“The Omega Glory”
Written by Gene Roddenberry
Directed by Vincent McEveety
Season 2, Episode 25
Production episode 60354
Original air date: March 1, 1968
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. The Enterprise arrives at Omega IV to find the U.S.S. Exeter already in orbit. Kirk is surprised, as the ship wasn’t scheduled to be there. There’s no sign of damage, but no sign of life, either.
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Galloway beam to the engineering section (Galloway is facing a different direction when they materialize for some reason), and they find a whole bunch of uniforms and piles of crystals half in and half out of those uniforms. It’s pretty grisly. McCoy reports that the crystals are what would remain of the human body if you removed all the water from it. The crew didn’t leave while naked, they’re all still there and dead.
Searching the ship, they find only uniforms, no life. They head to the bridge to find the same thing. Spock calls up the last log recording, made by the ship’s surgeon Dr. Carter before he died. He says that anyone on the ship is dead and the only hope of survival is to beam down to the planet. They do so, and find a man about to be beheaded, with a woman held prisoner nearby.
But the execution stops, not because of the Enterprise landing party, but because Captain Ronald Tracey of the Exeter shows up. He instructs the executioner—one of the Kohms (who are all Asian)—to spare the Yangs (who are all Caucasians), but imprison them. Tracey had beamed down with a landing party. The rest of his team beamed back to the ship and took a disease back with them that killed them all. Tracey has remained immune while staying on the planet.
McCoy has equipment beamed down so he can analyze the disease. Meanwhile, Spock and Galloway learn that Tracey used a phaser to drive off a Yang attack on the Kohm village. (They were also ambushed, with Galloway hurt.) Spock also found several expired phaser power packs next to Yang bodies, and sees that thousands of Yangs are massing to attack the village.
Before Kirk can take action against Tracey—his use of a phaser is a violation of the Prime Directive—Tracey himself shows up pointing a phaser. He kills Galloway and contacts the Enterprise, saying that the landing party is fevered and delirious. Tracey then explains to Kirk that nobody on this world has ever suffered disease. One of the younger Kohms is over four hundred years old, and his father is over a thousand.
Tracey wants McCoy to isolate whatever it is that allows this immortality and extract it from the thing that kills you when you leave the planet. Kirk tries to fight his way out, but Tracey gives him a good beat-down and takes him to the dungeon where Spock, McCoy, and the two Yangs already are. McCoy is freed to work further on the problem, while Kirk is put in the cell with the Yangs, who also try to beat Kirk up (it’s just not his day). The fight only ends when Spock manages to reach through the bars of his cell to neck-pinch the woman.
Kirk’s offhand use of the word “freedom” gets the male Yang’s attention. Freedom is, he says, a “worship word.” It turns out that the Yangs aren’t savages who don’t talk, they just don’t talk to Kohms. At Spock’s suggestion of trying to loosen the bars in the old mortar, Kirk works with the Yangs to do so, but once the first bar comes off, the Yang clubs Kirk on the head and frees himself and the woman. They escape, leaving Kirk with a headache (it really isn’t his day)—but also a way out! They escape and head to McCoy.
McCoy determines that a biological war was fought on Omega IV centuries ago, which is what led to the disease that killed the Exeter crew. Much of the population was wiped out, but those who survived developed an immunity and their antibodies allow them to live a long life. He also discovers that anyone becomes immune after time—if Tracey’s landing party had just waited a few more hours, the Exeter crew would all be alive.
Spock’s about to jimmy the medical scanner to contact the Enterprise, but Tracey shows up and shoots Spock, badly wounding him. Tracey, who looks like crap, reveals that the Yangs have attacked the village. Tracey drained all his phasers repelling them. Tracey orders Kirk at phaserpoint to beam down more phasers so Tracey can fight off the next Yang attack.
Tracey relaxes his guard after Kirk makes the call, and Kirk takes advantage to run away. Tracey chases him through the Kohm village, and tracks him down—but his phaser is now drained of power. So they go hand to hand for a bit, only to be captured by a bunch of Yangs.
The Yangs capture McCoy and Spock as well. Kirk makes the hilarious leap in logic that the Yangs and Kohms are parallels to the Yankees and the Communists, but the war that was avoided in the 20th century happened, and the “Asiatics” won. Oh, and he makes the leap by observing that the Yangs are now acting like the American Indians. Sure.
And then they top it off by bringing in an American flag. Because of course they do.
The Yang male from the cell is Cloud William, the leader of the Yangs. He plants the flag in the Kohm throne room, and starts reciting a chant that is very much like a corrupted version of the Pledge of Allegiance. Which Kirk then finishes reciting, stunning the Yangs, as those are their holy words.
Tracey tries to convince Cloud William that the Enterprise crew are evil, while Kirk tries to convince him that they’re all just regular folks, they just happen to be from the stars. Tracey uses Spock—with his satanic look and “lack” of a heart (it’s not where it would be in a human)—to bolster his argument. Cloud William tries to see if the evil ones can speak the sacred words, but Kirk doesn’t recognize it—at first.
Finally, they decide with trial by combat between Tracey and Kirk, who are bound at the wrist by a leather strap. A sword is in the floor which a combatant can use.
As the fisticuffs go on (and on and on), Spock—despite being badly wounded—manages to make a telepathic suggestion to the Yang woman to use the conveniently-right-next-to-her communicator to call the Enterprise.
However, Kirk finally gets the upper hand, but rather than use the sword on Tracey, he spares him. And then Sulu beams down with two security guards, at which point Cloud William decides that they’re gods. But Kirk has him get up off his knees. He finally figured out why the sacred words were so familiar—like the Pledge, it is a linguistic corruption of the Constitution of the United States. The Yangs say those sacred words are only for the chiefs, but Kirk insists that they were written for everyone, and must apply to everyone or they’re meaningless.
Kirk says they’ll leave these people in peace to find their way back to liberty, and they take Tracey under arrest. One assumes Sulu and the two security guards stayed on-world long enough to develop the immunity…
Fascinating. Spock can apparently mind-control a Yang woman just by staring at her really hard, which is a way more precise bit of mind control than he’s ever managed before or since, since in the past he’s only been able to influence general actions (“A Taste of Armageddon“) or read things in people’s minds (“Dagger of the Mind,” “The Changeling,” “By Any Other Name“).
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy saves the day with his scientific prowess. Because he’s just that awesome.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu commands the ship in Kirk and Spock’s absence once again, reinforcing the notion that he was intended as the third-in-command from jump. It never made sense that the chief engineer was part of the chain of command (notably, the various 24th-century spinoffs did away with this notion), with Sulu always making a ton more sense as the ship’s second officer.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura gets to call the surface a lot. Fun stuff.
Go put on a red shirt. Poor Galloway gets attacked by the Yangs and then Tracey shoots him like he’s an injured horse being put out of his misery. Kirk barely even notices that he’s been shot. (Hell, Kirk mispronounces his last name as “Galway”—perhaps mixing him up with another doomed crewmember whose death had no obvious effect on him—at the top of the episode.)
Channel open. “Who knows? It might one day cure the common cold, but lengthen lives? Poppycock! I can do more for you if you just eat right and exercise regularly.”
McCoy making it clear that he’s a better scientist than Tracey, which the blue shirt should have already made clear.
Welcome aboard. Morgan Woodward, having previously played the insane van Gelder in “Dagger of the Mind,” returns to play the insane Tracey here. David L. Ross appears as Galloway again, and is killed, though he’ll appear again as Galloway in “Turnabout Intruder” (and as another redshirt, Johnson, in “Day of the Dove”). Ed McCready makes the latest in a series of appearances in Vincent McEveety-directed episodes by showing up here as Carter (he was in “Dagger of the Mind,” “Miri,” and “Patterns of Force,” and he’ll be back in “Spectre of the Gun”).
Various Yangs and Kohms are played by Roy Jenson, Irene Kelly, Morgan Farley, Lloyd Kino, and Frank Atienza, while we’ve also got recurring regulars Nichelle Nichols and George Takei.
Trivial matters: Sulu’s experiences in this episode prove handy in the novel Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, as a retrovirus he’s exposed to in the novel uses bacteriological elements from Omega IV, to which he’s now immune.
The novel Forgotten History by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett establishes that the copies of the Constitution and American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance were left by an Earth Cargo Services vessel, the Philadelphia, in the early days of space travel to inspire the Yangs in their fight for freedom, which makes a lot more sense than anything in this episode. There was no record of it because the crew of the Philadelphia all died of the virus after leaving the planet.
Gene Roddenberry wrote the first draft of this script early on in the first season, but NBC thought the script was weak (more proof that studio notes aren’t all bad). He was able to sneak it into production late in the second season, because it was obvious at this point that NBC didn’t give a damn. Having said that, it was during the closing credits of this episode that it was announced that the show was renewed for a third season.
In Ruth Berman’s famous “Visit to a Weird Planet” story in Star Trek: The New Voyages, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley trade places with their fictional counterparts on the Enterprise, and it occurs during the filming of this episode.
To boldly go. “All this is for nothing!” Whenever Star Trek fans get into arguments—which happens with depressing regularity—one of the talking points is almost inevitably some variation of “this is/isn’t what Gene Roddenberry had in mind.” Roddenberry’s needs, wants, desires are often factored into it, as if he is the auteur of Star Trek.
The auteur theory is a popular one, but it so rarely applies to screen presentations because way too many hands are involved in it. Even the most aggressive single-vision shows—J. Michael Straczynski with Babylon 5, Chris Carter with The X-Files, Joss Whedon with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vince Gilligan with Breaking Bad, Ronald D. Moore with Battlestar Galactica, to give some obvious examples—still have plenty of other people involved that make the show what it is (The X-Files without the influence of Glenn Morgan, James Wong, and Darin Morgan doesn’t bear thinking about). And then you’ve got other shows where the singular vision departs—Eric Kripke on Supernatural, Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing—but the show continues.
When people try to cite Roddenberry as the auteur of Star Trek, I cringe, because—while it was very definitely his creation—the show owes its success to the people he worked with, and the people who came after him at least as much.
And in some cases, people whom Roddenberry had no say in the hiring of (which is everyone after he died in 1991, obviously). I know it’s popular now to slag J.J. Abrams and his fellow Bad Robot folk who did the last two movies, because they’re not “real Star Trek.” I always laugh at that, because people forget now that Roddenberry spent most of 1982 going to conventions and urging fans not to see The Wrath of Khan because it wasn’t “real Star Trek” and that this Nicholas Meyer fella didn’t know his ass from his elbow and he would ruin Trek, and it wasn’t his vision, dammit. (Never mind that he made enough of a pig’s ear out of The Motion Picture that Paramount went to great lengths to keep him from ever having anything to do with a Star Trek movie ever again.)
He stopped doing that once fan reaction to the second movie was so overwhelmingly positive, of course.
The thing is, while Roddenberry’s creation was a great thing, it was a lot of other hands that made it great, because as a writer? Roddenberry wasn’t all that and a bag of chips.
Let’s look at his writing credits for the original series, shall we? We’ve got “The Cage,” a failed pilot (and a mediocre episode, all told). We’ve got “The Menagerie,” which wraps the failed pilot in an overly melodramatic bit of nonsense. We’ve got “Bread and Circuses,” which is actually a decent satire, if somewhat nonsensical. We’ve got the stories for “Charlie X” (which is actually pretty good), as well as “Mudd’s Women,” “The Return of the Archons,” “The Savage Curtain,” and “Turnabout Intruder” (which really really aren’t), and also “Assignment: Earth” (which is more of a backdoor pilot than it is a Trek episode). Oh, and we have “A Private Little War,” which is pretty awful. (We won’t even get into his three contributions to TNG, the mediocre pilot, the flawed “Hide and Q,” and the embarrassing “Datalore.”)
And then we have this misbegotten piece of crap.
There is not a single redeeming feature of this episode. Like Morgan Woodward’s last guest appearance, we have a bad guy in Tracey whose motives are utterly unclear. We don’t know why he suddenly decided to arm the Kohms against the Yangs, or why he decided to just murder Galloway. (Maybe he figured that he was just a security guard, and Kirk would neither notice nor care. The rest of the episode bears this notion out.) This is the second time we’ve seen a captain lose his entire crew, but where Decker in “The Doomsday Machine” was obviously suffering major PTSD, Tracey barely seems to even give a damn. He’s actually quite cold and calculating, not going binky bonkers until later when he’s been in a massive firefight that he barely survived.
And then we have the complete WTFery of the Yangs and the Kohms, down to the American flag (with 50 stars!) and the linguistic drift versions of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Constitution. (My favorite is that it’s the amended version of the pledge, since “under God” wasn’t added to the pledge until 1954, twelve years after it was adopted as the official pledge by Congress, and six decades after it was first written without those two words.) No explanation—not even the nonsense “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development” we got in “Bread and Circuses“—is even attempted. For some stupid reason, the landing party just accepts that this planet evolved in so exactly the same way, down to the handwriting on the Constitution.
I haven’t even gotten to the offensive racial portrayals here. Tracey expresses surprise that the people “who look like us” are the primitive savages while the “Asiatic” Kohms are kind and gentle, because of course, it should totally be the other way around! (One wonders how Tracey would have responded if Sulu had led the landing party…) And then Kirk makes the connections to the history of the western hemisphere, solely because the Yangs happen to dress like some Native American tribes. And then, of course, the “Asiatics” (wince wince wince) turn out to be the real bad guys (just like the Commies, those bastards!) and the Yangs are the noble freedom-loving folk and all they have to do is read their Constitution and everyone will live happily ever after. And then I start slamming my head into the desk.
Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, and for that, we owe him a debt of gratitude, because he created a truly great thing.
But he also wrote this abomination with its offensive racial portrayals, with its stupid plot, with its idiotic and unconvincing Earth parallels, and with a simply endless number of fist fights. Both are part of his legacy.
Warp factor rating: 0
Next week: “Assignment: Earth”
Keith R.A. DeCandido is the Author Guest of Honor at Treklanta 2016 this coming weekend, alongside actors Carel Struycken, Tracee Lee Cocco, Jack Stauffer, Java Green, and Lynn McArthur; fans Bjo & John Trimble; and numerous other authors, performers, and fan film folk.
You forgot one of the most damning points — the crappy ending isn’t even original. No, Roddenberry ripped it off from Asimov’s The Stars Like Dust.
That’s true—but that ending was imposed on Asimov, as recounted in his autobiography, by the editor H. L. Gold, and Asimov despised the constitution subplot and thought it rather ruined the book! So it was recognised as a terrible ending even by the first author to use it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that some Star Trek episodes are bad and Gene Roddenberry, much like George Lucas, was a great creator but a mediocre writer.
But having said that, I do find this one moderately entertaining on a dumb level. A preview of things to come in the third season…
The Memory Alpha article on this episode makes the following incredible assertion: “A letter reprinted in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story reveals that Roddenberry personally submitted his teleplay for consideration for an Emmy Award.”
It’s one thing to end up with an awful end-result; hey, it happens. It’s another thing that Roddenberry was apparently completely oblivious to just how bad this episode was even after the fact. I don’t really know how the Emmy process works now or back then, but pity whoever had to review that submission.
dunsel: I considered mentioning that in the Trivial Matters section, but decided it would constitute kicking Roddenberry when he was down………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh, yea, I’ve finally caught up to the re-watch in “real time”! Been enjoying these rewatch/recaps greatly. They inspired me to actually sit down and watch TOS with attention, since everything I remembered about it came from re-runs when I was a kid. It’s been a real eye-opener in all kinds of ways.
