"Omega Glory": Any Cut Scenes?

[CoveTom]

Is anyone familiar with the script for "The Omega Glory"? I'm curious, because there's a place where it just feels to me like there should be something more.

When Kirk wakes up after being knocked out in the jail cell, and sees the key, he tells Spock something to the effect of "I'll have you out in a second." But then we just cut to the room where McCoy is and Kirk and Spock showing up. I suppose we could just be meant to assume that Kirk did, indeed, get the key and get Spock out, but it seems like an odd jump, and it just feels to me like there should be something else there.

Anyone know?

 

[T'Girl]

My assumption is that Kirk went out the now open window, walked around the jail, went in the front door, got the key, released Spock, and then the two of them walked through the village to the building that contained McCoy.

It would have been padding to show all this. Kirk stated he would get Spock out, then they're at McCoy's location. It wasn't necessary to show the inbetween.

 

[GSchnitzer]

Is anyone familiar with the script for "The Omega Glory"? I'm curious, because there's a place where it just feels to me like there should be something more.

When Kirk wakes up after being knocked out in the jail cell, and sees the key, he tells Spock something to the effect of "I'll have you out in a second." But then we just cut to the room where McCoy is and Kirk and Spock showing up. I suppose we could just be meant to assume that Kirk did, indeed, get the key and get Spock out, but it seems like an odd jump, and it just feels to me like there should be something else there.

Anyone know?

There was indeed something more in the script.

Scene 85 ANGLE - SPOCK

At the window of his cell. He notices Kirk moving in
the next cell, reacts, and hurries to the bars.

KIRK
(weakly)
How long...?

SPOCK
About seven hours, Captain.

Scene 86 ANGLE - KIRK

Stirring more, revealing a trickle of dried blood down
his face. The iron grill lies on the floor beside him;
above, the window is open. He stirs again, opens his
eyes and tries to move, grimaces at the pain which
surges over him. He gets groggily to his feet, trying to
clear his head, stumbles to the bars into TWO SHOT
with Spock.

Scene 87 KIRK'S CELL WINDOW

As the Captain stumbles to it, begins pulling himself
up through the window.

Scene 88 EXT. ALLEY BESIDE "JAIL" - FULL SHOT - DAY

Kirk climbing out into the alley, hurrying around to the back door.

Scene 89 INT. JAIL - ANGLE ON DOOR - DAY

Kirk enters through the rear door, hurries to the desk
and starts to pull open drawers. He finds the cell
keys and quickly unlocks Spock's cell.

So there had indeed been some "Kirk climbs out, goes around and enters the jail, and gets the keys to let Spock out" shots planned. In the end, it was just easier to put the keys out in the open, have Kirk deliver the "I'll have you out in a minute" line, and then have the audience fill in the rest themselves. It's probably a good call; we know what climbing out a window and going back into the jail to get the keys to release Spock would probably look like. Excising it makes more time available for more interesting stuff.

It's unlikely any of this stuff was shot--especially Kirk opening drawers to find the keys--since they already established the keys on the table. It looks like the keys were established so that they could avoid the whole rigmarole altogether. And they could dispense with an "alley" set and a whole lot of other camera set-ups.

 

[ToddPence]

Here's an earlier thread dealing with this very issue:

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=103836

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Not wanting to revive that old thread, I'll just post this here. Christopher has come up with an explanation that I hadn't considered as to why Omega IV is so much like Earth, and contains exact copies of the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance. He put it in his 'Department of Temporal Investigations' novels.

Spoiler: novels

It was an Earth freighter which visited Omega IV and deposited copies of those documents with the natives, as a gesture of inspiration to their struggle. Christopher pointed out that those items couldn't literally be as old as we thought they were, because they would have rotted away into dust. So apparently the freighter crew left copies of the Pledge and Constitution there for the people to use, and the Yangs adopted them into their own mythology. I can live with that.

And perhaps not surprisingly, the freighter was named Philadelphia.

 

[Timo]

...This sort of assigns extraordinary importance to an otherwise seemingly random and unimportant Kohm village. How come that in a global struggle for power, the village is within a few days' travel of the holding place of the unique relics? The Yangs didn't appear to have advanced transportation; are we to assume that Cloud William was their most exalted leader, an Alexander the Great of sorts, and governed from the very front and always carried his symbols of power with him?

Curious, then, that the Yangs didn't realize whom they were holding. Curious, too, that the relics, even if only a century old, were in such good shape despite living a hard life of bivouacking with the troops in the field.

An alternate take would have the Yangs creating numerous copies of the flag and the documents for their global reign of terror. They might not have jet planes or trains, but they could well have a printing press... This theory would remove age limits on the relics, as the originals might indeed have rotted away and/or would be kept in a sacred chamber somewhere, out of touch by mortal hand or eye.

