his amazing fighting skills that are known to be peerless throughout the galaxy.  Actually it turns out he does have a peer, for Tracey also has a similar set of amazing fighting skills. Tracey defeats Kirk.  He places Spock in his own cell and Kirk a cell with a male and female Yang. 

Kirk battling a couple of Yangs!

Kirk gets to practice his fighting skills in his cell as the two Yangs try their best to defeat the Captain.  From his own cell Spock is able to land a quick nerve pinch on the female which allows Kirk to focus on the male and outfight him.  Later the male, who we later learn is named Red Cloud, hears Kirk use the word “freedom” with Spock that he identifies as one of his people’s worship words.  Kirk and Red Cloud bond a little and work together to remove the bars from their decaying cell.  However, Red Cloud betrays Kirk by using a bar to hit Kirk from behind on his head.  Kirk is knocked out and the two Yangs escape.

Getting hit on the head gave Kirk a nice nap about eight hours long.  When he comes to he gets Spock out of his cell and they head for Dr. McCoy.  When they reach McCoy he has quite the tale to tell with his research.  It turns out the true story of USS Exter is the disease that killed her crew could have been avoided all together had her landing party stayed on the planet a few more hours.  The planet’s atmosphere that had exposed them would have run its course and they would have been fine.  They are fine now to go back to the Enterprise.  Also Tracey’s idea of a thousand year life is a delusion.   The life cycle of the people of this planet was extended due to natural evolution.  Tracey’s life expectancy is the same as it ever was.  

Helpful nerve pinch!

Tracey then enters armed with a phaser and looking overwrought.  He explains the Yangs attacked by the tens of thousands and even though he drained multiple phasers it was not enough.  Tracey takes Kirk outside and threatens him demanding that he call his ship for more.  Kirk tries to explain how that is pointless but relents just to demonstrate its pointlessness.  Kirk and Tracey fight again but this time the fight is unresolved as they are both captured by the Yangs.

This is the point we find out we are on a fake Earth it turns out the Yangs are really the Americans with “Yangs” short for “Yankee.”  The Kongs are the Chinese Communists.  They bring in the US flag and try to say the pledge but the way they recite their “holy words” is garbled and Kirk is able to correct them.  As we are about to get our dish of Americana, Tracey being a spoil sport tries to ruin everything by trying to convince the Red Cloud that Spock is the devil.  This almost works but Kirk gets Red Cloud to agree to let him and Tracey fight it out.  As they are fighting Spock uses his telepathic mental powers to make the female Yang, Sirah, to open the Starfleet communicator.  Lt. Sulu beams down with two security guards (interestingly no one seems to think he is a Kong) and takes Tracey into custody.  Kirk explains to Red Cloud and his people more about the “holy words” that are meant for everyone not just a few.     

Additional thoughts: I am really not a fan of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planet Development.  I think it just shows a complete lack of imagination.  The crew of the Enterprise should be running to alien civilizations not more Earths.  The one interesting thing about this fake Earth is, unlike the others we have encountered before, this one seems older than us.   In Miri the long lived children were said to be centuries old.  That would mean our worlds probably developed at the exact same time with the only difference being in their 1960s they tried to extend their life and instead caused the zombie apocalypse.  The Roman Earth from Bread and Circuses was an Earth that not only had a Roman Empire but a 20^th century Roman Empire.  This means their Earth was three hundred years behind us.  Yet the Earth that we encounter in this episode had people living on it who were thousands of years old and they all were born after the Great War.  This means out in the galaxy there was another Earth developing their societies exactly like ours but thousands of years ahead of us.  The only difference is with them taking a very different turn in their 1990s.  I guess we can see what became of Earth if Kahn was left unchecked.

One thing this episode screws up is the racial demographics of the participants, which is odd when you consider that Star Trek generally speaking is noted for its diversity.  According to census data at the time the United States was 87% White, 10% Black, 2% Hispanic, Native Americans and Asian Americans were under 1%.  So the “Yangs” instead of being all white should have been mostly white with over ten percent of their number being people of color.  While China may have been the Communist nation with the largest population, Communism got its start in the Soviet Union.  So even if the “Kongs” should be mostly Asian there should be a sizable Slavic minority.   

Captain Tracey won't accept defeat!

So here is what I think the episode is trying to say.  During the Cold War it was not unusual for movie and TV propaganda to try to depict our side as a “good and virtuous side” and the Communists as the evil and vicious side.  A good example would be The Manchurian Candidate. In this episode when we first meet the Kongs they are the civilized, reasonable and productive people; where the Yangs are angry violent savages by comparison.  It isn’t until we meet the Yangs that we discover that they have depth and maybe even a reasonable grudge.  In fact the American audience learns they are us. The episode is trying to challenge the perception of the good guy/bad guy mentality.  We first encounter the Kongs who we see are decent people and start to hate the Yangs for how they threaten them.  When we learn the Yangs are us the episode wants us examine our own prejudices in how we regard certain people as enemies.  That being said, the episode doesn’t live up to its task.

Oh no! Fake Earth time

If any Starfleet captain loses his or her crew it is important to know you can’t ever trust them again.  Captains care for their crews and their sanity surviving them is very unlikely.  First we saw Matt Decker and now Ron Tracey both men of fine reputation whose mind was unable to cope with their loss.  Decker turns into Captain Ahab and Tracey gets obsessed with finding the fountain of youth.  Starfleet needs to establish a regulation that if a captain loses his or her crew that captain must be immediately committed for their safety and that of others.

Kirk explaining what the holy words mean!

              My favorite scene in this episode is when Captain Tracey has Kirk at phaser point and demands he call up to the Enterprise to have them send down more phasers and packs.  Kirk tries to explain that this won’t work but Tracey is beyond reason at this point, so Kirk is like okay and opens his communicator to make the request.  As soon as he makes it to Uhura she immediately calls Sulu over and they are both like WTF!  They try to respectfully explain that such an order doesn’t make any sense, as Kirk predicted they would.  Tracey has moment where he remembered how Starfleet officers actually behave.

When your Captain says something really stupid!

I actually enjoyed this episode.  It starts out interesting with the missing crew, and continue to be so with a captain who was violating the Prime Directive, it is too bad it falls off the rails with the fake Earth nonsense and insensitive racial set up for the Yangss and Kongs.

Holding a relic!

 

FINAL GRADE 4 of 5