That being said, oy vey, this episode is a piece of poo. Redeeming facets…uh…Morgan Woodward manages to look really, really convincingly buggier-than-batsh*t scary? I’m groping, here…nah, that’s it, really. Except that somehow Kirk manages to beat down the big, supposedly tireless “savage” but in every fistfight with Captain Tracey (was it only two? or was it three?) he gets spanked like a bad bad donkey.
Spock’s Brain is still worse… But I didn’t remember this one being that bad. I’d give it 0 because McCoy is still awesome but there really should be an “Impulse power” rating like someone suggested in earlier discussions and this is a prime candidate.
Horrible all around with a plot that doesn’t make any sense.
Keith, disagree with you about The Return of the Archons, I thought it was pretty decent and creepy in the beginning though definitely became worse towards the ending.
Agree on every other point.
Is it possible for an episode to get a negative number instead of 0? Because this is actually worse than Spock’s Brain.
Fair enough Krad. And, to be clear, no pile-on intended.
Elliot– If we’re looking for a few redeeming virtues, the whole “weapon that leaves behind a few pounds of chemicals” is nicely grisly *and* budget-friendly, as it’s much easier to cast “a bag of salt” then extras. Which reminds me, I saw this episode in reruns as a kid and for ten years somehow retained the “fact” that humans are 96% water. It wasn’t until much later that I found out the episode is full of it and it’s more like 70%…
Wow, I didn’t know that you do ratings below 1. But the episode certainly deserves it.
Some additional points:
Why would becoming immune to a virus include developing an extremely long life?
Why do those Yangs wait until they have reconquered the very last village on the planet before they stop “living like the Indians”?
That final fistfight is so silly – after all the episodes where Kirk could outtalk anyone, he can’t even outtalk a mediocre demagogue who has been the Yangs’ enemy all along and has no better argument than Spock’s appearance? I guess that blow to the head did cause some lasting damage after all.
Redeeming feature: I liked it that Kirk could make the request for weapons Tracey demanded because he knew how his people would react, and the mock-apologetic look he gives Tracey afterwards. On the other hand, Tracey really should have known that this would happen… so, not really a redeeming feature.
I like Bread and Circuses, but it was written together with Gene Coon, and IMO he’s the best TOS writer (with the exception of Spock’s Brain); also much better than Nicholas Meyer.
@8 dunsel: Yeah, the low-tech wonder of “oh noes, it’s a pile of bath salts in a uniform!” was pretty special…I ended up watching this episode right after the one where everyone gets turned into crumbly pink cubes, so there was definitely some entertainment value in looking at all the ways you could be killed on TOS without leaving behind an actual corpse…
This episode got a 0. I guarantee that “Spock’s Brain” will have a higher rating than that.
One of the things I have tried to do with this rewatch is challenge some conventional wisdom. One is the notion that Kirk has always been a maverick who disobeys orders and goes his own way, which flies in the face of pretty much the entire TV series. Another is the idea that “Spock’s Brain” is the worst episode of Star Trek. It isn’t even the worst episode of the third season………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode is so bad that I had actually driven it from my mind entirely.
No way did NBC give a damn at this point – hence the efforts of your Treklanta co-guests the Trimbles to get that third season at all…
I kinda forgot this one existed, too. I don’t think I’d watched it again since first seeing it, until I watched it for this rewatch last night. Can I have my 50 minutes back, Keith?
(notably, the various 24th-century spinoffs did away with this notion)
Not quite. TNG’s The Arsenal of Freedom had the Enterprise’s chief engineer (of that particular week, anyway) challenge LaForge’s claim to command in the absence of Picard, Riker and Data.
This episode… Woof. We’ve got the “noble savages” on one side and the “Chinamen” on the other. I’m almost happy that the sketchy virology and the similarity between Omega IV and Earth are completely handwaved for fear that any explanation might cross over into what SF Debris calls “voodoo shark” territory, where the reason for ridiculous things happening serves only to make them more ridiculous. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VoodooShark has a better definition and examples.
I actually think “The Cage” is a pretty nifty little sci-fi movie. But it’s also by far the best thing Roddenberry ever wrote solo. He did have a good ear for dialogue, but his concepts left something to be desired.
As for this one, I always used to like Kirk’s big speeches about American values and all that, helped out a lot by the reuse of George Duning’s “Risk is our business” music from “Return to Tomorrow” (surely the best Kirk-speech music ever). But the older I got and the more I thought about the episode, the more I realized how little sense it made. Ohh, I went to such lengths trying to concoct a logical answer for how the Omegans could’ve had a United States and a People’s Republic of China thousands of years before either state existed on Earth. I had this whole backstory worked out where a couple of sleeper ships that fled Earth during WWIII — one from the US, one from China — fell through a time warp and crashed on opposite sides of Omega IV in its distant past.
But then, fortunately, I studied history in college and I learned something important: That a lot of the indigenous customs that explorers assume to have been part of ancient tradition are actually comparatively recent, and sometimes actually the result of earlier colonial contact. When I thought about the Omega IV situation, I realized that the American flag and the documents the Yangs possessed were in far too good condition to be thousands of years old. Without modern preservation techniques, they would’ve probably crumbled to dust long before. So they physically had to be much younger. And the idea that they were introduced to this paraphernalia by an Earth Cargo Services ship, the same as the Iotians in “A Piece of the Action,” made a lot of sense. Many cultures adapt outside ideas into their existing religions in a way that gives the superficial impression that they’ve converted to those outside beliefs, when actually they’ve formed a syncretic blend of the new and the old — like how Haitan religion incorporates Christian saints into the roles of supernatural entities in traditional West African religion.
By the way, Spock’s hypnotic effect on the Yang woman is a lot creepier than it seems, in terms of what Roddenberry’s underlying intentions were. Recently, the fellow who runs the excellent Star Trek Fact Check blog, and who posts on the TrekBBS as Harvey, reprinted a May 2, 1966 Roddenberry memo about the Vulcans, including the following passage:
This casts Chapel’s and Leila Kalomi’s crushes on Spock in a rather disquieting new light. At least he tried to resist taking advantage of his power over them, but still, the idea that this is what Roddenberry intended to be going on all along is kind of squicky.
It’s a toss-up between this one and the one where Kirk gets knocked on the head on a planet full of Native Americans for Worst Episode Ever. “Spock’s Brain”, mentioned above, is terrific.
@16 Did anyone ever ask Roddenberry to explain the logical contradiction inherent in feeling pride that you have no feelings?
16– Yikes. Although arguably it explains how Chapel was simultaneously engaged/convinced her fiancé was alive out there somewhere and also lusting after Spock…
Another bit of trivia: hilariously it was this, of all episodes, which was chosen to receive the View-Master 3D treatment (I actually have this set). Imagine if it were, say, the ‘Tribbles’ episode instead!
Hard to disagree with the overall assessment of this episode, but Morgan Woodward raises it (a little) by being hella fun to watch.
If I had to nominate a worst episode, I would go with that one where the bearded, crazy man is bouncing back and forth between universes. Don’t recall the name. The only thing that sticks in memory is how nonsensical and BORING it was. Though yea there’s plenty in competition for worst, Omega Glory being one of them.
#18 Are the Vulcans contradictory or just old-fashioned hypocrites? They don’t lie, until they need to. They’re pacifists, until they feel like fighting over their mates. And they’re all IDIC and hippie dippy, until they come across a species they don’t like, with noses held so high they’d drown in a rainstorm. Gee, what must their politicians be like?!
sputnik57: That was “The Alternative Factor,” which at least had Lieutenant Masters in it to redeem it a skosh. But yeah, that was pretty cruddy, too.
As for what a Vulcan politician is like — well, we met one! What do you think Sarek is? And what they’re like is arrogant and insulting and high-handed and snotty. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Christoper L Bennett – squicky indeed
ad – good point!
I can’t see why supressing emotion would mean you had to be hynotised to have sex, but what bothers me more is the idea of using hypnotism as a regular thing in social and economic contexts. Why would you need to use hynotism if not for coercive purposes?
Disagree, Eduardo. First of all, Yar was next in line to command after Data (with Worf being fourth in command after Yar died), though she was off-ship, too. Also Picard didn’t leave Logan in charge, he left La Forge in charge. Logan’s challenge was based entirely upon his higher rank and the fact that he was a dick. (Then again, Logan was played by Vyto Ruginis, who has spent a very long career playing pretty much exclusively dicks…..) And it’s a challenge that completely failed. You’ll notice that, once La Forge became chief engineer, he was never put in charge of the ship again.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22 Ha, good point! I always think of Sarek as Spock’s dad first, ambassador/politician second.
@24, et al And, IIRC, the test to see if you were allowed to be left in charge of the ship involved sending the Chief Engineer to his death (though it was probably just that formulation of the test).
26: No, the test is always like that. In the first season, three people passed, then Picard decided it would probably be better to start holding it on the holodeck.
I remember both “Visit to a Weird Planet” and its sequel, “Visit to a Weird Planet, Revisited” (which told the story of Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley on the real Enterprise). I don’t remember either story mentioning that “The Omega Glory” was being filmed (other than the circumstantial evidence that Vincent McEveety was there). It is certainly possible, but if so, where would the line “Scotty, get a report on that power source and meet me in the briefing room” (which was established as Shatner’s proper line after the three of them beamed up from somewhere in whatever scene they were filming) fit in this? Even if it was to be cut later in post production there doesn’t appear to be a good context for it. In fact, I can’t think of any episode where that transporter room scene would fit in.
This one was bad, and I completely agree with the zero rating. I hadn’t realized that it was written by Roddenberry, and knowing that does diminish my view of his legacy,
Keith, I slag Abrams!Trek not because of “real Star Trek“-ness, but because they are terrible as movies.
My standards aren’t that high, but I disliked the first reboot movie as much as you disliked this episode.
I am glad someone at Disney apparently kept him from ruining Star Wars.
For what it’s worth, I’ve also had to deal with “Are you possibly related to the flautist?” questions with respect to James Galway.
I’d like to think that Galloway, or his surviving twin brother (to explain his return in Turnabout Intruder), ends up becoming Admiral Tom Y. Galloway, as seen in various Peter David Trek comics and novels, but given that “I’m” an Admiral commanding a Starbase circa the time of Star Trek IV, “I”‘d have to manage some speedy promotions. There was a chance at one point that a “Tom Galloway” character would’ve appeared on Enterprise, in direct reaction to Peter’s Tuckerization of me, and that would’ve fit the timeline better, but alas it didn’t happen.
You gave “Datalore” a 4/10, back in the day. And here you call it “embarrassing”. For First Season TNG, a 4/10 is a passing grade, easy, if not Top Five. Where do you get “embarrassing” from all that?
FWIW, I think it’s a bad episode, too (and “Omega Glory” is even worse). I’m…technically more perplexed at the 4/10. Have you been revising your ratings?
But, if you first see this episode while still in elementary school–maybe early elementary school–it’s really good.
Another thing you may realize as a kid is that it’s got the same payoff as Planet of the Apes, juxtaposing the scantily clad cave girl with remnant symbols of America at the climax.
Come to think of it, they also had the basic seed of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, only part human telepaths controlling the regular humans while a fight scene is going to which the scantily clad cave girl is a bystander. Though, I think the reason Spock suddenly developed this power was because he knew it was the only chance he had at ending the episode before it got even worse.
Although, it obviously would have been better if the Yang’s first words to Kirk (proving he could speak) had been “Get your stinkin’ hands off me, you darn, dirty human” (“darn” because broadcast television in the 60s).
@24
When was Tasha Yar’s place in the…not chain-of-command, but, y’know. The succession thing…..when was that explicitly established? I’m not surprised that in TNG, bridge officers would be considered in the line of….thing….but I’ve seen Season One plenty, and I don’t recall Tasha EVER being mentioned in such a way. Troi fell into that role in “Disaster” (though I do kinda forget how she ended up on the bridge sans Picard, Riker, Data, AND Worf), because she out-ranked O’Brien and Ro (despite clearly knowing FAR less about…anything…than either of them, hence that part of the episode ended up being more about O’Brien and Ro fighting through Troi). But Season One Tasha (as contrasted with all the other Tashas, of course) did…nothing. When was her role as a possible replacement commander-person even mentioned in passing?
Worf was established as fourth in command in a bunch of places — one I know for sure is “The Best of Both Worlds” — so it stands to reason that Yar would have had the same place. It’s a supposition, but a reasonable one. We never saw it because she was always on away teams, never left behind on the bridge.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Muthsarah: I keep saying that the warp factor rating is the least important part. But also? 4/10 is pretty sucky. It’s below average. So no, I haven’t changed the rating system.
Also? Here are the season 1 TNG episodes by ranking:
8: Where No One Has Gone Before
7: The Big Goodbye, 11001001, Home Soil
6: Encounter at Farpoint, The Battle, When the Bough Breaks, The Arsenal of Freedom
5: Hide & Q, Too Short a Season, Coming of Age,
4: Datalore, Heart of Glory, Symbiosis, We’ll Always Have Paris, Conspiracy, The Neutral Zone
3: The Last Outpost, Lonely Among Us, Haven, Skin of Evil
2: The Naked Now, Code of Honor, Justice, Angel One
So top 5? Hardly. It isn’t even top 10. There are 11 episodes I ranked higher, 5 I ranked the same, and only 8 ranked worse.
Honestly, anything above 5, I would consider embarrassing because, again, that’s below-average.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve long argued that Enterprise is a worse series than Voyager because at least VOY was memorably bad, whereas ENT was just boring (there were times when I forgot the plot of an episode by the time next week’s preview was over).
I think “Spock’s Brain” fits in the same category as Voyager — yes, it’s horrible and sexist and actively hates the audience, but at least it doesn’t put me to sleep the way “The Empath” and “The Paradise Syndrome” do.
@krad
I think these two were my first comments on this board. I’m a rookie. Long time reader, first time….typer. Y’know. Not trying to “come at you”. Or whatever.
That said, I am very flattered and tickled and happy and such that you, the writer, were willing to respond to my comments, and so very, very quickly. Such feedback is unheard of on any Internets I’ve ever been on.
As for your specific replies: I agree with your tacit agreement with me that Tasha was never given mention of her rank in the command thingee. Yeah, Worf maybe got his place. Two seasons later. When Geordi was suddenly the Chief Engineer, Miles O’Brien suddenly exists, and Beverly Crusher has both left and come back. Lotta time had passed. A million years as far as the show’s development has gone. As for Tasha’s all-too-brief part of the show, still no mention of her role in the command structure during her time. Just sayin’….
(Tasha was the most ill-used, and ill-written-for character, possibly in all of Trekdom. So sad….)
As for your season rankings, I wasn’t aware that you ranked things almost season-for-season. I’m guessing that you, being a fan, and being on the Webs, are aware of Chuck “SF Debris” Sonnenberg, and his rating system, where he (explicitly) ranks all Trek series on a 1-10 scale, based on the quality of each individual series, and each individual series alone. Where “Datalore” would only be up against other TNG episodes, and not TOS or DS9 or whatever. In that light, putting any Season One TNG episode up as even “mediocre for the series” is generous, given how terrible the first two seasons were compared to what was to come. Most episodes of Season One were terrible, on any level. Heart of Glory, Home Soil, 11001001, Where No One Has Gone Before, maybe Conspiracy, I get the love, there’s goodness to be had. But to be below-average for Season One is to be birthed in a dumpster. I’m sorry for that imagery, but it fits. And to be a below-average Season One episode, something you, years later, consider “embarrassing”, doesn’t register as 4/10. 2/10, at best. Probably worse. For a series in which Star Trek V exists (and “The Omega Glory”), “embarrassing” must be qualified.