This doesn't really relate to cut scenes or lines as such. We can speculate on visitors from Earth, with or without time travel, even when our heroes never discuss such a thing, because we already know our heroes are (intimately) familiar with ancient visitations and cultural contamination from/to/via Earth. They could take such an explanation for granted here; rather than deliver a line, they "deliver" this "information" to the audience implicitly through their looks and gestures as the Star-Spangled Banner enters the room.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BillJ]

^ Not wanting to revive that old thread, I'll just post this here. Christopher has come up with an explanation that I hadn't considered as to why Omega IV is so much like Earth, and contains exact copies of the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance. He put it in his 'Department of Temporal Investigations' novels.

Spoiler: novels

It was an Earth freighter which visited Omega IV and deposited copies of those documents with the natives, as a gesture of inspiration to their struggle. Christopher pointed out that those items couldn't literally be as old as we thought they were, because they would have rotted away into dust. So apparently the freighter crew left copies of the Pledge and Constitution there for the people to use, and the Yangs adopted them into their own mythology. I can live with that.

And perhaps not surprisingly, the freighter was named Philadelphia.

I posited the same thing on these boards years ago. Great minds think alike.

This was posted four months before Forgotten History was released...

I think you could just as easily reverse the scenario above. That Omega IV developed the Constitution and flag first and it was transplanted to Earth by one of their starfarers.

Or...

Perhaps the Omegans had developed similarly to humans and had their devastating wars that blew them back to the stone age. Then, after Earth develops warp flight, one of our own starfarers or a group of them headed to the stars with artifacts of the U.S. government and crash landed on Omega IV. Teaching the Omegans of their ways and the values of the land they came from, which the Omegans recognized as similar to the ways they use to cherish and embraced them as their own.

 

[Disruptor]

Could be that the document really said "E Pleg Neesta" and Kirk was just having dellusions because it reminded him of something from US history.

I mean there's only so many rituals and flag patterns and syllables out there, so are bound to be similar to some of ours.

Did they ever unfurl the flag, maybe it only looked like an American flag the way it was hanging down.

 

[BillJ]

Could be that the document really said "E Pleg Neesta" and Kirk was just having dellusions because it reminded him of something from US history.

I mean there's only so many rituals and flag patterns and syllables out there, so are bound to be similar to some of ours.

Did they ever unfurl the flag, maybe it only looked like an American flag the way it was hanging down.

We see what Kirk is reading and it says "We the people..."

 

[UnknownSample]

I didn't know there was any doubt that this was a case of another planet identical in all ways to Earth developing in an exactly parallel way, because of it. (Exactly parallel until their nuclear war, that is.) I haven't seen this one for a long time, and don't remember what is overtly said onscreen, but from childhood on, I've been sure of this.

 

[Disruptor]

We see what Kirk is reading and it says "We the people..."

He got a really good bump on the head earlier courtesy of Cloud Williams. We were just seeing he thinks he's seeing.

 

[Ssosmcin]

There's also a bit of an argument missing at the end of the episode. Spock and McCoy are about to launch into one of their debates when Kirk cuts them off to leave the to discover their freedom and liberty. I think it's in the Blish adaptation. The cut is pretty clumsy.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

..

Curious, then, that the Yangs didn't realize whom they were holding. Curious, too, that the relics, even if only a century old, were in such good shape despite living a hard life of bivouacking with the troops in the field.

An alternate take would have the Yangs creating numerous copies of the flag and the documents for their global reign of terror. They might not have jet planes or trains, but they could well have a printing press... This theory would remove age limits on the relics, as the originals might indeed have rotted away and/or would be kept in a sacred chamber somewhere, out of touch by mortal hand or eye.



Timo Saloniemi

I think it's simpler to just say that they were given a facsimile of the constitution on a futuristic kind of paper that would never rot or tear. It's condition as we see it is only to make it appear as the constitution looks now (well in the 1960s anyway).

 

[Disruptor]

Perhaps Space Jesus after visiting the Roman planet, visited Omega IV and gave them democracy and the Bible (with pictures of Vulcans in it).

 

[Tallguy]

An alternate take would have the Yangs creating numerous copies of the flag and the documents for their global reign of terror.

Their what now?

 

[Timo]

Tracey seemed clear on the issue: the Yangs were taking over, and this little phaser-defended village was the only one capable of resisting. Also, the savageness of the Yangs was not in doubt. So, global reign of terror.

...For a given value of global, of course. Presumably, the old culture had been a widespread one, but the territory the Yangs and Kohms were fighting over might have been much reduced. Yet apparently the planet had no culture to offer outside the Kohm villages, or else Tracey would have commented on that, or ended up there instead of in the village we saw.

Whether the fall of the village meant the end of the Kohm culture or just another local defeat depends on how we interpret the flag and the documents. If they're unique, then their presence here is probably only explainable if this is the final triumph of the Yangs and Cloud William is the head honcho. If there are lots of copies, then a set could be paraded at every local victory and Cloud William could be a local leader only.

Timo Saloniemi