McCoy makes some of the same points later, when Spock shows up with the empty phaser power packs, so I'd say this scene was cut and the plot points distributed elsewhere in the episode.
Can 'Omega Glory' ever be fully restored?
- Thread starter Mr. Laser Beam
- Start date
The name 'Wu' is Chinese, but the actor who played him, Lloyd Kino, is almost certainly of Japanese ancestry. Kino (name probably shortened from Kinoshita) played many Japanese characters in his career, but (not surprisingly) played other ethnicities when work was offered - sometimes Chinese or "generic Asian", but also Vietnamese on at least one occasion.
Edit:
Finally able to get back and read the deleted scenes. Thanks for posting those, ToddPence.
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Hmmm. Sounds like maybe for awhile they were going for one of those Twilight Zone style shockers...the kind where you'd dislike or pity someone for a whole episode, and then find out at the very end that 'someone' is you. Like the 'ugly woman & pig doctors' or that episode where a flying saucer with tiny aliens invades a woman's house and she keeps trying to kill them, and then you find the 'aliens' are from Earth.
Set up the whole episode where the viewer assumes the 'savages' are terrible monsters, until the very end when they bring out the Constitution and American flag and it turns out they're us (US audience perspective) and the nice villagers we've grown to empathize with are our Cold War enemies. Maybe to suggest who is civilized and who is a savage is often a matter of perspective. That element is still there, but not played to the hilt like Twilight Zone would've done.
Or then again since it was the 60's, it could've been a warning about what could happen to the west if Communism went unchecked. A 'losing your freedom' kind of story. Then there's the racial aspect regarding Spock.
Almost sounds like they might've been trying to mix several moral themes in one story, and then later decided to shift most of the focus to Tracy and the non-interference aspect but left bits and pieces of the earlier themes in there.
Might explain some of the disjointedness and why the whole parallel Earth thing was there to begin with, when you didn't really need it just to tell a 'prime directive' or 'good vs. evil' story.
Anyway, some cool revelations. Thanks!
Mark
Reading this and thinking further about my post above, I could see how an American viewer might start to sympathize with Tracy watching this scene and say "you know, this time I think Kirk is wrong. He ought to give Tracy those phasers so he can protect those innocent women and children from those vicious savages". Then again we find at the end "we're" the savages and we were advocating for Tracy to wipe out our own descendents...so to speak. And that suddenly our Communist enemies had human faces we'd never paid attention to before. Very 60's.
And maybe the Spock thing wasn't racial afterall, but a way of making Tracy seem more righteous at first and those who follow the Prime Directive cold and heartless, only to wonder in the end if maybe it's more proper to ask questions first and not assume we always know what's best.
I could be totally off-base here, but reading through this I'm starting to think this episode could've been pretty interesting in a different way. A little like "And Let That Be Your Last Battlefield."
Mark
Those lines seem awfully familiar. So either I have seen that scene in some version or another or I read a script version of it. (This seems unlikely as I don't believe I have ever actually perused the script version of anything.) Is it possible that the scene was part of the print & shown back in the early days of reruns?
That entire deleted scene is included in James Blish's print adaptation of the episode. Maybe that's where you know it from.
OMG!
*goes digging in his paperback boxes*
Tracy might be an example of a star fleet captain who adhered to the letter of the prime directive once too many times. There could of been other event, over the course of Tracy's career, where he stood to the side and bad things happen. A slow transition of thought took place. A crisis of conscience. One massacre too many made Tracy vow never again.
He was right about one thing, the Yang did massacre/subjugate the Khoms.
T'Girl
Yep. I recognized it right off from Blish's adaptation. As I was going through the thread I made the connection and was ready to identify it until I came across this post.
Much of those same dialogue bits were recycled in other scenes, which is why I think that the scene we're been presented with wasn't filmed and is from an early draft.
I wonder if this story wasn't at least partly influenced by Edgar Rice Burrough's classic novel The Moon Men. This novel features a future Earth in which America has been overrun by enemy aliens from the Moon. These aliens are thinly-disguised representations of communists. The Americans in the novel have been forced out of their cities by the invaders, and adopt Indian tribal customs as they return to the wilderness and fight to regain their cities, just like the Yangs in this episode. Also like the Yangs, the Americans in the novel worship an ancient American flag as a deified religious object, although they have long since forgotten its origin and meaning. Roddenberry may have read "The Moon Men" and been inspired by it, there are certainly many paralells between Burrough's book and his script.