That said, there’s a lot of overlap between you and I regarding which Season One TNG episodes are still worth re-visiting. The season as a whole is kinda worthless (I’ve always advised friends to start with Season Three, and to only see “Q Who” and “The Measure of a Man” in retrospect), but there are a few episodes worth viewing in retrospect, and I think you and I share the same opinion on which few those are.
**reads review**
**sees KRAD’s rating**
**laughs heartily!**
A zero! HA HA HA. I didn’t know you gave zeros.
But it is truly a $*#@@@@@ sandwich of an episode.
Muthsarah: I rank each episode on a 0-10 scale where 10 is great and 0 is awful. It’s not a relative scale, it’s my gut for where to rank it. Very few 0’s have been given out over the course of the rewatches — besides this, we’ve got “Shades of Gray” and “Profit and Lace” at the very least. I’d have to dig around to find all of them………
And, again, the warp factor rating is by far the least important part of the rewatch. I only include them because Tor.com asked me to include them when I started the TNG Rewatch in 2011, and now it’s pretty well ingrained.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The sequel, Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited, was the story printed in The New Voyages. The original was in a fanzine a few years before. It was frustrating as a reader to get a sequel when I had no way to read the original.
Re: The warp factor rating for Datalore… Of course 4/10 can’t be compared. In TNG terms Warp 10 would be an infinitely great episode.
You’ll notice that, once La Forge became chief engineer, he was never put in charge of the ship again.
He did become a captain a couple of decades later though, as seen on Voyager’s Timeless.
Now for the issue of Gene Roddenberry. the writer.
Keith, I’m going to disagree with you on a number of counts. There’s a difference between being a writer and being a head writer/executive producer, as we all know.
Throughout the rewatch, you rightfully pointed out that the early episodes were among the show’s best because they depicted a realistic feeling of a community travelling through space, before story fatigue and clichés set in. Case in point, ALL of those episodes were personally rewritten by Roddenberry. Gene Coon wasn’t even remotely involved with Trek at that point.
What I’m trying to say is you can’t judge Roddenberry based solely on the episodes he has a writing credit on, especially given the pitfalls of WGA credit rules. If I were to do that to another executive producer, say Michael Piller, you’d find that aside from Best of Both Worlds his credited episodes aren’t exactly TNG at its prime (Booby Trap and Masterpiece Society are at best pedestrian efforts). Hell, his DS9 and Voyager work don’t fare any better. Most of the best efforts come from other credited writers, but we all know Piller has a hand in every script during his tenure. Duet and Inner Light are brilliant not only because of Peter Allan Fields, but because Piller was in charge.
Now, you’ll get no argument from me when it comes to Omega Glory. It’s definitely worse than Spock’s Brain. At times, it definitely feels like a really green attempt at a pilot script. That’s the only explanation I could offer especially given the disturbing use of Spock’s telepathy, which is woefully out of place. Tracey is a villain devoid of proper motivation, a stark contrast to a captain truly taken by guilt and madness such as The Doomsday Machine’s commodore. That alone tanks the whole episode. The racist tones are nothing more than icing on a spoiled cake.
Did Roddenberry had ego problems? Definitely. Was he the best writer? Probably not. Was producing Omega Glory a wise move? A big no. But then again, he didn’t care, and neither did the network at this point. Assignment: Earth was a backdoor spinoff pilot, and for all intents and purposes Star Trek was pretty much cancelled and gone. At the tail end of an exhausting 26 episode season only to get cancelled, I wouldn’t care either.
As for his credited work, which I did enjoy, I can point to Charlie X, I truly adored The Cage, and also The Menagerie for the most part (it did win a Hugo, as I recall). And I still appreciated A Private Little War, and also Bread and Circuses. The first Trek picture is still my favorite amongst all 12 films. The one that Roddenberry happened to produce. It definitely conveys the visua scale of Trek on the silver screen better than any of the other films. Of course, we also have Robert Wise to thank for that. But as I said, Roddenberry’s contribution is more than that.
@9, It wasn’t just developing antibodies that gave them a longer life, it was evolution. Dr. McCoy said, “Survival of the fittest, because their ancestors who survived had to have a superior resistance. Then they built up these powerful protective antibodies in the blood during the wars. Now, if you want to destroy a civilization or a whole world, your descendants might develop a longer life, but I hardly think it’s worth it. “
@43/Eduardo: I’m sure Keith is well aware of how writing credits in television work. The issue is not Roddenberry’s skill at rewriting, it’s his skill at coming up with ideas in the first place. As I said before, the faults in his credited scripts lie in the concepts more than the dialogue.
And contrary to the popular myth that Roddenberry himself was largely responsible for promoting, there’s no real evidence that NBC was planning to cancel Star Trek at this point. It hadn’t been renewed yet, but at worst it was “on the bubble,” its fate undecided. The idea that the show had been cancelled and some miraculously gigantic letter-writing campaign convinced NBC to un-cancel it has no evidentiary support. Inside Star Trek by Herb Solow and Bob Justman cited evidence showing that the reputed million letters received by NBC were a myth and it was really more in the tens of thousands — which was actually quite a sizeable amount, but not as unprecedentedly gigantic as Roddenberry claimed. The on-screen announcement of the show’s renewal is generally touted to mean “Okay, we submit to your overwhelming pressure and are reversing the show’s cancellation,” but it was really more like “Listen, we’re not actually going to cancel the show, so please stop flooding our mail room.”
@44/Robert: But that isn’t how evolution works. Someone created a virus (or several different ones?) that killed a lot of people. Some people had better resistance and survived. They passed this better resistance on to their descendants. That’s fine, but it wouldn’t automatically extend their life span too. To extend their life span, you have to have conditions where naturally occurring long-lived people have a higher probability of raising children than average people.
We can make up conditions like that – let’s say the virus killed all the young people, so the only ones who could still have children and raise them too were people who were both long-lived and still fertile later in life. But that’s an explanation after the fact, it’s NOT what McCoy says in the episode. And a thousand years would still be a very long time.
@2 – Wiggy: I’m with you, this is at least entertaining on a dumb level. There are episodes that are better written and more original, but bore me.
@16 – Chris: Spock’s powers over human females and his celibacy remind me of what was later done with the Deltans.
@17 – Bill: I like that one!
I just cant hate this episode as much as the rest of you. I remember watching this for the first time as a little kid 10-12 in the early eighties when ST first came to my house via basic cable. Growing up in that time period of a still hot Cold War, US vs. the Commies era it was really cool to see the US flag and constitution in an episode where the Yanks came back to defeat the Communists. Sure, now it makes no sense whatsoever but I didn’t really care at that age!
One thing that bothers me about this episode: Spock mentions finding Yang bodies killed by phasers, but every time we see a phaser set to kill, it always disintegrates the target. What was Spock finding?
@35 KRAD – In the episode The Big Goodbye, when Picard and Data are trapped in the holodeck and Riker is in command, Tasha is in command when Riker is down bothering Wesley and Geordie at the holodeck door. Later, Tasha sits in Riker’s chair. I think your fourth-in-command supposition is backed up…
@43 Re “Omega Glory” as seeming like a “pilot episode,” I seem to remember reading in THE MAKING OF STAR TREK that this was in fact one of the completed episodes that was up for consideration as the premiere episode in September 1966. Thankfully, they chose “The Man Trap;” otherwise, I wonder if we’d be here today instead having discussion about fond memories of a short-lived series called “Star Trek” that was cancelled in mid-first season, and what might have come out of it.
@48/Missile742: But that’s what makes this episode feel so un-startrekky, because… didn’t they usually overcome ideological differences peacefully? With Chekov on the bridge and everything? And after all those anti-war episodes in the first season?
I didn’t see this one as a child because it hadn’t been translated to German yet, but I think it would have confused me.
@51/Russell H: No, what you’re thinking of is the fact that “The Omega Glory” was one of three candidate scripts that were commissioned to be the second pilot, the others being “Mudd’s Women” and the eventual winner, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” There is no way an episode filmed at the start of the first season would’ve been delayed until late in the second season; they were barely able to keep up with the schedule in the first season and couldn’t have afforded to leave a completed episode unshown. Also, it includes references to concepts that weren’t introduced until late in the first season, like Starfleet and the Prime Directive. (Naturally they rewrote it before they shot it.) The episode was filmed in late December 1967, less than three months before it was aired.
You know, no matter how many times I watch this episode, I never get the message of it. Kirk’s speech at the end aside, nothing makes any sense. It’s just a really terrible hour, one I wouldn’t even inflict on my wife ( whose been watching some of these with me).
“Spock’s Brain” is far more entertaining than this abomination. It’s actually one of the better episodes of the third season. “And the Children Shall Lead”, anyone? “Plato’s Stepchildren”? There are far worse episodes than “Spock’s Brain.”
@50/Jose Tyler great call on Tasha in The Big Goodbye. It always bothered me that the director had her sit in the first officer’s seat instead of the command chair. The 11-12-ish year old me always wondered if that was because she was a woman.
I loved Star Trek as a little kid. This episode, when I first saw it, was my first realization that something I was thrilled with could also be incredibly disappointing. For some reason I still remember clearly thinking to myself how awful this episode was. I’ve refused to watch it since, which must be about 40 years ago.
Worst of TREK:I’ve gotta go with THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR. It commits the irredeemable sin of being unbearably boring.Whatever ever else you might want to say about THE OMEGA GLORY, at least it’s not boring.
Alpha and Omega: Let’s see, good things about THE OMEGA GLORY….The fight scenes between Kirk and Tracey are well done (Shatner and Morgan Woodward really sell it)…..The opening on the deserted ship is creepy….Shatner goes OTT in the best possible way in the conclusion……Bad things about THE OMEGA GLORY…..the sheer implausibility of the parallel worlds conceit….The nebulous nature of Tracey’s plans…the whole prolonged longevity business….
My Grade: 6
Being a Starship captain is an old man’s game: Interesting to once again see just how youthful Kirk is in comparison to other Starfleet captains.
Tracey, master of unarmed combat: Tracey gets my vote for Kirk’s most formidable foe (in terms of hand-to-hand fighting).
Contemporary fears in a future mirror: We’ve already seen the Klingons function as a proxy for the USSR (A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR, ERRAND OF MERCY, THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES). In THE OMEGA GLORY, we see the fears engendered by Communist China. Some key facts to bear in mind:
In 1968, the USA recognized Taiwan as the government of China. US-PRC relations didn’t start to improve until Nixon’s visit in ’72 (Spock: “There is an old Vulcan proverb: only Nixon could go to China”). In 1979, the United States transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
And China presented a rather scary face to the world in 1968. The Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was in full swing. Estimates on the dead run from a low of 400,000 to a high of 2-3 million.
“Tracey, master of unarmed combat: Tracey gets my vote for Kirk’s most formidable foe (in terms of hand-to-hand fighting).”
That should read: Tracey, master of unarmed combat: Tracey gets my vote for Kirk’s most formidable HUMAN foe (in terms of hand-to-hand fighting).
Typos, the bane of my existence.
@55/Dante: “[…] no matter how many times I watch this episode, I never get the message of it.”
“The US is great”?
I think there’s a nice idea in the episode about how it’s important to understand the principles of the Constitution rather than just parroting its words. But that’s rather undermined by the inherent racism of the episode. And it’s sort of a random digression in the final act of an episode that was mainly about stopping a Prime Directive violation. (Before I came up with my rationalization about the ECS Philadelphia introducing American paraphernalia, I was inclined to just disregard the details of the last act and presume that the episode had resolved with the Yangs’ historical documents just being something generally similar in principle to Western ideals of liberty, rather than exactly duplicating the US flag and Declaration and such. You could’ve removed those details from the script without altering the story all that much, which is a sign of what a conceptual mess the episode is.)
@60/Christopher: Actually, I like the part about stopping the Prime Directive violation, and also the rogue Starship captain as a villain (ok, it seems I do like something about this episode after all). If you take away all the crap, what remains is a lot like the plot of Insurrection, isn’t it? Longevity included.
But it feels to me the other way round – as if the Prime Directive plot is only a vehicle for the patriotism stuff. Because – the episode title. “Freedom is a Yang worship word.” And, of course, the ending.
Hey, I just found something else I like, namely this dialogue between Kirk and Spock in the cell, after Spock has nerve-pinched the woman: “Pity you can’t teach me that.” – “I have tried, Captain.” Didn’t Kirk ask Spock several times in the first season to teach him the nerve-pinch? A rare bit of continuity!
@23/Jazzlet: “Why would you need to use hynotism if not for coercive purposes?”
I tried to respond to this a couple of days ago, but the board wouldn’t post it, and it’s been long enough to assume it wasn’t held for moderation for some reason, so I’ll try again.
If you’re talking about fictional “mind control” hypnotism, you might be onto something. But real hypnotism can never be coercive, because it doesn’t actually exist — not in the sense people assume, anyway. Brain scans show no fundamental difference between a conscious state and a “hypnotic” state. Despite the name (from the Greek word for sleep), hypnotized people aren’t actually unconscious, just very relaxed. Hypnosis is essentially a voluntary act of submission, a choice to relax one’s inhibitions and let someone else take responsibility for one’s actions. In a way, it’s a form of role-playing, convincing oneself that one is in another’s power because it’s liberating to be freed of responsibility. I figure it’s a similar mental state to the one sexual submissives seek to enter, only without the sex. As Mythbusters demonstrated, hypnotized people given instructions they don’t want to follow will just get uneasy and say “I don’t want to do that.” They’re suggestible by choice, because they trust the person giving them suggestions. Take away that trust and it won’t work.
So since hypnosis is actually about relaxing inhibitions and self-restraint, I could see how an emotionally repressed people could need to be hypnotized into letting their guard down enough to allow for intimacy. But you’d think that both parties, not just the women, would have to be hypnotized. Roddenberry’s assumption that only the women would need to be persuaded to lower their guard illustrates his own biases and assumptions.
I don’t hate this episode as much as some people do. As a kid, the patriotism message resonated with me, as did the finding the deserted Exeter. There’s an interesting story there with Dr. Carter and crew; I’d love to know more about the Omega disease and what exactly happened when the landing party beamed back.
I think the first third of this episode is well done. But it falls apart after that. As a adult, I see the flaws in the script much more clearly than I did as a kid.
The episode does reveal Roddenberry’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Even in a bad episode like this there are some good Kirk/Spock/McCoy moments and some witty character dialog. Even Tracey, before he goes over the top, comes across captain-like. He obviously knows Kirk and respects him as a fellow starship commander. Yet at the same time he is obviously uncomfortable with Spock from the get-go, either some anti-Vulcan racism on Tracey’s part or perhaps some “oh, great, Commander Spock beamed down, it won’t be as easy to get out of this now.”
As noted by other posters, the scripts that were written or re-written by Roddenberry have more of a community, “this is a real starship” feel to them, especially in the first season but also in the second. Note that in A Private Little War he gave the other members of the bridge crew some actual dialog, and the first-season scripts that were re-written by him before he burned out had a lot of that. There’s some of this here with Sulu and Uhura on the bridge too, highly competent professionals.
Of course, Roddenberry’s weaknesses as a writer show up badly in this one, issues of plotting and the basic logic of the whole planet plus the racist stereotypes. Overall it ruins the episode despite the good intentions of the message.
One thing I’ve always wondered was, what did they do with the Exeter? Did they tow it back? Did they leave it for just anyone to find and die as a result? Did they destroy it? Seemed like they just left it there which always struck me as irresponsible to say the least.
@46/ I could see a virus capable of wiping out civilizations leading to at least a small improvement in lifespan. The ones who survive also have to deal with the fact that everything that supported them before was gone. Only those who can survive without a doctor’s help will make it.
