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The Omega Glory...

Kirk was smaller and believe it or not much less experienced than Captain Ronald Tracey of the Exeter! The ease with which the bigger guy chops down Kirk is self evident on his face when Jim makes a dash for freedom! Omega was the first Trek episode that I ever recorded on VHS back in 1980 too so always held that special interest for me! :D
JB
 
Kirk was smaller and believe it or not much less experienced than Captain Ronald Tracey of the Exeter! The ease with which the bigger guy chops down Kirk is self evident on his face when Jim makes a dash for freedom! Omega was the first Trek episode that I ever recorded on VHS back in 1980 too so always held that special interest for me! :D
JB

It would have been interesting to see Kirk try his flying drop kick on Tracy, but it just didn't happen in OG.

spocksbrainhd0888.jpg
 
Thanks, SB, but I'm not really familar with Fred Carson as such and always believed he was Sidney Haig! :techman:
JB
 
I never had a problem with this episode. Parallel Development would mean some higher life kidnapped humans at specific points in time, ran them in a simulator for study, and then abandoned the project. In this case, it was the study of humans during the Cold War. Once the humans were abandoned, the natural inclinations took place, creating the situation that Tracey would find. Henous.
 
A big point seems to be that these folks aren't human, though - which comes as a big revelation to the heroes and the villain and undermines everything they thought they were fighting for or against. That the folks would naturally live for centuries upon centuries is both a neat scifi concept and justification enough for them to be rabid warmongers who want to rid their planet of excess numbers.

That the Yangs wouldn't naturally be Genocidal Nazi Injuns is far from said. What the Kohms are or were is never really made clear, apart from the last pitiful villageful of them being meek victims; might be they were worse than the GNIs originally, even though the GNI propaganda merely paints them as land-grabbers.

Basically, the episode leaves open all sorts of rationalizations for the setup, while simultaneously covering the madness of superpower biowars, the genocidal campaigns of the conquest of the West, and the search for the Fountain of Youth - topics whose topicality is not necessarily in direct correlation with their dramatical value. The Cold War angle of this really feels the most distant of the three, there being nothing cold about the atrocities we see and hear about (unless we interpret them as proxy wars in the Third World), and little indication that the two sides would be analogous to 1960s superpowers until the very end.

Timo Saloniemi
 
The thing is that Spock declares that your earth avoided the conflict that the Omegas fought and yet in Bread And Circuses quotes the death toll from said conflict??? And in TNG we learn of the War against the Mandarins as such in Encounter At Farpoint!!! :wtf:
JB
 
The thing is that Spock declares that your earth avoided the conflict that the Omegas fought and yet in Bread And Circuses quotes the death toll from said conflict??? And in TNG we learn of the War against the Mandarins as such in Encounter At Farpoint!!! :wtf:
JB

"Space Seed" and "Bread and Circuses" must be referring to the same WW III, I would hope, but "The Omega Glory" can be excused if said WW III wasn't against the communist bloc.

I don't remember the Farpoint dialogue, but it wouldn't surprise me if they thoughtlessly trampled TOS continuity in their very first episode. Some of the TNG-era resources were not up and running yet.
 
Gene, DC Fontana, David Gerrold and Bobby Justman were all there. They knew a little something about TOS continuity.
 
Yup, "Omega Glory" is pretty specific about the conflict Earth dodged: an armageddon war between the Communists and the Yankees.

Spock: "Kohms? ...Communists? The parallel is almost too close, Captain. It would mean they fought the war your Earth avoided, and in this case, the Asiatics won and took over this planet.

That some completely different parties happened to nuke Earth back to the stone age almost a century later is a different issue altogether.

Timo Saloniemi
 
A big point seems to be that these folks aren't human, though - which comes as a big revelation to the heroes and the villain and undermines everything they thought they were fighting for or against. That the folks would naturally live for centuries upon centuries is both a neat scifi concept and justification enough for them to be rabid warmongers who want to rid their planet of excess numbers.
Timo Saloniemi

Ahhh, but why aren't they human? Simply because of the long lifespan? Flint was human.

Nah, these guys are human, they just live a hell of a long time.
 
The thing is that Spock declares that your earth avoided the conflict that the Omegas fought and yet in Bread And Circuses quotes the death toll from said conflict??? And in TNG we learn of the War against the Mandarins as such in Encounter At Farpoint!!! :wtf:
JB

"Space Seed" and "Bread and Circuses" must be referring to the same WW III, I would hope, but "The Omega Glory" can be excused if said WW III wasn't against the communist bloc.

I don't remember the Farpoint dialogue, but it wouldn't surprise me if they thoughtlessly trampled TOS continuity in their very first episode. Some of the TNG-era resources were not up and running yet.

