Title: The Omega Glory
Airdate: 3/1/1968
Plot Summary
The Omega Glory follows the Enterprise as it comes to Omega IV. They find the USS Exeter in orbit. Kirk, Bones, Spock, and Lt. Deadshirt go over to investigate and they find the crew dead and reduced to crystal piles.
It turns out the planet carries a disease and if you bring it back, you die fairly quickly.
However, the planet seems to protect you so the away team beams down. There they find Ron Tracey, the captain and only survivor working with the Kohms to hold off the Yangs in a civil war.
He is using Federation weapons to do it, a clear violation of the Prime Directive. Tracey has found there is something on the planet that allows for near immortal long life as well as curing the disease.
Kirk must stop him, but he finds the planet holds a bigger secret than any of them could’ve imagined.
Risk Is Our Business
For the second time, Kirk has to clean up someone else blowing their nose on the Prime Directive. I guess he’s making up for past mistakes.
He shows he’s still the OG when it comes to bare knuckle brawling. He has to do it in jail for quite a while and then later on against Captain Tracey.
We also see he does a great job training his crew, as Sulu is on top of it when Kirk is forced to beam down weapons.
Logical
Spock uses his mind skills to get Cloud William’s chick to bring over a communicator and opening it, thereby putting an end to the mess when Sulu beams down with a security contingent to bring order to the situation.
He also ruefully mentions that he has tried to teach Kirk the Vulcan nerve pinch with no success.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones figures out the disease can be taken care of if you just come down to the planet to build up an immunity. He also figures out that there’s no magic to the immortality, the people have just evolved that way.
You can’t make a medicine to create evolution. Well you can in Trek, but typically no.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu takes command of the ship instead of Scotty, which starts to happen more and more. I think because he doesn’t get a lot to do otherwise. He’s ready to go to save Kirk. One wonders if he and security team were standing on the transporter when the signal finally came in as quickly as they arrived.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is absent this time around.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura answers the phone as needed.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty isn’t in this one either, oddly enough.
Canon Maker
I guess parallel worlds? The constitution has been written now on multiple planets, assuming there was a Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers as well. Ok.
Canon Breaker
In Patterns of Force, Kirk wonders to Spock what are the odds of a planet evolving exactly the same things as Earth, in that case the Nazi’s. Spock says it’s virtually impossible, which as it turned out it was.
Here when they find out this is basically Earth, complete with a duplicate copy of the Constitution, they babble on about the theory of parallel world’s development.
We already had Miri, complete with exact continent shapes to Earth and the upcoming Bread and Circuses. If I had to give a point to Patterns of Force, it at least identified the idea of exact copies of Earth as ludicrous.
Yet here we are again.
Uniform logo confusion continues, however I believe this will be the last time. The delta was decided to be on all Starfleet uniforms by Roddenberry by this episode’s airing, but someone forgot to tell Theiss so Tracey and the rest of the Exeter uniforms have their own unique logo.
Spock is established as a touch-telepath and once again we throw that out the window.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
Lt. Galloway is killed by Tracey. He was already injured, this was an insult.
Technobabble
When Spock gets the female to open the communicator, it seems to open on its own, as if spring loaded or something. We’ve only see it open when a user flicks it open or opens manually. Maybe this is a canon breaker or maybe no one typically uses that function. Hard to say.
Phasers can be drained if you use them enough. We saw that only once before when Sulu was stuck on the frozen planet while Kirk was busy raping Rand.
I Know That Guy:
Morgan Woodward and his crazy eyes return. He was last seen in Dagger Of The Mind.
Roy Jenson plays Cloud William. He was in Daniel Boone and the first man ever beaten up by Caine in Kung Fu. He may be a known by GenXers in the Eastwood comedy Every Which Way But Loose as the biker Woody. Oddly he returned in Any Which Way You Can but played Moody instead of Woody? Weird.
He was also in Red Dawn.
Iren Kelly plays Sirah, Lloyd Kino plays Wu, and David Ross plays poor Lt. Galloway.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I know everyone makes fun of The Omega Glory but I’m going to defend it. Slightly.
For one, the pro-America stance is great. Kirk saying that “these words have to apply to everyone! Or they mean nothing!” is a great notion. It should be what America should aspire to always.
If kids internalize that idea, I got no issues with it, I’m here for it. Sure, we’ve failed at that time and time again throughout history but it’s still a good aspiration.
That all being said, this episode is all over the place. First it’s about the disease. Then about finding the fountain of youth. Then about the parallel earths, a story about the prime directive. Pick a lane!
It also is probably the first one showing a command level officer, most notably Admirals in The Next Generation era, going totally evil.
One thing I liked about The Doomsday Machine was that Decker was coming from a place of purity. He felt enormous guilt at losing his crew and wanted to stop a thing of incredible destruction power. He made bad choices but totally understandable ones.
Tracey on the other hand is completely irredeemable. He lies, he destroys the Prime Directive, he murders without remorse, he’s a complete piece of shit.
One wonders how such a psychopath could get as far as he did in Starfleet. No psych evaluations?
Then there’s the idea of an exact copy of the Constitution coming about on another Earth clone. The Original Series couldn’t decide if this was ridiculous or happened quite frequently. It was ridiculous and I’m glad it was discarded in the The Next Generation era.
Overall I may like the end message of The Omega Glory OK, but to get there, you have to contort yourself into all kinds of knots.