Of course what is overlooked in the episode, and is easy to overlook as a viewer, is that these people aren’t humans. They just look like humans. They may well have had naturally long lifespans even before the virus. Maybe they used to live for 800 years and the survivors’ superior genes upped it to a 1000.
@65/Robert: Yes, they should have left it at “People live longer here because it’s natural for them to do so”. But then, there’s so much wrong with this episode anyway…
Perry Armstrong: I also had that View-Master version of “Omega Glory” when I was 13 or so, and I remember two alterations that were made in the “script”: The Yangs became the Meraks (‘Mericans?), and instead of Spock hypnotizing the woman into reaching for the communicator, this is attributed to “woman’s intuition”!
I remember liking this episode when I was a kid, and I thought the ‘reveal’ of the American Flag and the “holy words” seemed cool and clever at the time… Then again, I was just a kid.
Re-watching it now, I’m struck by just how awful this episode is, on so many levels. In fact, I think it might be the worse episode of the original series. It’s one of the few episodes that I found to actually be painful to re-watch.
Interesting point from Trajan23 @@@@@ 57 regarding Kirk’s relative youth compared to most other captains we see over the course of the series.
Eduardo Jencarelli @@@@@ 42 – Timeless is one of my favorite episodes of Voyager. I would presume there’s nothing strictly preventing an engineer from going into the command track. As a medical/counselor, Troi takes the first steps toward joining that group towards the end of TNG. It’s just that La Forge’s standard duty station would not have had him on the bridge, so he would have been below the bridge officers in the hierarchy of command.
Dunsel @@@@@ 27 – that made me laugh out loud!
But man, this episode was a trainwreck. The “’Murica” was a bit too sledgehammery in the last act.
Re chief engineers in the chain of command, I always assumed La Forge was still fifth-in-command after being made chief engineer, it’s just there’s never a point where Picard, Riker, Data and Worf are all off the ship without him. In “Descent” Part I, he’s twice sat at command point with Picard when Riker, Data and Worf are absent (albeit in Troi’s seat rather than Riker’s), which coupled with the “Who’ll take command if we both beam down as well?” exchange, suggests he’s effectively acting first officer. In “Gambit” Part II, Data tells Worf that if he doesn’t feel able to continue as first officer, he’ll give the role to La Forge, suggesting he’s next in line.
Also, the other 24th century chief engineers do seem to be in the chain of command: O’Brien commands the station in “Emissary” and it’s implied in “Rules of Engagement” that he’d take command of the Defiant if Worf was unavailable (although that may have been Ch’Pok reaching), while Torres is left in charge of Voyager in “The 37s” and “Tsunkatse”.
You know something?
I just watched this episode again (started another rewatch of all of five series of Star Trek, three months ago) and I’ve changed my mind about it a bit. I wouldn’t call it a good episode, but there’s an important message hidden underneath all the silliness: A great document like the US Constitution can quickly become meaningless if people just mumble the words without understanding them. The Yangs forgot where they came form and what their principles are (as Kirk said “I didn’t recognize the words because you’ve said them so badly”). They mumble “worship words” like “Freedom” but don’t really understand what they mean (at least not in context).
And when Kirk tells them what the words really mean (“It applies to everyone or it means nothing!”) it sends a shiver down my spine. Because how many times did we – on earth – forget what the Yangs have forgotten? From the McCarthyism of the 1950’s to the aftermath of 9-11, it sometimes looks like we too need some “Captain Kirk” to come down from the sky and remind us what our “worship words” really mean. Or at the very least, a Star Trek epsiode that will do so :-)
it most certainly does not make sense to put helmsman Sulu in the chain of command. This is a show from the 1960s, clearly influenced by WW2 submarine and destroyer movies. On such a ship, the helmsman is a junior sailor—always enlisted. Meanwhile, the senior engineer is a senior officer most certainly in the chain of command. This holds true in navies worldwide today
@72/Pants: I’d say only “Balance of Terror” was influenced by submarine movies. More generally, the Enterprise was more the equivalent of an aircraft carrier, not a destroyer. The Making of Star Trek has a production illustration showing that the ship is about the same size as an aircraft carrier, and its biography of Kirk says that his first command before the Enterprise was a destroyer equivalent. The Constitution class was meant to be the largest class of capital ship in the fleet.
And of course, there was also a lot of influence from NASA, where astronauts were usually officers with plenty of technical expertise.
I’m pretty sure it all lies in one thing: They needed more faces on the bridge, and it doesn’t make sense to have somebody low-ranked there.
@74/LV: It probably had more to do with whether James Doohan or George Takei was available in a given week. Both were only signed for a certain number of episodes per season, I believe.
75, Nope, Scotty took command even in an episode where he didn’t appear(Journey to Babel I believe? ), though I’m not sure there was ever any argument between them about who was in command in any given situation, I’m more talking about Sulu in exclusive, who remained in a position of authority when they put in on the bridge versus wherever he hung out when he was doing astrophysics.
Which I’ll accept is a position of potential importance on a starship sufficient that I would not be aghast had he ever taken command, but obviously wasn’t on the bridge, so they promoted him to helm officer, because…it was more convenient.
@72/Pants: Well, Sulu is a lieutenant, so your argument doesn’t apply. Possibly flying a 23rd century starship is a more demanding task than steering a WW2 submarine or destroyer. Besides, flying the ship isn’t the only thing he does – he also fires the phasers and, according to Spock in “Arena”, is “an experienced combat officer”.
@74/LordVorless: Why wouldn’t it make sense to have somebody low-ranked on the bridge? Chekov is on the bridge, and he’s an ensign.
@75/Christopher: And when both of them were available, either of the characters could be in command. In “Arena” and “The Savage Curtain”, Sulu is in command although Scotty is present too; in “Metamorphosis” and “Friday’s Child” it’s the other way round.
@76/LordVorless: Not being on the bridge isn’t an obstacle. A lot of the time Scotty isn’t on the bridge either.
77, the key emphasis is on a face, or in other words, a significant part, somebody you recognize, dialog with, and otherwise interacts, and even the later addition of Chekov (who had the youthful officer role when they added him) isn’t especially low-ranking. Unlike say a certain Mr. Crusher whose presence of the bridge was often intrusive.
Engineering, of course, was an acceptable conceit, people’s perceptions went along with it, a space-ship certainly needed a power-plant. (and well, obviously in the future, they could be right next to it without any worries about how dangerous it really would have been, though with their explosive electronics, maybe it wasn’t more of a risk…) But even with that, there was often a lot of the phone-effect, and there’s a limit to how much you can make that work. Add in the expense of a set, and well, it’s just easier to set things up so your cast is “naturally” concentrated.
Also why McCoy was so frequently on the bridge. And why doctors in other series were often more secondary than McCoy.
@78/Lord Vorless: They could have decided that the head astrophysicist is an important person on a ship that does space exploration and put him frequently on the bridge too. But after Kelso’s death, they had a vacancy to fill.
79, certainly not unreasonable to consider such a position important in a technical sense, however, it’s outside most people’s framework, but the “guy that tells the ship where to go” works much easier and doesn’t have the same feel as a character. Plus it might have cut the duplication with Spock a bit.
Quoth LordVorless: “even the later addition of Chekov (who had the youthful officer role when they added him) isn’t especially low-ranking. Unlike say a certain Mr. Crusher whose presence of the bridge was often intrusive.”
Um, Chekov was the lowest possible ranking for an officer (ensign). It’s also the same rank that Crusher had after “Where No One Has Gone Before.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
What he means is that he was an officer, and not an enlisted man. And while Picard did give Wesley a field commission, he was not actually a Starfleet trained officer. If I had busted my ass at the Academy to get assigned to such an important starship, and lost my chance to be helm officer for Alpha Shift to that kid, I’d be very mad.
@82/MaGnUs: My theory is that in the 24th century flying the ship has become largely automated, perhaps as further development of the M-5 unit. What’s left is so boring that people are actually happy to be replaced by an eager teenager.
That’s not supported by the on-screen evidence, particularly when they need to defend themselves.
81, 82, indeed, as a matter of practicality, Chekhov had some training and some authority, Wesley? Not so much. If anything, they ought to have called him Midshipman or something.
83, the buttons don’t do anything, it’s worse than the Tardis!
@84/MaGnUs: Perhaps I’ve exaggerated a bit. But I like the idea (which isn’t really mine; it was a joke someone made in the “Ultimate Computer” rewatch). It explains Wesley’s presence on the bridge in a way that doesn’t make Picard look bad. And I think we can safely say that helmsman in the 24th century isn’t the demanding job it used to be in Sulu’s time. My evidence is that post-Wesley, someone different was flying the ship every week. Apparently it has become something akin to driving a car.
O pot, o kettle! What is it that drives some people to read all sorts of meanings into a script to the point of a debate that makes all of them want to take fully loaded phasers to the whole thing? I for one find the whole thing absolutely illogical! Can’t we all get along? or is it impossible for us humans? Be that as it may, let me delve into a technical subject that does not call for such beefing and squawking and griping and generally behaving like a bunch of three-year-olds arguing about whose sandbox it is. This technical subject has to do with what Spock was doing at a critical moment while Kirk and Tracey were slugging it out. Some of you may remember that Vulcans were, and are, a telepathic species, some more adept than others (they even have a rating system about this), and Spock, seeing the need to get an Enterprise security team down to the planet’s surface on the double, was performing a neat little maneuver called telepathic hypnosis—more difficult than it looked, because there was no physical contact and therefore requiring a greater concentration. He could have zeroed in on anyone among the spectators, such as Sylvester Hosselplotz in the fourth row, but he picked on a woman named Sirah (Cloud William’s mate) simply because she had been watching with such concentration herself). It might well have qualified as a remote-control mind-meld. And he induced her to pick up the communicator, get it to him, and open it—thus alerting the Enterprise, “get that security team down here!” I had had no idea that this was just another of Spock’s formidable mental abilities, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. .
Something else just occurred to me. I was watching this episode on a local TV station this afternoon, and I noticed that Spock was watching Sirah throughout the third and fourth acts of the show. He noticed that she was watching the proceedings with intent concentration, not just curiosity—and that was what decided him to finally take action and perform telepathic hypnosis to get her to get that communicator to him and open it. As I said one before, he could have just as easily singled out someone like Sylvester Hosselplotz or Joe Veeblefetzer from the crowd, but he saw how intently she was watching Kirk and Tracey slug it out, and so he gave us another demonstration of his formidable telepathic powers. Difficult, yes, because there was no physical contact, but his mind did it. Oh, by the way—Tracey was insane, another victim of the search for the “fountain of youth”: what is it that drives some people over the edge, wanting something so bad they’d kill for it?We may never know.
As I was reading over a number of comments relating to this episode I was amused by Jana Jansen’s wondering inquiry as to why Spock had been unable to teach Kirk the Vulcan nerve pinch. Spock had said—with perhaps a hint of frustration—“I have tried.” He had no need, no cause, to be frustrated; it seems there’s one key element,, a faculty which apparently humans do not possess. Leonard Nimoy, in the course of his marvelous “Spockumentary”, stated that Vulcans have a special ability to project a particular energy from their fingertips which when applied to the neck and shoulder will render a person unconscious. Kirk, like all terrestrial humans, did not have this ability. However—he may have had a degree of ESP, a sixth sense, which came in handy on the job—and there was that “Kirk-fu” which got him out of the hot water Starfleet had stuck him into!
In honor of American Flag day (today), I shall make a few remarks on this rather bad episode.
In order to clear my head, I found it helpful to skip ahead to when the American Flag appears, pause it and reduce the color to nearly black and white, slow forward and slow reverse it a bit, restore the color and mentally substitute for the Anthem music:
“Oh say can you see/my eyes/if you can/then my hairs too short (Hair, The Cowsills).
Then to rewatch from the beginning, having restored my “beginner’s mind” …
(Continued in multiple posts to come …)
(1) I found I was able to accept the infection on the Exeter as a simple plot device, a way to get Kirk & Company down to the planet surface with little expectation of help from the Enterprise, and a problem to solve.
(2) Keith, you found evidence of racism in the way “Tracy expresses surprise that the people ” who look like us” are the primitive savages while the “Asiatic Kohms are kind and gentle, because, of course it should totally be the other way around.”
I saw it rather differently. Kirk asks Tracy, “You were left alone down here, Ron. What happened?” By way of explanation Tracy says “the villagers, the Kohms here, were friendly enough, once they got over the shock of my white skin. As you’ ve seen, we resemble the Yangs, the savages …” He’s a white guy explaining the situation to four other white guys (more or less). Not only that, but Roddenberry has reversed the mainstream 60’s expectation and made the Asiatics the ones who are civilized ( in an era in which Vietnamese were referred to as “gooks”.) Tracy even refers to “hordes of them (Yangs) out there”. In the 60’s it was not uncommon to hear the Chinese being referred to as the “yellow horde”. I’d say that Roddenberry is pretty clearly trying to get people to step outside whatever prejudices they may have here.
(3) Things begin to get interesting when Tracy announces that he believes that isolating the immunizing agent will be the key to longevity. There was a possibility to explore a serious theme here: what price would you pay (whom would you be willing to sacrifice) to acquire the fountain of youth? But then it is spoiled when Kirk suggests “For sale by …?) and Tracy responds “By those who hold the serum” Whatever else Tracy might have been willing to do, I can’t see it as being in service of a get- rich- quick scheme.
(4) I liked it when the Asian Woman brings McCoy food, and makes neutral eye contact – simply acknowledging his existence. Then McCoy smiles appreciatively, and she reciprocates. An elegant way to further suggest that the Kohms are relatively civilized.
(5) McCoy’s talk of “survival of the fittest” is pretty much nonsense, although I suppose you might try to account for longevity as some kind of spandrel. But again: plot device. Similarly, I am not bothered when someone fires a phaser ‘set to kill’ at someone, and said person simply disappears instead of turning into a plasma fireball.
(6) Yangs, Kohms, and the American Flag. I’ll give Spock the last word on this one.
“The parallel is almost too close, Captain”.
Cross brains with Spock, he’ll cut you to pieces every time.
(7) This episode could at least have been a bit less bad if Kirk had stopped at “We the People” and then pointed out that these words had to apply to everyone, yes even the Kohms, or they meant nothing. During the 60’s Martin Luther King had argued that the Constitution (and its associated mythology of protecting human rights) applied to “Negroes” as well as to Whites, which too many people at the time saw as being nonsensical and even offensive. Kirk’s “rousing oratory” here makes me wonder what it would be like to hear him read the operating instructions for a microwave oven.
(8) But now, finally, we do have one truly priceless moment. Cloud William says “I do not fully understand, one named Kirk. But the words will be obeyed, I swear it!”
For that, of course, is exactly the sense in which too many Americans honor the Flag. They obey the words, they give honor to the Flag … but they do not understand.
Happy Flag Day!
@90-98: Why couldn’t you put all that in one post?
I don’t agree that Roddenberry was trying to challenge prejudices, because Tracey was the bad guy and the situation being set up was dystopian — the noble American/white culture being overrun and driven into barbarism by the Asiatic horde. Kirk overtly describes it as “the yellow civilization” (itself a racial slur) overthrowing “the white civilization” (implicitly defining America as a white nation rather than a multicultural one).
It’s notably similar to the premise of the two incredibly racist 1928-9 novellas that introduced the character later known as Buck Rogers — the once-great American culture (explicitly equated in the novellas with “the White Race”) overrun and driven into savagery by the relentless hordes of the “Yellow Peril,” not because they’re intrinsically worthy as people but because they’re more numerous and ruthless. The story of the Anthony Rogers novellas is about the whites fighting back and regaining their “rightful” place in control of America (to the horrific extent that the entire “Han” race is ruthlessly exterminated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons wielded genocidally by the “heroes” in the second novella). The outcome in “The Omega Glory” is along similar (though far less extreme) lines, the Yangs fighting back against the villainous Kohms and succeeding in taking power once again, at least locally. The implication is that that’s the way it should be, that Cloud William and his people are the ones who should be running things, once Kirk reminds them of American values.