WW III was also called the Eugenics Wars, and it was the last big war, but they didn't use large scale biological warfare like the people on Omega 6 did. That's the war, the biological one, that Earth avoided.

TNG's WW 4 doesn't fit in anywhere and I don't try to make it fit.
 
Kirk and Spock had no problem beaming down to Organia, class D- on the Richter Scale (!) of Cultures, and presumably pre-warp (despite the automatic doors).
View attachment 6406
Cowboys.
my explanation for this is that if the federation knows the planet in question has awareness of other worlds and has been visited by cultures that dont have a prime directive, then it's ok to drop on in.
 
The thing is that Spock declares that your earth avoided the conflict that the Omegas fought and yet in Bread And Circuses quotes the death toll from said conflict??? And in TNG we learn of the War against the Mandarins as such in Encounter At Farpoint!!! :wtf:
JB

Good work noticing what could appear to be a contradiction.

Pay attention. In "The Omega Glory" Spock says that Earth avoided the war that happened on Omega IV - an all out nuclear war between the "first world" lead by the USA and the second would Communist powers, and so avoided a nuclear holocaust with at least hundreds of millions dead in caused by the Cold War turning red hot. In "Bread and Circuses" Spock gives the casualty figures for the Third World War that did happen on Earth, which obviously must have happened under sufficiently difffent circumstances than the war on Omega IV for Spock to consider it a war with a different cause.

"Space Seed" and "Bread and Circuses" must be referring to the same WW III, I would hope, but "The Omega Glory" can be excused if said WW III wasn't against the communist bloc.

I don't remember the Farpoint dialogue, but it wouldn't surprise me if they thoughtlessly trampled TOS continuity in their very first episode. Some of the TNG-era resources were not up and running yet.

I do no think that they must be referring to the same war in "Space Seed" and "Bread and Circuses".. In fact, I think that they must have been referring to two different wars. I believe the Eugenics Wars in "Space Seed" was after the Third World War mentioned in "Bread and Circuses" and thus was the Fourth World War or later in Spock's list of Earth's world wars, and also should have been much bloodier than the Third World War in "Bread and Circuses".

Gene, DC Fontana, David Gerrold and Bobby Justman were all there. They knew a little something about TOS continuity.

That is correct.

Yup, "Omega Glory" is pretty specific about the conflict Earth dodged: an armageddon war between the Communists and the Yankees.

That some completely different parties happened to nuke Earth back to the stone age almost a century later is a different issue altogether.
Timo Saloniemi

Yes, Omega IV suffered an Armageddon war between the Communist powers and the USA.

In our history the threat of a nuclear armageddon between the Communists and the Yankees lasted from about 1959 to 1989, give or take a few years of constant fear. So saying that the unrelated conflict in the Third World War of "Bread and Circuses", or the unrelated conflict in the Eugenics Wars in "Space Seed", or the unrelated conflict in the Third World War in Star Trek: First Contact happened almost a century later is making a rather unjustified chronological assumption.

I think that I wrote a larger post on August 21 but forgot to save it. Anyway, I also comment on Earth's world wars in post number 16 in the thread: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/your-last-so-called-world-war.300954/
 
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.... A Parallel development right down to the words of the Declaration of Independence breaks suspension of disbelief. ....

Absolutely! This has prevented me from enjoying any of the "parallel planet" stories. That another planet could develop a society of capitalists and communists, and the latter became ascendant; that a culture resembling ancient Rome could develop and evolve to a technological level; that a tribal society resembling 18th century Native Americans exists, are all believable. That in each case they would develop exactly like earth, with the same totems, tenets, and writings, is completely unbelievable.

In the episode with the Nazi world the base concept is valid since a Starfleet captain thought that the most efficient government to rebuild this world. But it is not believable that he would have them recreate all the Nazi regalia of twentieth century earth, just institute an authoritarian government using that world's existing uniforms and insignia.

At the other extreme is "A Piece of the Action", where another planet recreates 1930 Chicago with only one book - a history of the Chicago gangs - as a reference. Ludicrous! No matter how inventive or mechanically inclined was this society, are we to believe that from mere photographs of automobiles they can deduce the working of an internal combustion engine, a gearbox, a braking system, etc.? Or from photos of men holding Thompson sub-machine guns they can reproduce functional models of these weapons? It is highly doubtful a history of gang warfare would contain technical descriptions of automobiles and weapons. And these people learned how to play pool from just photos of pool tables (something the Beverly Hillbillies didn't do with a pool table in their home, "it's a billy-yard table, that ugly thing on the wall (mounted rhino head) must be the head of a billy-yard").
 
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