ToddPence, you're reading my mind. I've always been struck by the similarities between "Omega Glory" and "The Moon Men", so much so that when one is mentioned, I always think of the other. I'm a big ERB fan and I have every one of his books.
Btw, for those who don't know and may want to read "The Moon Men", it's a sequel to an earlier book called "The Moon Maid". Yep, there were babes on the moon; this is Edgar Rice Burroughs after all.
Robert
Btw, for those who don't know and may want to read "The Moon Men", it's a sequel to an earlier book called "The Moon Maid". Yep, there were babes on the moon; this is Edgar Rice Burroughs after all.
Robert
I am also a huge ERB fan and have all of his books save for one called "The Girl From Farris's", which I've never been able to find a hard copy of. (It's probably now availible for free online, though).
>Btw, for those who don't know and may want to read "The Moon Men", it's a sequel to an earlier book called "The Moon Maid".
Actually, it's more accurate to say that "Moon Maid" is a prequel to "Moon Men", since the latter was written before the former.
>Btw, for those who don't know and may want to read "The Moon Men", it's a sequel to an earlier book called "The Moon Maid".
Actually, it's more accurate to say that "Moon Maid" is a prequel to "Moon Men", since the latter was written before the former.
I have "Girl From Farris", got it in paperback a long time ago. I'm pretty sure it's old enough to be in the public domain but Project Gutenberg, an online site that has public domain books doesn't seem to have it, you might double check me on that.
Robert
The Burroughs estate has always had a very firm grip on his work. I seriously doubt any of his writings will ever become public domain.
You know, given the timeframe, Omega could very well be the original Earth. Populations of other earth-like planets, including OUR Earth, might've been transplanted from there and influenced by Preservers. I can perfectly imagine that they'd deliberately influence our culture to reconstruct the cultural conditions of Omega, just to see what went wrong there and whether it could be avoided.
I see it like this: There was Omega, which was the original Earth (until the war broke). Then there was 892-IV, which for some reason froze in Ancient Rome era. Preservers tried to revert the mistake, which explains the introduction of English language into the Rome setting. Eventually they abandoned it and went on with Miri's planet; quite probably they were developing Kirk's Earth and Miri's Earth at the same time, maybe copying them with some sort of planetary replicator device. On Miri's Earth, the experiment failed - sometime back in 1960s, inhabitants developed the immortality virus, thus eradicating themselves. Kirk's Earth succesfully survived, unifying all nations and entering the warp era.
Our Earth (or, more exactly, Kirk's Earth! Because there's no proof that those two are the same!) is, obviously, the first successful experiment. But who knows which one is it in the row? Is it Earth #3, or Earth #50, or Earth #5253?
I see it like this: There was Omega, which was the original Earth (until the war broke). Then there was 892-IV, which for some reason froze in Ancient Rome era. Preservers tried to revert the mistake, which explains the introduction of English language into the Rome setting. Eventually they abandoned it and went on with Miri's planet; quite probably they were developing Kirk's Earth and Miri's Earth at the same time, maybe copying them with some sort of planetary replicator device. On Miri's Earth, the experiment failed - sometime back in 1960s, inhabitants developed the immortality virus, thus eradicating themselves. Kirk's Earth succesfully survived, unifying all nations and entering the warp era.
Our Earth (or, more exactly, Kirk's Earth! Because there's no proof that those two are the same!) is, obviously, the first successful experiment. But who knows which one is it in the row? Is it Earth #3, or Earth #50, or Earth #5253?
^I already addressed that idea earlier, didn't I? First off, there's too much overwhelming evidence that we evolved on this planet as part of its overall biosphere. Second, us being descended from the Omegans wouldn't explain why the framers of the United States Constitution, a document arrived at through a lengthy process of debate and compromise among dozens of competing factions, ended up with the exact same verbatim wording (at least to its preamble) as a constitution written on some alien planet thousands of years before.
Though I believe the Procounsel says to Kirk "You're a Roman, Kirk, or you should have been". So they are called Romans, for what its worth.
Actually, Kirk read the magazine to Spock and McCoy. All the text was in English, which we saw on-screen.
I know that's what we were shown, but I'm suggesting (or elaborating on a previous poster's suggestion) that it was apocryphal -- that the story we were shown was a dramatization that took liberties with what "actually" happened, and that the "real" events of that scene were different from what we were shown.
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