Roddenberry wasn’t being intentionally racist, but he’d grown up in a culture where the “Yellow Peril” mentality was widespread and he’d fought in WWII when racism against the Japanese was viciously overt among Americans. He wrote a story that built on some of the established racial tropes of his culture and didn’t stop to question those tropes to the extent that he should have. There’s a lot of orientalist stereotyping in TOS. The Klingons in “Errand of Mercy” were themselves an iteration of the Yellow Peril trope, a Mongol Horde in space with Red Chinese politics. The Argelians in “Wolf in the Fold” are a blatant “exotic East” culture complete with belly dancers and mystics. Even the Vulcan arena in “Amok Time” plays on a number of “savage tribal customs” tropes. Sure, Sulu was there, but he fell into the accepted category of “domesticated” Asians who’d fully embraced Western culture. There was a lot of ’60s TV in which the “good” non-Westerners were the ones who’d completely assimilated to Anglo-American culture and values and spoke “good English,” while the “bad” ones were those who clung to their indigenous ways and spoke with accents.
@99/Christopher: I still think that the Klingons were deliberately portrayed the way they were, as a means to mislead the audience. It was supposed to come as a shock that the Organians considered them and the Federation as much the same thing. That isn’t stereotyping, it’s using stereotypes to undermine them.
@99/CLB,
So sorry, but I still don’t see it that way!
I posted in separate posts because I am posting from my phone, which tends to lose things. I usually keep my comments a lot briefer.
@100/Jana: I think that’s giving them too much credit. Even if there was an attempt to suggest that differences could be overcome, “Errand” still made use of a number of Yellow Peril tropes that were common in the media of the day and for the preceding decades. Such tropes are all over TOS, especially in season 2, with lots of alien cultures being built from stock orientalist and/or tribalist cliches with a few spacey twists. After all, the people writing these episodes were mostly freelancers writing for all sorts of other shows — Westerns and spy shows and the like — and they’d just come in for a few weeks and churn out a Trek script in between other assignments. So naturally they’d exercise a lot of the same muscles, recycle a lot of familiar building blocks. And Roddenberry and Coon weren’t exempt from that. They had to churn out scripts fast and sometimes they fell back on the established conventions and stock portrayals of exotic cultures. If you watch other shows from the same era and how they portrayed non-Western cultures, you can see how TOS reused and mixed many of the same tropes and cliches. (The Man from UNCLE in particular is a hell of an education in ’60s TV racial stereotypes. That show seemed to go out of its way to paint as many non-Western cultures as possible as backward savages with malicious designs, except for the one sexy, Westernized female member who helped the heroes.)
@102/Christopher: I have the impression that Coon, unlike Roddenberry, was unusually open-minded and good at avoiding stereotype. Just think of “Arena”, “The Devil in the Dark”, or “Metamorphosis”, or the decision to make the Napoleon character in “Space Seed” an Indian and give him a multi-ethnic crew. He was responsible for much of Star Trek’s good reputation. That’s why I had the idea that the Klingon makeup might have been deliberate in the first place.
I agree about the second season. Also, in the second season the Klingons became standard baddies, and thus their makeup problematic.
@103/Jana: As I understand it, the decision to base “Errand”‘s Klingon makeup on the “Space Mongols” idea was thought up on the spot by Fred Phillips and John Colicos at the start of the production. So they fell back on stock racial tropes even if Coon didn’t.
And such things are always relative to the era. Someone who’s enlightened and tolerant by the standards of their own time will tend to seem backward and prejudiced by the norms of a later generation, because we’re always moving forward. Like, as a kid, I admired how racially inclusive Filmation’s animated and live-action Saturday morning shows tended to be, but now I look back at their Asian characters and I can see that they’re pure stereotypes, defined solely as martial artists. Progress is made one step at a time. Just look at TOS’s gender politics. Many female fans in the ’60s and ’70s loved the show for how well it portrayed and treated women compared to most other shows of the day, but to 21st-century eyes it’s often shockingly misogynistic. Its treatment of race is no different — ahead of the curve for its time but still not entirely free of unexamined stereotypes and prejudices. And “The Omega Glory” is probably the worst episode of the series for Asian stereotypes and general racial cluelessness.
It would interesting if we could have some Asian Star Trek fans to chime in on this discussion. I am aware of course that it is itself racist to assume that any particular Asian can speak for all Asians (or even that it makes sense to lump all Asian varieties together), but still …
I’m Caucasian (specifically Scottish/German), but for most of my life that has meant not having to think of myself as being a member of any race, instead simply me. Those in a minority, perhaps, don’t have that luxury.
One thing I didn’t comment on before is how much it must have blown Cloud William’s mind to see Sulu beam down at the head of the landing party :)
@104/Christopher: I keep hearing how misogynistic TOS is, but I’m not seeing it. Janice Rand isn’t a good character, episodes like “Mudd’s Women” and “Wolf in the Fold” are awful, and there’s the occasional “Captain, I’m afraid”, but for the most part, I find that it holds up very well. A lot of credit must go to D. C. Fontana and Nichelle Nichols, but male writers like Jerome Bixby also wrote good female characters. And any character played by Diana Muldaur radiates a cool competency I love.
I’ve said this before – in my opinion the 2009 film is appallingly misogynistic, more than any TOS episode.
@105/Keleborn Telperion: Asian characters are the one area where Star Trek consistently disappoints me. TNG and DS9 didn’t even have an Asian character in the main cast, unless you count Keiko O’Brien. And I’m still waiting for an Asian series lead.
Nice observation about Cloud William and Sulu.
@106/Jana: So… you don’t see it, except for the parts where you do see it? That’s… selective.
Nobody’s saying it’s constantly misogynistic at every step, and it was relatively progressive for its time by simply having women aboard the Enterprise. But it still had episodes that were pretty sexist — the ones you mention, “Turnabout Intruder,” the treatment of Drusilla in “Bread and Circuses.” And nearly all its “career women” on the ship were in traditional feminine roles like nurse, secretary, and switchboard operator, and only one (Anne Mulhall) ever got above the rank of lieutenant. And it was assumed that women like Carolyn Palamas (and implicitly Angela Martine, if you read between the lines) would give up their careers if and when they got married, because that was the norm expected of employed single women at the time.
It’s like I said about the racial stereotypes. If you just watch TOS in isolation, there’s a lot that you can just read as part of the specific stories being told and not see more to it than that. But if you watch other 1960s TV shows and movies, you see a lot of the same tropes showing up, often in more blatantly sexist or racist ways, and you realize that TOS was a product of its time, uncritically employing many of the era’s tropes while questioning or transcending others. It tried, but it was imperfect. We’re all products of our time.
@107/Christopher: I don’t see that it’s worse than many shows or films made decades later, or even today. It isn’t perfect, but nothing is, and it’s still pretty good. I feel fine showing it to my daughters, without any explanation added, except for the two aforementioned episodes. And it did have female doctors and scientists, one lawyer and one engineer. Its women came across as competent professionals, and they were treated as competent professionals. All this is important to me, and it still isn’t a given today.
@107/CLB,
I may be getting a bit of a clue as to what you’re talking about now. Let’s try this: When viewed in isolation, I do not find the character of Drusilla to be sexist, because surely that’s how a “Roman Emperor” would make use of a woman, and it makes sense that a beautiful woman like Drusilla would be willing to play the role of a Sex Kitten, because she wants to be well fed and housed, and other opportunities aren’t available to her. Still, it is the *absence* of women in other roles where it might be expected to be possible on the Enterprise that is sexist; and further, it is the continual visiting of societies like that of “Roman World” where such roles are not possible, so that we simply never see the possible alternatives – such as a society that is even more (or much more) sexually and racially balanced and integrated than that of Starfleet.
@108/Jana: Yes, but there were competent female doctors and scientists and professionals in plenty of ’50s and ’60s sci-fi movies, because the movies were about scientists and they had to fit in love interests for the heroes and eye candy for the audience somehow. But they were still defined in terms of the 1960s norms for career women, in that they were always single and usually looking for someone to marry so they could quit their job and start a family, or else they were cold, aloof and “mannish” until the male leads thawed their hearts. The temptation looking back today is to see career women and filter them through our own expectations of that concept, but if you’re familiar with the expectations and tropes surrounding that idea in the 1960s, you can see them uncritically perpetuated in Star Trek. It doesn’t make it unwatchable for modern audiences, no, but it was made in a different time and is a product of that era’s assumptions.
@109/Keleborn: What’s sexist isn’t Drusilla herself, it’s that Captain Kirk implicitly has sex with her. With a slave. With someone who has no right to refuse. That is rape. Sex with a slave is rape by definition. Gene Roddenberry was okay witth portraying the show’s hero sleeping with a woman incapable of giving consent. He surely didn’t think of it as rape, but men back then had little understanding of sexual rights and consent, and many things were considered acceptable at the time that are now recognized as sexual assault.
@110/CLB,
Yeah, I wasn’t comfortable with that either. Drusilla *appears* not only cooperative but actually interested, but that’s pretty meaningless given the context. A slave that is being made to carve a piece of furniture might prefer to do good work, but he (or she) would prefer much more to be free and not a slave. Kirk (and the writers) should have known better.
I am wondering: what would be your archetypal example of a good female role (in a movie or show), or of a portrayal of a healthy society?
@110/Christopher: The way I see it, people go out of their way to find flaws in 1960s portrayals of women, and they don’t do the same thing for stories made in the 1980s or today. With some notable exceptions – I rarely see 2001 accused of sexism, although it totally should be.
You don’t need scientists to provide “love interests for the heroes and eye candy for the audience”. A secretary will do the job. Not all the women in Star Trek wanted to marry and give up their jobs. The “give up their jobs” part is only true for McGivers, Hedford and Palamas. Helen Noel didn’t want to marry Kirk, she wanted a fling. Areel Shaw was clearly comfortable in her job. So was Uhura, or Mira Romaine, or Edith Keeler. Janet Wallace and her husband were a working couple. And this isn’t a complete list. Star Trek had female writers, and it shows. I’ve recently read an interview with D. C. Fontana where she told that she had been responsible for the female chief engineer TNG started out with, but then the other writers changed it.
I haven’t studied “the 1960s norms for career women”, but I was born in 1967. I grew up in the 1970s, watching many films from the 1960s, constantly on the outlook for good female characters. I found plenty of them in TOS, and still do.
@111/Keleborn: There is no archetypal “good female role,” because “female” is half of everyone. The good way to do it is to stop pretending “female” is a single, uniform category. Just write good, diverse characters and have roughly half of them be women.
@112/Jana: My intention is not simply to find fault. Not every analysis is a value judgment. But I majored in history in college. I learned to think like a historian, and part of that is being careful not to back-project the assumptions and attitudes of our own era onto things from an earlier era. If we want to understand the intentions of works from an earlier era, we need to understand how people at that time looked at the world differently from us. Something that appears to mean one thing when we look at it with modern eyes may have been intended to mean something entirely different. So we have to take care to recognize our own biases and assumptions and filter them out when evaluating history. Making value judgments is actually counterproductive, because that’s imposing our own views and can keep us from understanding other views.
A lot of people back in the ’60s didn’t think there was anything demeaning or misogynistic about expecting women to choose family over career. As that culture saw it, having children and raising families was a vital, admirable role that was the natural place of women, a role that they were ideally suited for and celebrated for performing. This is basically was Roddenberry was going for in “Turnabout Intruder” — that Janice Lester’s delusion was believing that a woman had to succeed in a male role to be happy, that she would’ve been perfectly content if she’d valued her natural feminine role to the degree that it deserved. Looking back now, though, we can see that the gender essentialism of the era wasn’t as egalitarian as it claimed, that it was far more limiting and repressive for women than for men. And that’s why it changed.
“You don’t need scientists to provide “love interests for the heroes and eye candy for the audience”.”
If you’re making a B movie that’s about a small crew of scientist-astronauts flying to Mars or a team of scientists burrowing to the Earth’s core or investigating a giant monster, then yes, you do, because the whole movie is about scientists. I’ve watched a ton of such B movies over the last 2 or 3 years and I’ve seen the pattern over and over. A particularly interesting case is The Giant Claw from 1957. There, the female lead Mara Corday plays a mathematician who helps the male scientists perform their calculations — a role that was traditionally performed by women at the time, as seen in the movie Hidden Figures. It’s an interesting glimpse into the cultural norms of the era. But many other movies feature a lone, brilliant female scientist who is specifically called out as exceptional for being able to succeed in a conventionally male role, and who almost always ends up falling in love with the male lead, becoming a screaming damsel to be rescued, and filling all the standard movie-heroine tropes.
“Not all the women in Star Trek wanted to marry and give up their jobs.”
I never said they did. I said the trope appeared on occasion within the show and is recognizable as a broader cultural trope of the era.
Yes, of course there are ways in which TOS’s portrayal of women was progressive for its time. I’m certain I’ve already said that once or twice. But we have to acknowledge its imperfections as well if we want to evaluate it honestly. We should look at texts from the past for what they really are, the bad with the good, rather than reading them selectively to suit our own agendas and wishes. Because that makes it about us rather than about the work itself or the people who made it. They did things for their reasons, not ours.
@113/CLB,
Let me rephrase then. What would you consider to be an example of a movie or show in which there are females who have good roles and the movie/show as a whole is relatively free from sexism?
Or does such a thing simply not exist?
@114/Keleborn: There are a lot of shows today that are good at writing female roles, particularly those with plenty of women on their staffs. But why make the question about today’s shows? This is a conversation about the 1960s values that are apparent in TOS.
@114/Keleborn It’s really hard for a TV show or any work to move too far out of the mores of its time. That said there were a few, rare instances in the 1960s that did have women in a more equitable role than the women of Star Trek. The Avengers, a British series that was very popular in America, had Emma Peel who was in every way equal, and in some instances superior to, to her partner John Steed. She showed no interest giving up her job and becoming a wife until the actress who portrayed her, Diana Rigg, opted to leave the series, at which point her “dead” husband was discovered to actually be alive and she went off to be with him. There was also a one season series, Honey West, that was built around a woman who ran her own detective agency and had a male who was her partner, but was she was the one to make decisions. Both these series played to the idea of woman as “sex symbol” but they also both avoided the stereotype of “woman waiting to catch a man, get married and leave it all behind”.
Basically, Star Trek broke many boundaries by having both women and minorities represented on the show. It was not, however the only or even the MOST progressive show, at least when it came to representation of women. Sadly, I can’t think of any other shows of the time that had more representation for minorities and POC. That may be because I didn’t see them, or ST may well have been far ahead of the curve in that way. Shows are made in the culture of their time and it’s really hard to leave that mindset behind. I’m sure some of our more progressive shows, that we think of as taking a daring look at some issues, will look tame and backward in 50+ years. It doesn’t mean they (and Star Trek back in the day) aren’t being daring now, just that they are not capable of seeing how the culture would change.
@115/Christopher,
I am asking for an example because I am making a sincere attempt to understand you, and I don’t find a conceptual definition of sexism to be adequate to do that; it invites me (or allows me) to project my own understandings of that onto your definition.
