The passing earth freighter theory doesn't hold water or the Earth colonists finding Omega IV unless they went through a time warp! The Kohm Wu is hundreds of years old and his father is well over a thousand according to Captain Tracey! So when the Yangs and Kohms first fought their battles the earth was yet to face the dark ages of the thirteenth century!
Indeed. But there is nothing wrong with time warps. And if we assume that time travel is the reason 18th-19th century Earth artifacts rose to prominence in 8th-9th century Omega IV, we might be better off assuming it was the work of some nutcase like John Gill with an actual mission of political upheaval. Add a suitably tragical twist to the story where this selfish meddler meets a gruesome end after seeing all his efforts bring nothing but personal and general disaster...
As for the scale of Yang barbarism, why would it be anything less than global? If the Kohms still held major parts of the globe, why would they not come and crush the Yangs? Or at least attempt that, somewhere within the sphere of influence of Cloud William's posse, thereby making the chief aware that his mission is less than complete?
(Incidentally and fittingly, Omega IV has no oceans separating landmasses: it's all a single continent, both in TOS and TOS-R...)
The most telling bit, however, is that Ron Tracey beamed down on this particular village. There would be far too much coincidence involved unless this really
were the last remnant of recognizable civilization surviving on the planet!
As for crumbling artifacts, we have to consider that the artifacts reach the site of the final Yang triumph apace with Cloud William himself. There are many scenarios where this would be plausible:
1) The planet has five hundred copies of the Holy Writ and about ten thousand US flags. Each field commander has access to a set. I mean, why not?
1.1 Cloud William might not be able to read or write, but he can have clerics/clerks for the task. And even they can work on monkey see, monkey do basis, without understanding the weird symbols they are copying.
1.2 Whoever provided one set of the paraphernalia could easily have provided a million. That's trivial compared with interstellar travel, let alone time travel.
2) There is only one set, but it survives through millennia.
2.1. The clerks/clerics keep it alive with constant but limited-edition copying.
2.2 The original meddler made sure the artifacts are indestructible. See above.
All sort of variation is also possible. Perhaps Cloud William and his various colleagues and predecessors consumed these artifacts like there was no tomorrow, but their former lands are full of secret shrines where replacements can be dug out and rallied in front of the troops. Or the local Kohms might have preserved a set out of sheer curiosity or respect for the ideas and ideals of the barbaric enemy.
In the end, I see no reason to assume the Yang campaign was less than effective across the globe. Towards the end of the desperate fight, the Kohms have captured the local Yang leader - without realizing that it is in fact
the Yang leader. Sure, this can mean that it's only a local action, but it can equally well mean that the campaign is drawing to a close and the biggest bosses necessarily converge on the site (nothing else would work for a nomadic culture like that). And if it were a local action, the odds would be greatly against the surviving Kohms
not recognizing their chief foe - but without mass media, they could well remain ignorant of the looks of the global boss.
Timo Saloniemi
