Review

It's bad enough that Star Trek rehashes previous episodes occasionally, but it's even worse when they rehash a bad episode. The Omega Glory is a rehash of one of Star Trek's worst episodes: Miri. Just like Miri, we once again have an alien planet with a parallel Earth culture with absolutely no explanation given at all for how the aliens developed a parallel United States, complete with a parallel American flag and a parallel verbatim copy of the U.S. constitution. I suppose it's possible that John Gill from Patterns of Force (or someone like him) stopped by this planet on his way to go make a parallel Nazi culture on that similar planet full of aliens which look exactly like humans, but without the episode at least trying to explain this nonsense, or at least one character questioning how all this came to be, I'm afraid I can't award the episode any points, due to the fundamentally unsound nature of the premise.

Worse yet, the episode has plenty of other details to be annoyed with as well. For starters, at one point Kirk claims that a captain would give his life, or even the life of his crew, before violating the Prime Directive. Yet he has previously violated the Prime Directive many times. Likewise, it seems like a hasty error in judgement for Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Galloway to have ever beamed down to that planet at all given that the decision was based on nothing more than the recommendation of a hysterical log entry of a dying bridge officer on the Exeter, especially since it is clear that they knew there was a primitive culture down there to begin with. If they had to beam down there, the least they could have done was beam down to a location that wasn't so densely populated so as to avoid the conflict that ensued with the locals.

That said, it's totally unclear why the entire crew of the Exeter didn't evacuate themselves to the planet, since they appeared to have the knowledge that there was a cure for them on the surface, given that they took the time to leave log entries testifying as to the fact that there's a cure on the surface. But I suppose stupidity is a prerequisite for being a member of the Exeter's crew, if Captain Tracey is to be taken as representative of the average level of intelligence for a member of that ship's crew.

But that's not all. Among other annoying gaffes, McCoy incorrectly stated that the human body is 96% water when the actual figure is closer to 70%, and Kirk claimed to be unable to learn how to do the Vulcan neck pinch, despite the fact that we've already seen him perform it in The Return of the Archons. Likewise, both the shoddy construction of the Kohm prison as well as the extent to which Spock could manipulate the Yang woman with Vulcan telepathy also pushed the bounds of what is believable. Finally, Spock's reasoning that the only two possible causes for why the Yangs' advanced civilization could have regressed so much being either nuclear war or biological warfare is a painfully obvious logical error. There are any number of reasons why a civilization could experience a regression with a war being only one such reason.

But perhaps the most striking detail of the episode is its blatantly racist and nationalist qualities. This isn't like Patterns of Force, where the racist nationalism is confined to a few misguided characters. In this episode the racist nationalism seems to ooze from the plot itself. The Yangs (Yankies) are Caucasian, revere the American flag, and the U.S. constitution's texts are holy words. The Kohms (Communists) are Asian and clearly depicted as the bad guys. At one point Tracey mentions that the Yangs "look like us" and the Kohms do not, as if there are no Asians in the Federation. Kirk even refers to the Kohms as "yellow" people and claims that had his ancestors been forced out of the cities, they'd end up living like "the Indians," by which he was referring to Native Americans.

The score of the episode even begins conspicuously playing the national anthem of the United States whenever the U.S. flag appears on screen and Kirk at one point states in a moment of nationalist pride that "no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way" when referring to the text of the U.S. constitution. I wonder how he feels about the Federation charter.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one.