It was quite helpful for me to hear you describe your background in thinking about history, because it is apparent to me that we have very different styles of thinking, especially when it comes to viewing a film. I respect the commitment you make to objectivity, but I personally have no interest (for example) in trying to understand the Romans from their own point of view. They are not admirable, and that makes them useless to me. When I watch a film I try to create for myself the kind of experience I want to have, and that means sometimes ignoring parts that are bad or don’t work, and sometimes mentally rewriting parts of it to make it work for me. Previous posts with you have alerted me to the kind of price I am paying for this, in that I am effectively creating false memories.
Now here’s the thing. When viewing The Omega Glory, I sincerely do not see the kind of racism you are talking about. I could try to analyze it moment by moment and say “How can you call that racist?”, but I am not a fan of that style of communication, and further I think we would just be talking past each other (and possibly making each other unhappy). I am looking for some simpler way to “grok” your point of view here. A shortcut like that is not always possible, but then a series of social media posts is usually inadequate for trying to go deeper (I think!)
@113/Christopher: I don’t disagree with everything you say, but there are some things that bother me.
For starters, let me say that I consider it an accomplishment if a story written decades or centuries ago still works when looked at with modern eyes. I love fairy tales about capable women. I recently read Mademoiselle de Scudéri by E. T. A. Hoffmann and greatly enjoyed the main character. And it made me very happy when I rewatched TOS a couple of years ago and found how much of it still holds up today.
Secondly, not everyone in the 1960s had the same attitude. The 1960s were a time of change for women, and that means that you can find very different attitudes next to each other. I would prefer to talk about the different writers instead of talking about general “tropes of the era”. I have the impression that Roddenberry and Fontana had very different attitudes. If you claim that Roddenberry was guilty of gender essentialism, I’ll agree; if you say that “the era” was, I won’t. I know people who were born in the 1940s and don’t have an ounce of gender essentialism. I’ve met people younger than me who believe that women and men are inherently different. Which brings me to my last point:
Progress isn’t always linear. My mother was a housewife. My paternal grandmother was a dentist. In some respects, the 1980s seemed more reactionary to me than the 1960s, even while they were happening. I don’t see any disdain of career women in the portrayal of Areel Shaw, but I do see it in the portrayal of Shelby in “The Best of Both Worlds”. To say that the “portrayal of women was progressive for its time” doesn’t do justice either to the time or to the portrayal of women.
@116/percysowner: “Sadly, I can’t think of any other shows of the time that had more representation for minorities and POC.”
Oh, there were a few shows in the ’60s that were better in that regard than TOS. I Spy broke ground by having a black co-lead — okay, it was Bill Cosby, which is unfortunate in retrospect, but it was still groundbreaking. Mission: Impossible had Greg Morris as a regular for its whole 7-season run, the only cast member to be a constant presence throughout the whole series, and though he started out somewhat marginalized (tending to work behind the scenes), he became increasingly essential to the show and even led the team on a couple of occasions. There was also the Diahann Carroll sitcom Julia, groundbreaking for having a black female lead in a non-stereotypical role.
@117/Keleborn: If you can’t see the racism in an episode that explicitly references “the white civilization” and “the yellow civilization,” and that equates being American with being white, then I don’t know how I can make it any clearer.
@118/Jana: Like I said, I’m not just talking about whether an episode “works” today. I’m just warning against making assumptions about the intentions of the writers, because what you think something means may not be the same thing that it meant to audiences and writers 50-odd years ago. They had assumptions that are often invisible to today’s audiences because we don’t have the same assumptions, but if you look at it in context with other fiction from its era, you can recognize those assumptions you didn’t see before. I never would’ve noticed the ’60s gender values in the portrayal of Carolyn Palamas or Janice Lester or whatever if I hadn’t considered TOS in context with other works from its time.
So whether an episode “works” in isolation is a different conversation from how it fits into the larger cultural context. Neither perception is wrong, and we don’t have to choose one over the other. You get a fuller picture if you consider both.
@119/Christopher,
Well, like I said, I have a viewing strategy that includes ignoring or discounting things that don’t work for me.
Specifically, when Kirk refers to the white civilization and the yellow civilization, we do not yet know that this has anything to do with America or China. I did wince a bit at the expression “yellow”, because to me it’s an odd thing to say: Asians to my eyes at least do not look “yellow”. But no one thinks it is racist to refer to a black person as being black and a white person as being white. 2 groups had descended into tribalism or near tribalism, and its my understanding that when that happens, people separate themselves into color groupings. And Kirk couldn’t very well refer to them as Caucasian and Asian, not at that point.
As for America being white (in fact in the final scenes the Yangs had a higher percentage of blondes than is to be found in America), well I guess I could call that racist if I could manage to take it seriously: But again, I discount and ignore that because everything after the appearance of the Flag is a ridiculous incoherent mess (even if I did manage to extract from it 2 good sentences (@98). Perhaps you feel it is irresponsible or nonsensical for me to be doing that. But personally I can find just enough of interest in this episode to consider it to be better (or more of interest to me) than The Alternative Factor, And the Children Shall Lead, The Savage Curtain, Turnabout Intruder, Catspaw …
What I do not see is the kind of opening scene – to – closing credits thoroughgoing racism that would cause me to write off the entire episode as having, as Krad says, “no redeeming qualities”.
@120/Keleborn: What makes a word a slur is usage and convention. “Black” used to be considered a negative term, which is why “African-American” was favored for a time, but in recent years “black” has been reclaimed as a positive by the black community, a term they embrace with pride. (Similarly to how “gay” and “queer” used to be insults against homosexual people but have been embraced by that community as positive terms for themselves.) But “yellow” has been a racial slur toward Asians for a long time. I mentioned the old “Yellow Peril” mentality common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the stereotyping of Asians as a dangerously exotic and unknowable menace. The word has a lot of nasty connotations attached to it.
@119/Christopher: You get an even fuller picture if you consider that not everyone from that era had the same assumptions. That’s why it’s interesting to read behind-the-scenes stuff like memos or interviews with the writers. Also, Star Trek was supposed to take place in a world different from their own, so sometimes they tried to overcome their assumptions.
@120/Keleborn Telperion: I wonder why Asians came to be called “yellow” in the first place. Was it really because they “look yellow”, or did it have something to do with the fact that yellow was the Chinese emperor’s colour and the colour Buddhist monks were wearing? The first Europeans to venture into East Asia must have seen much more yellow than they were used to. And before that, there was the Mongolian Golden Horde.
@122/Jana: “so sometimes they tried to overcome their assumptions.”
Exactly. Sometimes, not always. Sometimes, instead, they failed to overcome or even notice their assumptions. Every generation does. I’m sure that even the most progressive-minded of us have unexamined biases that our children and grandchildren will find hopelessly backward. We’re all steeped in societal prejudices and preconceptions from childhood, and learning to become less prejudiced is a lifelong process. I can look back on my childhood and young adulthood and remember when I learned to question and overcome each prejudice in turn, and there are still other prejudices and blind spots I’ve only recently become aware of.
@123/Christopher: I just wish you wouldn’t treat people from earlier decades as a uniform mass with uniform attitudes. I keep talking about what Fontana did, or Coon, or Bixby, and you keep talking about audiences, writers, and generations.
@122/Janajansen,
First Europeans to venture into East Asia seeing Yellow (fabrics, dyes) …
An interesting thought. I did a brief search and uncovered that Marco Polo had described Chinese as being white, later Carl Linnaeus would describe Asians as being pale yellow. I have also heard Orientals being described as olive-skinned, and that doesn’t work for me either – and I hope I am not employing another racial slur by using the word “Oriental” (!)
Is it a racial slur if you don’t get that it’s supposed to be a racial slur?
If William Shatner was willingly using what he understood to be a racial slur then that would be … disappointing. I wonder if the actors contracts required them to say whatever was in the script. That in itself could form the basis of an interesting drama where an actor deliberately fumbles offensive lines and is sued for breach of contract.
The next show after Star Trek that I discovered as a teenager and really liked was Kung Fu – and I didn’t like it for the Kung Fu. The main character was blended Asian/Caucasian, played by the white actor David Carradine (who described the show as an anti-revenge Western). They did have a good amount of authentically Asian supporting cast. This was mid-70’s.
In my earlier years I had really liked the show Julia, about a single black mother raising a young son. What I liked about it was that she and her son had the kind of relationship I would have liked to have had with my own mother. Some time ago I explored the possibility of getting this on DVD, and discovered that many moderns consider it to be racist – apparently the mother was an Oreo Cookie, selling out to the White Bourgeoisie.
Not sure if I have a point. Just sharing, I guess.
@125/Keleborn Telperion: Linné was awful! Not only did he define four human races, each with its own distinct skin colour, he also assigned different temperaments and different postures to them. Asians, apparently, are yellow, melancholic, and rigid. I wonder if he chose the “melancholic” attribute because, according to Galen, the corresponding organ is the liver, and hey, people with liver disease are yellow, just like Asians!
“If William Shatner was willingly using what he understood to be a racial slur then that would be … disappointing.” – I imagine that he didn’t consider it a slur. Not everybody did. In my childhood in the 1970s, I was told that humans came in four colours, but I wasn’t told that they had different temperaments, or postures, or worth. And here’s an article about “Yellow Power”.
I really should rewatch Kung Fu one of these days.
@126/Janajansen,
“I wonder if he chose the ‘melancholic’ attribute because, according to Galen, the corresponding organ is the liver, and hey, people with liver disease are yellow, just like Asians!”
I think that works better as an explanation for why he chose the color yellow. The reason they seemed melancholic was that being around him depressed the hell out of them. And rigid, the way people get when they take offense.
@127/Keleborn Telperion: Perfect explanation!
@124/Jana: What??? My whole point is that a diversity of attitudes existed. I’m saying that you need to consider both the positive and negative attitudes that TOS’s various creators put into it. It seems to me that you’re trying to ignore the negative ones altogether, to see it as uniformly positive, and I’m saying it’s more multilayered than that. In some ways it was relatively ahead of its time, yes, but there were some real groaners here and there too, which you have already acknowledged, so we’re not really that far apart.
@125/Keleborn: “Is it a racial slur if you don’t get that it’s supposed to be a racial slur?”
Yes, because the opinion that matters is that of the group being referred to. If you accidentally step on someone’s foot without realizing it, you’re not the one who gets to decide if you actually hurt them. Your lack of awareness does not erase the damage.
And yes, “Oriental” is definitely considered a slur these days. On top of the negative cultural and historical associations attached to its use, it literally means “Eastern” and thus is inherently Eurocentric. “Asian” is preferred, or better yet, referring to each nationality individually.
It seems to me that those pushing back on acknowledging the racism, misogyny, and other similar problems that appear in this and other TOS episodes are making a fundamental flaw in assuming that every moment of every episode represents the genuine intention of the creators in service of a unified story vision. Even Babylon 5 couldn’t achieve that, as Straczynski openly admitted that some scenes, episodes, and storylines were there simply because they needed to finish an ep in time to make the network uplink. Given that type of commercial pressure, it should be no surprise at all that the writers of TOS (and almost every other show, before and since) sometimes fell back on using tropes and conventions of both the genre/medium and their contemporary cultural mores—not because the writers were advocating anything or making a conscious attempt to build something larger, but simply because using things familiar to the expected audience is a quick and dirty way to flesh out an episode into something coherent enough to maintain the ratings. In the same way that it is problematic to project modern views onto earlier generations, it is problematic to glean too much about the intentions of writers based on material they generated in order to pay the mortgage. As CLB mentioned above, calling out a flaw need not be considered a value judgement once other factors are considered.
There are a number of elements in TOS that have not aged well—Janice Rand’s motivations, many portrayals of the Klingons, etc.—but in most cases there were other elements of the story or the production that were interesting enough to redeem their episodes overall. The big problem with “The Omega Glory” is that if you take away the issues that grate on modern sensibilities there’s essentially nothing left of any interest. At best it’s an example of what NBC execs in the 1960s considered acceptable prime-time filler, at worst it’s a big black mark on Roddenberry’s claim to ‘vision’.
@130/Ian: But that’s the point. A lot of prejudice is not a matter of the willful intention to do harm. It’s a matter of not recognizing the injustice of the prejudices you were raised with, of not realizing how your beliefs or assumptions are harmful to other people. We’re all raised within a framework of unconscious cultural prejudices we don’t even recognize, and that’s why it’s important to examine our own assumptions and listen when their flaws are pointed out to us.
After all, sometimes the lack of intent is the thing that does the most harm. If you drive with your eyes closed, you’re not intentionally aiming at anyone, but your very lack of awareness of your effect on them is what’s dangerous to them. Like I said before, what makes something harmful isn’t the intent of the person who does it, it’s the effect on the person it’s done to. So worrying about intentions is missing the point.
Most people don’t really intend to be cruel to others. But what makes prejudice and social injustice so hard to overcome is that most people don’t realize when they’re guilty of it. They’ve been raised with certain attitudes that they think are natural and okay, so they don’t realize the harm they’re doing. This is what happened in TOS. Roddenberry and the others making the show didn’t intend to be sexist or racist, but they were in some ways, because they were only able to transcend some of their era’s prejudices, not all of them.
I’ve made that mistake myself. I’ve inadvertently let a couple of hurtful things get into my published fiction because I didn’t realize they were hurtful. For instance, in my first Hub story, I referred to the Chinese female lead as having a “Dragon Lady” quality, not realizing that that was an ethnic slur. Once I realized it was, I deleted that phrase from the revised/collected edition of the story. For that matter, CBR just published a piece about a Captain America writer who inadvertently gave a black character a name that could be taken as a racial slur, then promptly changed it when the slur was pointed out to him.
@131/CLB: ‘But’? I think we’re mostly arguing on the same side here. ;-)
Although you seem to be implying that malice and ignorance (or apathy) are the only noteworthy reasons why the writers may have failed to challenge problematic social norms, while I’m suggesting that pragmatic retreat is another one–and perhaps the most common one for popular-entertainment media properties. I find it difficult to fault a writer (or anyone, really) for occasionally taking the path of least resistance when the energy or resources are not there in a particular moment to fight the good fight. With that in mind, I think it becomes a bit easier to shake one’s head at the flaws in an episode without trying to make too much of it: haters should not view “The Omega Glory” as the defining moment used to condemn Roddenberry or Star Trek, but at the same time hardcore fans should not feel the need to defend it lest the whole series be damned. It’s just a crappy episode, whose particular flaws are instructive about 1960s American culture. One of the 79 TOS episodes had to be worst, and this is a good candidate!
@132/Ian: I’m not saying anything is “the only reason” for anything; life isn’t that simplistic. I’m talking about what’s relevant in discussing the factors behind this specific episode.
And it’s not about “condemning” the show or even Roddenberry. It’s about acknowledging their flaws and shortcomings rather than denying their existence. Star Trek may have been relatively ahead of the curve in its portrayal of women and black people, but its portrayal of Asians was mostly on a par with other contemporary portrayals in American media. And “The Omega Glory” is the standout example of that. We can only speculate about the reasons, but we must at least acknowledge the facts.
We probably shouldn’t be using the phrase American either. I am sure that in many parts of the world that has become a slur word.
Actually, I have never appreciated being called white either. There is a necessity for some kind of groupings to exist as abstractions, but it seems offensive to attach that group label to any particular individual.
@132/Ian,
The only serious sense in which I would like to (gasp) defend this thing is that there was a serious story under there that might have been told about what price someone might be willing to pay to acquire the fountain of youth, and what kind of character would be willing to pay that price. That story did not actually get told here, or else got displaced by … other things. But, dammit Jim!
I have had black and Asian friends who have had no problem enjoying LOTR, and didn’t experience it as racist. Perhaps they simply chose not to, in order to enjoy the story.
Again, it would be interesting to hear from some Asian fans just how offensive they found this.
I was fortunate to be a clueless teenager who didn’t know anything about the Mongols other than the name Genghis Khan, and was unfamiliar with Mongol slurs, when I was introduced to the Klingons. All I noticed about them was that obviously ST, like Outer Limits, had certain challenges when it came to creating believable aliens.
(Not that, at age nearly 60, I am claiming to be no longer clueless. I fact, I still don’t quite seem to be able to decide whether the period should be placed inside the parentheses, or out.).
:)
@135: “obviously ST, like Outer Limits, had certain challenges when it came to creating believable aliens.” That’s really what I’ve been trying to get at: any attempt to critique this episode (or any TOS episode, for that matter) in light of a broader social and creative context, that doesn’t also factor in some of the practicalities of 1960s TV production, stands of good chance of missing the mark. Production realities don’t justify the flaws, necessarily, but they do help explain them to one degree or another—and often more accurately than attributing all the praise/blame to the creators, actors, and/or audiences.
@136/Ian: Of course the whole idea of Earth-parallel cultures in Trek was explicitly built into the series pitch as a way of making a science fiction affordable on a TV budget. But of all Trek’s Earth-parallel episodes, “The Omega Glory” is right down there with “Miri” and “Bread and Circuses” for the sheer random nonsensicality of it all. Well, at least “Bread and Circuses” had a thematic excuse for doing a Roman planet, as a way to draw a satirical parallel between the Roman arena and modern television, even if it had no good in-universe justification. But in “Miri” and “Omega,” the parallelisms added nothing to the plot. Both could’ve worked the same with just approximate parallels, like the Orientalism of Argelius or the medieval-village setting of Sarpeidon’s witch-hunt era, rather than exact duplications.
@137/CLB: Excellent points, but I was referring more to the troubled state of the Star Trek writers room in early 1968. Hard to do good progressive work when you’ve been handed a (previously rejected) script recycled from the first season, your creator is battling with the network over the time slot, and many think they’ll be looking to latch onto different shows for the next season. Is it really that surprising they may have played it safe (by 1968 prime time standards)?
@138/Ian: I don’t see how any of that is relevant. The point is, Gene Roddenberry thought the story was a good idea in the first place. In fact, it was one of the earliest ideas he came up with for the show. And that shows he wasn’t immune to the racially charged assumptions and storytelling tropes of his era.
@126/Janajansen,
“I really should rewatch Kung Fu one of these days.”
I consider the Pilot to be a particularly good episode, if you just want to put your toes-in-the-water, so to speak.
I searched Kung Fu series rewatch, but alas no joy.
Ready to embark on a second career?
@139/CLB,
Would you happen to have read Roddenberry’s original script? I am wondering now if he considered the fountain – of – youth angle to be just a plot device, a way to kill time until he could pull his surprise ending! Or did someone else add that?
I am not very familiar with TNG, but I seem to remember that episode where Picard and Wesley must cross a desert involved a device that another character at least believed held out a similar promise. Could be wrong about that.
Using the moniker Keleborn Telperion, perhaps people can understand my interest in this particular theme.
And by the way everyone, feel free to refer to me as simply Keleborn or even KT. It must be a bit tedious to have to type it out in full. Unless you just copy-and-paste (which I can’t do on my phone).
@129/Christopher: “It seems to me that you’re trying to ignore the negative ones altogether, to see it as uniformly positive, and I’m saying it’s more multilayered than that.”
Actually, I do see negative ones. No female security guards, starship captains, or admirals. No older women except T’Pau and Amanda. Almost every woman is beautiful; it’s usually demanded in the scripts. The women never talk to each other, they only talk to the men. Almost no female friendship scenes – we know that the women are friends because of the rec room scene with Uhura and Rand in “Charlie X” and Uhura and Chapel’s hug in “What Are Little Girls Made Of”, but those are the only scenes where we see it. Almost no male-female friendships – these people have great working relationships, but the only friendship scene we see is Sulu and Rand having lunch together in “The Man Trap”. TNG did all this better.
The reason why I keep talking about the positive aspects is that nobody else seems to do it. Our discussion started with you saying that from a 21th century point of view, TOS is “often shockingly misogynistic”. And I don’t think it is. Sometimes, yes. Often, no. And not particularly shockingly, either. As I said, I was shocked much more by the 2009 reboot film. Sadly, misogynistic storytelling isn’t a thing of the past.
@140/Keleborn: Thanks for the recommendation!
A second career, hmm… sounds tempting, but I don’t think I have the time. I need my spare time to defend the honour of TOS ;-)
@141/Keleborn: From what little I can tell from Inside Star Trek and the Star Trek Compendium, the original version of “The Omega Glory,” which Roddenberry had written and favored as a candidate for the second pilot, was not much different from the final version. I imagine that the Earth-parallel idea was always intended as a critical element; after all, part of the way Roddenberry sold the series to network execs was by concocting the parallel-Earth gimmick as a way to save money by depicting alien worlds as duplicates of Earth settings that could be created using stock set pieces, costumes, props, etc. from the studio warehouses. And part of the purpose of a pilot episode is to demonstrate what a typical episode would be like, in logistical and budgetary terms as well as creative terms, so that the network could assess how much they’d have to spend on an entire season. So it makes sense that he would’ve written a pilot script that demonstrated the parallel-Earth premise.
However, intent and result are two different things. The plot may have been conceived around the parallel idea, but as I said, the story we got doesn’t really need the exact parallels, the duplicate Americana that doesn’t get revealed until the end of the penultimate act. It could’ve been written out without materially altering the flow of the story. Just give the “savages” their own ancient democratic traditions that Kirk recognized as comparable to American ones.
Anyway, from what I read about it, I get the feeling that Roddenberry was pretty attached to “The Omega Glory” even though nobody else liked it much. He wrote a memo claiming that NBC favored it for the second pilot even though they didn’t, and a year and a half later he convinced NBC to let him submit a revised version of the script that addressed their objections, only to turn in a revision that was barely any different and get turned down again. (Well, actually John Meredyth Lucas wrote that draft.) Bob Justman said in Inside ST that he wrote a long, scathing memo about the script’s problems, then decided it was too harsh, tore it up, and just made a few oral recommendations that Roddenberry incorporated but that, in Justman’s view, “didn’t do much good.”
As for your nickname, I confess I don’t recognize its significance, though it sounds like something from Tolkien.
@142/Jana: I think the reason I find TOS’s misogyny shocking is because I grew up convinced that it was this great, progressive, feminist show. The first generation of Trek fans, writers, and fandom/convention organizers was overwhelmingly female, and clearly their view was that TOS was much better in its treatment of women — and in its portrayal of male characters’ respect for women — than most other stuff on TV at the time. But looking back at it now with modern standards, I realize there is some pretty hardcore misogyny in some episodes and some low-level, routine ’60s gender condescension in quite a few others. If it was feminist and progressive for its time, then things must’ve been really bad for women at the time, and that’s the most shocking thing. Although I’m familiar enough with other ’60s TV and film to know that, yes, there was a hell of a lot of sexism then. Although there were at least a couple of shows that did better jobs overcoming it than TOS did, like The Avengers with Mrs. Peel.
@139/CLB: A-ha, I think I grasp our disconnect now. You are focusing on the nature of the episode’s flaws, which I’m in no way disputing. My commentary here is more about the degree of those flaws, and how the particular details of how the episode came into its final broadcast form may provide mitigating factors that make it unworthy of the amount of attention it gets. Lawyers say that hard cases make bad law; I think it is similarly true that badly written episodes—especially ones with fraught production histories—make poor springboards for analysis of broader topics. There are other, better episodes with similar flaws where it seems the debate would be a bit more fruitful.
One thing just occurred to me though. My angle here is about the importance of context in interpreting documents from the past. That’s actually kind of an important story point in this episode…so maybe, if you tilt your head and squint, there’s one redeeming element in there after all! :-)
@143/Christopher: Okay, I understand.
I guess in a manner of speaking I come from the opposite direction. I watched Space:1999 before I ever watched Star Trek, and that had a female doctor and a female alien scientist in its main cast. I knew about Star Trek, though – I knew that the lead character was an alien who had a “computer brain” and no emotions and said “fascinating” all the time. It sounded ludicrous. I also knew that the rest of the main cast consisted of a boring generic leading man, an elderly doctor and a Scottish engineer. All men. Totally outdated. (The year was 1978, and I was eleven years old.) I wasn’t interested in watching that at all, but my brother persuaded me to give it a try.
Our first episode was “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, and I was instantly taken by Kirk. This wasn’t a boring generic leading man at all, this was a tremendously interesting and likeable character! Our second episode was “Court Martial”, and I was smitten with Areel Shaw. I loved her mixture of cool professionalism and genuine caring for her “old love”. I had been so wrong about this show!
It took me much longer to realise that I had been wrong about Spock, too. And only years later did I learn that early Star Trek fandom had been mostly female. I would have loved to be a part of that. The happy ending is that I can chat with you guys now.
I hope this wasn’t too long or uninteresting. As Keleborn said above, just sharing.
@145/Jana: Space: 1999 had its problems, but there were ways in which at least its first season equalled or even surpassed Star Trek. In many ways, the first season’s core cast paralleled ST’s a great deal — you had the core triad of the commander, the scientist, and the doctor, and an ethnically diverse supporting cast backing them up. But ’99 did a better job featuring and fleshing out its supporting characters.
But I’d say John Koenig was a much more boring leading man than James Kirk. It often seemed the only emotional expression he was capable of was shouting. For whatever reason, neither Landau nor Bain gave their best performances on that show.
On the composition of early Trek fandom, I think the fan base as a whole was about evenly male and female, but the female fans totally dominated the more active and creative facets of fandom like conventions, fanzines, fanfiction, and what would now be called cosplay.
@146/Christopher: Yep, Koenig was a boring leading man. He was my least favourite character. I was usually bored by the leading men in films and TV shows. That’s why Kirk came as such a surprise to me.
Thanks for the information about early Star Trek fandom!
I actually see some really good ideas in this episode. I love the idea that the Yangs are religiously reciting their holy words without understanding what they mean. I love the idea that their foundational text is not only no longer understood, but that only the highest leaders are even allowed to read it. I love the idea of an ancient biological weapon that has long since become part of the natural environment. And I love the Insurrection-esque idea of Tracey willing to commit genocide to profit from his profound miscalculation of a potential Fountain of Youth.
There are two separate stories there, each with the potential to be pretty good. But holy crap did this episode misfire in the execution. I remember seeing this as a kid and thinking you’ve got to be kidding! when they brought out the flag and the Constitution. (I do, however, love the music cues in that section.) And while I think 6 months is plenty of time for a maniac like Tracey to get over the loss of his crew, his personality isn’t very clear. His behavior is perfectly sane, but his actions seem anything but. And what exactly does he hope to gain by having the Yangs kill Kirk at the end? Surely they aren’t going to let him live after everything he’s done to their race.
And speaking of race, Yellow vs White. They actually went there. I suppose “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” was more blatant in its racial representation, but at least it actually made a statement with it. In this, not only are Asians the bad guys (simply because they won, apparently), but the White dudes are portrayed as perfectly justified in trying to reclaim their land 1000+ years later. You’d think the statute of limitations would run out at some point. I wonder if the story would have been written the same if the races had been Middle-Eastern.
Still, good ideas and an attempt at a message trumps the pointless stupidity of “Spock’s Brain”. This may be bad Star Trek, but it is still Star Trek. It is not the worst episode.
Not a good episode but personally I get a little teary over the Flag and the Constitution. Still the last, best hope of mankind. Kirk needs to make that big speach to make the Yang’s understand what their holy things really mean.
I am going to be in so much trouble aren’t I?
@149/roxana: Oh, sure, I love the big dramatic reaffirmation of American ideals and all that. It’s terrific in itself. It’s just unfortunate that it’s in the context of such a nonsensical, cluelessly racist story.
Yes, very unfortunate.
@@@@@149/princessroxana: It’s just that this was the foundation of an alien culture. I know it was retconned in one of the books, but in the episode it’s clearly supposed to be a parallel planet. I would rather they just traveled into the future a la The Time Machine or to another dimension than trying to convince me that some relatively nearby planet evolved as an exact duplicate of Earth until one particular time in history.
Otherwise, like I said, I love the ideas. The Pledge of Allegiance is something to mean, not just to say. The Constitution is for the people, not just the courts. But how many people will get that message in the midst of such a strain on credulity (and the racism, of course, though that wasn’t on my mind when I saw this so many years ago)? Unfortunate, indeed.
Yeah, this parallel evolution concept was pretty dumb.
I saw the originals 1966-69 along with all the other TV shows of the day, incl. the nightly news with Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley & David Brinkley. Absolutely appreciate caution about not jumping to conclusions about the past, but, as one subjective voice, tend to agree with Scott, Ian, KT’s initial series of comments, and Jana’s objection to “shockingly” misogynist and her appreciation of Kirk as a man who has pretty amazing access to his emotions, unlike the stereotype.
Omega Glory is certainly one of the weakest and most muddled episodes. Still, like Scott and KT, I saw the final reveal about reciting completely garbled “worship words” reserved for the chiefs’ eyes only as a double link to MLK’s demand that the majority white population stop merely paying mealy-mouthed lip service to its finest values (the check returned with insufficient funds in “I have a dream” and other writings) and an even closer critique of the lies and manly but mangled patriotism of US generals about the Vietnam War.
As a kid, I saw the choice of texts pragmatically — they couldn’t be religious in a TV show, so which texts would a US audience recognize instantly? And the corny flag bit and musical flourish, to me, were the assertion that the show or the writers meant the critique positively: we love what the US stands for, too; that appreciation is not a monopoly of “ignorant savages” with My Country: Love it or Leave It bumper-stickers. That section has always remained vivid and biting to me, warts and all.
Regarding the yellow and white races, agree – racist, rooted in a long tradition, but also for the “short-hand” reasons Ian mentions. No one then thought these episodes would be seen more than twice – the original + a rerun. Initially, on first viewing, I saw the intro to the Kohms as KT did. Hey, look, they’re the good guys (?!)
This was a period of standard racism against Asians — the WWII holdover hatred of “the Japs” (our neighbors – 2 brother-sister couples had survived Pearl Harbor), plus the horrifying Red Chinese and Mao, and exactly at the time of Omega Glory the Vietnamese “gooks.”
Early March 1968 when it aired was the essentially the end of the frightening Tet offensive — in the news every night, exactly a month after the publication of Eddie Adams’s front-page AP photo of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Vietcong fighter Nguyen Van Lem point blank in the street with a shot to the head, though a good year before the My Lai massacre reports initiated by Seymour Hersh. Initially, the Kohm/Yang switch appeared to be a simplistic reversal of good/bad guys based on skin color. Then it became clearer that the Yangs were supposed to be clawing back their homeland from “the Asians.” So simplistic patriotism, again based on skin color. But the impression remained with me that it was sick, greedy, powerful Tracey, a Starfleet officer, an establishment figure, who was evil, not so much the Kohms or the Yangs.
Regarding Spock’s finding of dead bodies that had been killed by phaser, there is a possible explanation why they are not vaporized. It relies on a bit of speculation from the technical publications, though I think it might make sense. In Shane Johnson’s popular “Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise”, the “Phaser IV” (as used in STII) and the “Phaser IIB” (as used in STIII) had distinct settings for “Stun, Disrupt, Disintegrate”. From the Franz Joseph technical manual it looks like the force setting on a TOS phaser is via an analog dial, but it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose that there are equivalent settings.
Since Tracey mentions running into a problem with power drain and too many opponents, it make sense they would not disintegrate all opponents–they switched to Disrupt, which reasonably might be a lethal setting that uses less power and doesn’t disintegrate the target. Are there other on-screen instances of phaser deaths without vaporization? That might back this up some more.
@155/tjareth: “Are there other on-screen instances of phaser deaths without vaporization?”
The Salt Vampire. Kodos/Karidian. And plenty in the 24th-century shows, since there was less censorship on the depiction of dead bodies.
I’ve thought pretty much exactly the same thing. We owe Gene a great deal of gratitude for Star Trek, but yours truly also didn’t think of him as the best of writers.
I was surprised about your comment that he treated the Wrath of Khan so. I recall that he was pretty harsh about Star Trek VI as well.
@122 JanaJensen on where the colors came from: I read that one of the first written examples of races associated with the colors still in use was in a book by Linnaeus, drawing on the 4 medieval humors — sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile), and phlegmatic (phlegm). It was believed that the proportions in the body affected or determined personality and health (everyone had all 4, but different proportions).
My context was the use of “red people” and “red men” in the southeast US by the indigenous people, incl. Cherokee, in their dealings with the French (based in the Louisiana territory) in the 1700s. The usage was then was adopted into British and US usage around the city of St. Louis, MO, and established by the 1810s-1820s. This has meanwhile become accepted as an academic thesis, even though it’s also used dismissively (“they called themselves ‘red’!”) in the recurring US debate over the name of the Washington Redskins sports team (formerly of Boston).
The explanation for the indigenous use was not Linnaeus and medieval Europe of course. The theory/linguistic research indicates that the local peoples saw white as peaceful and red as at war, first, and, second, may have been responding to the association awoken by the French use of “white people.” The term “Christians” had been the most common until it was realized that blacks had adopted the religion but still had to be discriminated against (in the thinking of the time!). When interpreted into the local languages, “white” for the “French” is thought to have evoked “red” for “us, the people.” (One of the research papers I read was published in 1997 by someone named Shoemaker).
Here’s an article discussing the origins and use of the “yellow” term for Asians:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/09/27/647989652/if-we-called-ourselves-yellow
Apparently the term Linnaeus used was luridus, which can mean sallow (pale) as well as yellow, and that also carried connotations of toxicity or disease.
Not the best of episodes but I personally am atavistic enough to get a thrill out of Shatner reading the Constitution.
After reading the posts, supra, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that TOS was inherently racist. Generally, when the crew of the Enterprise encounters an alien civilization, the aliens usually are depicted as being of one race and/or have one or two major characteristic(s). Here is some proof:
1. Argellians are primarily hedonists;
2. Vulcans are primarily logical and stoic;
3. Andorians are primarily violent;
4. Tellerites are primarily argumentative;
5. Klingons are primarily ruthless and warlike;
6. Earthers are primarily peaceful, but can be violent;
7. Khoms are primarily peaceful;
8. Yangs are primarily violent and warlike;
9. Cappellens are primarily violent and honor-bound; and
10. Iotians are primarily imitative.
In TOS we rarely see aliens that are not stereotyped in some way.
@161/Paladin: “Planet of Hats” aliens are hardly a unique Star Trek trope. It’s a common shortcut in science fiction, especially in forms like short stories and episodic TV when you don’t have time to go into depth about a culture and need to paint it in broad strokes. If anything, I’d say it was a bigger problem in the TNG-era shows, which brought back many species on an ongoing basis yet still tended to portray them in a one-note way, with only occasional departures.
But yes, a lot of the aliens-of-the-week in TOS were informed by stock Orientalist or tribal tropes commonly used in ’60s TV and earlier Western fiction. The second season was particularly prone to it.
I’m not saying it’s a good episode, but I admit to being a huge fan of the American Constitution.
Wow, it took me 3 days on and off to read all these comments, haha! Anyways, on to this terrible episode. I always felt that it started off promising with the scenes aboard the Exeter. The mineral inhabited uniforms strewn about the ship were really intriguing. It reminds me of an episode of The Twilight Zone called, “Long live Walter Jameson”, where a 2000 year old man has his immortality compromised after being shot. As he is dying, his body rapidly turns to dust and we’re left with something similar to what we see here in this episode. I wonder if that was what inspired parts of “The Omega Glory”.
@Krad/To boldly go
Cliched as it is, I thought his motives were perfectly clear, potential immorality.
@7/Darr:
I have to disagree there. I thought “Spock’s Brain” was so bad that it was funny. This episode is so bad, it’s sad. I’d prefer to laugh
@30/sps49:
I’m the total opposite. I thought the movies were fine as movies, just very bad as Star Trek.
@38/Muthsarah:
Totally agree; it’s a fantastic site!
@52/JanaJansen:
What your saying about the episode, you will get no argument from me there. But Missioe742’s point was only that at age 12, this episode being “un-startrekky” was not a factor he/she considered.
@105/Keleborn Telperion:
I wish I could link the quote, but I couldn’t find it so I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. I hope I’m not misremembering
. Avery Brooks (Captain Sisko) was once asked if he feels an obligation to represent black people everyday. I really respected his response that he doesn’t wake up everyday thinking, “how will I be black today”. Nor should he have to. And that’s one of the tragedies of racism in that minorities can’t always just go about their daily routine without their minority status being a factor, and that’s just not right.
@161/Paladin Burke:
I think that’s being unfair because narrative shorthand was a necessity for TOS. You can’t expect them to have fleshed out every alien race in absolute detail every time and think it was going to work in a 1 hour television episode.
I blame Roddenberry for “Angel One” as well.
Also, I agree with the poster who pointed out that long lifespans may have always been normal for the species native to that planet. No evidence to the contrary was ever given in the episode, but of course neither was any explanation of the duplicate flag and Constitution. Perhaps Christopher L Bennett addressed the lifespans in his book as well?
@165/fresnel: I don’t think life expectancies came up, no.
Did we even find out why the Exeter was at Omega IV in the first place? Kirk is surprised to see it in orbit. Not sure we’re told why the Enterprise is there itself, matter of fact…
@167/Arben: “Did we even find out why the Exeter was at Omega IV in the first place? Kirk is surprised to see it in orbit.”
Kirk says “She was patrolling in this area six months ago.” Presumably that’s when the disease struck and the crew were killed, so there were no further reports from it.
“Not sure we’re told why the Enterprise is there itself, matter of fact…”
It’s a strange new world. They’re exploring it. That’s explicitly their mission. Presumably the Exeter‘s too.
@ChristopherLBennett/168: Well, yeah. I’ve noticed during my rewatch that the Enterprise is on specific missions within that broader mission to rendezvous, observe, make deliveries, check in, etc. more than I’d remembered, however, to such an extent that I found it notable that it arrived at this planet deliberately but without a stated reason. And while there’s occasional reference to ships being too far away from Starfleet for messages, it not being mentioned that the Exteter was known to have been missing / incommunicado felt notable too.
Awful from top to bottom. And the way the Kohms just vanish after the Yang invasion without any word about it from anyone is deeply disturbing.
On re-watching the story Saturday I don’t think it’s all that bad; just a bit stupid here and there. So this starship captain suddenly decides to go Ferengi and sell immortality to the Federation? Didn’t his crew recognize he was such a loon? I might be wrong, but I don’t think people go bat-crap crazy that fast, but what do I know?
And of course the other thing everybody complains of, the flag and Constitution being taken straight out of an American civics textbook. That part of the plot was utterly ridiculous. Eeb plebnista indeed, ha ha. It couldn’t get any more stupid. But stupid isn’t always bad. Here it was interesting to see every fighting move Kirk used, Tracey countered sooo easily… For once our hero was completely outclassed and got his butt thoroughly kicked, and by an older man, too. It has probably been noted that Ron Tracey was the Anti-Kirk.
But then it suddenly hit me: equally bad, Star Trek Insurrection, was the TNG version of Omega Glory but only a bit more polished. Well, that scene with McCoy and Spock, the girl–
McCoy: “What are you doing?”
Spock: “I’m making a suggestion…”
— That was priceless. We see that Spock is too often underestimated. You gotta wonder though, if psionics was a thing taught in all Vulcan schools like Telepathy 101, or did Spock take advanced courses somewhere along the way? Does Spock bend spoons when he’s alone to amuse himself? I don’t think I ever saw Tuvock doing anything so cool.
It never bothered me before, but when I found out that any body can do the neck pinch– Archer, Data, Odo, Picard, and even ordinary people in the real world such as it is– every time Kirk complains he can’t do it kinda sets my teeth on edge a bit. I understand it’s comedy, but it’s weak comedy at Kirk’s expense.
I give Omega Glory 5.0. But hey, i liked Howard the Duck, too.
@171/Ron Hubbard: “…when I found out that any body can do the neck pinch– Archer, Data, Odo, Picard, and even ordinary people in the real world such as it is– every time Kirk complains he can’t do it kinda sets my teeth on edge a bit.”
Archer could only do it as a result of sharing Surak’s consciousness, IIRC. Data and Odo both have superhuman strength and motor control. And what Picard did in “Starship Mine” looked superficially like a Vulcan nerve pinch, but it was actually a carotid artery block.
@172 Picard also shared Sarek’s consciousness, too. But the bradycardia plexus and what Dim Mak experts call Stomach 12 run along both sides of the neck and shoulder. Now Nimoy may have *thought * he made it up, but I have seen a few YouTube videos of people teaching the pinch. Trouble is, it only seems to last less than 30 seconds– but that might be a matter of how hard you do it. :-)
@173: Ron Hubbard: Archer performed the nerve pinch while he was carrying Surak’s katra. That’s the point. The skill was not his; he just borrowed it from his passenger, and there’s no evidence that he retained it afterward.
By contrast, Doctor McCoy was unable to perform a nerve pinch while carrying Spock’s katra. Perhaps his physical strength was inadequate compared to Archer’s.
And again, what Picard did was not a Vulcan nerve pinch. Here’s how the script describes it:
“Devor springs back into a combat stance… but Picard is ready for him. He dodges, yanks him around in a hammer lock and wedges the side of his hand into Devor’s carotid. Devor struggles for a second, then slumps.”
@174 Funny, there is also a video of all the non-Vulcans who have done the neck pinch: Data in both Unification part 2 and Nemesis, Archer in Kir’Shara, Seven of Nine in The Raven, Odo in Paradise Lost, Michael Burnham in The Vulcan Hello, and Picard in Starship Mine. Okay, I’ll marginally give you that one as Picard’s technique is sloppy. This may have been before his mind meld with Sarek.
Now, as for the other seven, 1.) your argument about Archer and and Surak’s consciousness doesn’t quite hold water for the same reason you argue about McCoy: McCoy had Spock’s katra and still couldn’t do it.
But just to nitpick, after mind melds humans and other entities usually don’t forget what information they acquire from Vulcans except in that one instant, Spock’s “Forget…” to Kirk over his machine girlfriend. No reason why Archer didn’t retain the technique. But the line that was said to him was, “Your technique is improving.” A curious thing to say to someone if a Vulcan mind was in control, don’t you think?”
And 2). Come on, Data never mind melded with any Vulcan nor did Odo, Seven, and presumably Michael Burnham didn’t either– so it must be a technique any human can learn that doesn’t require some esoteric knowledge or Vulcan supernatural strength. You’d have to ask if the technique was in the Enterprise computer for Data to learn it (entry: Vulcan customs), or did he just know human anatomy and sussed out how to do it from seeing it done? Ah, the advantages of an eidetic memory. And again with Odo, where did he get it from?+
I’ll admit I have a little trouble believing all Borg drones remembering billions of bits of assimilated 4-1-1 from 1,000 assimilated worlds or more without their heads exploding, but okay, Seven of Nine can do the pinch as good as any Vulcan. Former drone yes, but Seven is still a human home girl with average female strength. Now, I’m gonna ignore that nonsense on Voyager about “ruptured trapezius bundles,” but just from eight chracters alone doing it– seven if you want to ignore Picard’s sloppy “carotid” whatever– the neck pinch must not be that hard and must not be something only Vulcans can do.
Oh, wait! That horse in Star Trek V! Spock did it to a horse (or close to a horse, yeah) but it didn’t work on Mudd’s android twins (did he really expect it to?) or on Gary Seven. Draw your own conclusions, there. ;-)
@175/Ron Hubbard: “Funny, there is also a video of all the non-Vulcans who have done the neck pinch: Data in both Unification part 2 and Nemesis, Archer in Kir’Shara, Seven of Nine in The Raven, Odo in Paradise Lost, Michael Burnham in The Vulcan Hello, and Picard in Starship Mine.”
Picard did a carotid block, as I’ve already shown. Discounting that, Archer was carrying a Vulcan consciousness at the time and thus did not actually learn the skill himself; Burnham had been raised on Vulcan from age nine and had plenty of time to learn it and the broader Vulcan disciplines that go with it; and the others all possessed superhuman strength and capabilities. None of them is analogous to Kirk, whose knowledge of things Vulcan is so lacking that he didn’t even recognize the name “Surak.”
“your argument about Archer and and Surak’s consciousness doesn’t quite hold water for the same reason you argue about McCoy: McCoy had Spock’s katra and still couldn’t do it.”
On the contrary, it supports my argument. People are not stamped out on an assembly line. They have different potentials and abilities. One person might have a natural talent for, say, basketball or piano playing, while another person practices for weeks and still isn’t any good. What would be unbelievable is if a skill came equally easily to everyone.
Sure. Sure.
The episode was bafflingly bad. That episode of Voyager where going at warp 10 turns two of the crew into salamanders that leave their salamander babies on a random planet was an absolute masterpiece compared to this. I did not remotely comprehend how incredibly stupid and offensive the episode was when I was in middle school. 0 is generous. That is all.
I think that there’s a few crumbs of potential in this one’s premise. Someone could probably have done a pretty decent story about a Starfleet Captain who gets marooned on a primitive planet and winds up picking sides in a genocidal civil war. You could even make it a post-apocalyptic Cold War analogy, if you absolutely must. In the hands of a much, much better writer than Gene Roddenberry, it *might* even have been possible to have them break down along 20th century human racial lines without it being cringe-inducingly racist, depending on the point that they were trying to make. But unfortunately, whatever else this episode might have been, “The Omega Glory” is what we got, and it absolutely deserves that 0.
The novel Forgotten History by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett establishes that the copies of the Constitution and American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance were left by an Earth Cargo Services vessel, the Philadelphia, in the early days of space travel to inspire the Yangs in their fight for freedom,
The ending of this episode drove me nuts every single time I saw it, so thank you, Christopher, for crafting an explanation that makes sense! I’m definitely going to use this in my head canon when I watch this.
I know it’s been years since anyone darkened the doors of this particular disaster, but I just wanted to say well-done, Keith, for calling Roddenberry out on his absolute bobbins as a Trek screenwriter. TMP alone should dissuade anyone from applying the auteur theory to Trek. And the worst part is, he never learned. Has anyone read his very last Star Trek submission, ‘Ferengi Gold’? It was outlined some time in the second season of TNG and reproduced in that unofficial Altman/Gross ‘Captain’s Logs’ book. It featured yet another parallel Earth development, with a colonial US-type civilization and Ferengi instead of Klingons. Cue lots of leering at the female characters and Roddenberry’s odd depiction of Picard as a self-important bureaucrat who ‘bribes’ Dr. Pulaski to relieving Riker of duty so he can beam down to the planet, then needs Riker to save him when he gets captured.
Boy this episode is terrible. Just Kirk referring to the “white civilization” and the “yellow civilization” earns it its zero.
The big buff blond haired, blue eyed “Native American” kept reminding me of Rojhaz from Gaimon’s 1602 miniseries.
Captain Tracey killed the security guard because he reached for his phaser.