The Omega Glory...

I'm pretty sure that Maab realised too late that Kirk was a better prospect of making an alliance with than the cowardly Kras! But he sacrificed himself in order to get the Klingon!
With the Yangs, one thing I've always wondered was after the final battle with the Kohms, where did the Yangs disappear to? I mean it seemed that the Yangs were intent on reclaiming their ancient lands but from whence had they come?
JB

 

BUT WHAT WAS OURS... IS OURS AGAIN!

 

What do you mean "where did the Yangs disappear to?" They took over, hence their capture of Kirk and Tracey. The Khoms were the ones who-according to Tracey were "dead or in hiding".

 

About the Vians, my theory is that they had the power to open a wormhole month in front of an orbiting planet so the planet would pass into the wormhole. And the other mouth of the wormhole would be opened in a position where the planet's speed & direction would match the necessary orbital speed and direction to orbit another star at the correct distance.

And quite possibly the Vians could only create one wormhole in the time remaining before Minara went supernova. So if that was the case the Vians could literally save only one planet and its entire population. Or possibly there were a lot of inhabited planets in the Minara system and Lal and Thann were given the task of selecting one planet and saving it. Possibly other Vians would also have been giving the task of saving a single planet, but there would be no guarantee that there would be enough Vian teams to save every inhabited planet in this scenario.

This is the only theory I could think of that gave the Vians the ability to save the inhabitants of one planet and also a reason to delay beginning the rescue while they spent a lot of time deciding which intelligent species to save.

And if true the theory would be evidence that the Vians either 1) just recently discovered that there were intelligent natives of Minara planets or 2) were guilty of very bad planning. According to the astrophysical knowledge of 1968, and even more so that of 2019, a supernova explosion should have been predictable for thousands and millions of years. So if the Vians had known about the intelligent natives of Minara planets for several times as long as it would take to move one planet to safety, they should have begun moving planets to safety around other stars immediately after the discovery. Perhaps they had done so and already moved a bunch of planets, starting with the most populous ones, and Lal and Thann had the mission of selecting the last planet to move to safety.

And then there is the problem of there being habitable and inhabited planets around Minara and Beta Niobe. Stars that become supernovas are extremely unlikely to have habitable planets and intelligent life on those planets. But a number of stars in Star Trek that seem like future supernovas do have habitable and/or inhabited planets.

Two possible theories are:

1) Advanced old civilizations terraform young planets around young stars to make those planets habitable billions (not millions, billions) of years sooner than they would have become naturally, and introduce advanced lifeforms (including intelligent beings) to those planets that would have taken billions of years to evolve naturally. Perhaps they are Providers from Triskellion who bet on whether the intelligent beings can invent warp drive and escape before their stars go nova or supernova.

2) Advanced old civilizations move planets around young massive stars about to go nova or supernova to other young massive stars over and over again so each planet spends a few hundred million, or a few tens of million, or a few million, or just a few hundred thousand, years at a time orbiting each successive star. After they do this many times over for billions of years those planets may become habitable and intelligent life may evolve on some of those planets.

Or possibly there is some sort of combination of both theories.

If the second theory was correct the planets of Minara would have been moved from star to star to avoid supernovas many times already over billions of years, so presumably the ancient civilizations were still around and would have done so without the Vians and still did so with any planets that the Vians didn't have time to move to safety.

 

That is one of the more confusing theories I've ever read around these parts.... Wouldn't starting with a young star give the most amount of time? Don't old stars go supernova, not young ones?

 

Nope. It's all about its mass, which is truly massive for a supernova. By the way, the Minarian star was going nova, not supernova, but a minor detail that doesn't change the dilemma. I discussed this nova science in a previous thread: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/production-order-group-viewing-2018.294100/page-78#post-13028310

 

Story wise I'm asking! After the Kohms took over the place where did the defeated Yangs go to? The hills? Surely the Kohms would have gone after them! It's almost as if the Yangs had come from another territory after years in the wilderness to reclaim their ancient homelands! A bit like the British who were thrown out of Btitain and went to live in France (Brittany) and hundreds of years later their progeny returned with William The Conqueror to take back the lands of their forefathers!
JB

 

This actually sounds more plausible than Timo's assertion that the Yangs engaged in a worldwide genocide of the Kohms. Why would they? The only territory they're interested in is the territory their forebears had been driven out of. They have no need to drive the Kohms out of any other territory around the world. I personally have never subscribed to the worldwide extermination theory.

 

The heroes speculate that the Khoms drove the Yangs away in an ancient war closely paralleling a US/USSR confrontation. But this is utter speculation; in technological terms, the war may rather have paralleled the conquests of Genghis Khan, and the means of transportation available to the fighting sides would indeed have made Brittany or Madagascar a valid refuge for the banished.

The heroes find no evidence of a higher civilization once having existed on the planet, but Tracey tells them there "once" was one. Nothing about this directly connects to the Khom/Yang conflict, however; that may have come later, when all was already lost. And of course Tracey's speculation does involve all being lost: the ancient war would supposedly render the Khoms just as technologically helpless as the Yangs, and unlikely to retain the capacity to hunt down every last Yang (or Britun, or Gurmin, or Rensh, or Ytuljan, or whatever).

Indeed, one wonders how Cloud William's forces eventually would become capable of global eradication of the Khoms, if they still lack advanced transportation or weaponry. So a model where the fight is not global is attractive. But what about the globe in that case? Is the rest of the planet lifeless? If the Khoms of the local North America are an urban culture, what about the Khoms of the local Asia? Aren't they in an excellent position to turn the tables when their brethren are under threat here?

There is no problem with coming up with working scenarios here. The problem lies in any such scenario ruining the attempted parallel with the US/USSR confrontation, which sort of undermines the premise of the episode.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Kohms...only good for killin'

They definitely engaged in a local "genocide."
The episode doesn't imply that the Yangs took over the whole world, just that they reconquered their ancestral lands. It doesn't have to be "North America" either. Whatever these ancestral lands were, they have all been reconquered, not by Cloud specifically, but by the Yangs, and Cloud William's people/tribe conquered these last remaining Kohms.

The Yangs were driven from their cities and into the wilderness, where they became as savages over the course of centuries.

 

A remarkable thing about this action we get to see: Cloud William is not just a local boss, he's the boss of all bosses. Why, he's the one with the sacred relics!

Whether he's the boss of the local "North America" (whatever shape this continent) or an even bigger whole can be debated. But merely local he ain't.

Unless there are thousands of copies of the document and the flag, that is. We have to consider in any case how such things could survive for a thousand years if rolled up in some saddle bag. There might be a whole cottage/wigwam industry churning out hundreds of those things every year, of course, but in that case we'd expect the errors to creep into the copies and not just their verbal interpretations...

Or then the unique originals might have been made time-proof by technology more advanced than that available in our 1960s. This would in fact be a likely scenario if they were originally introduced by a John Gill style meddler traveling in a time machine and perverting local cultures into images of Earth on the verge of global conflict, for obvious personal gain as the Fuhrer or the President of the nation enraged to self-righteous world domination.

In that case specifically, and in any case, really, all bets are off as to whether the lands really are ancestral to the clueless Yangs. Since their culture hinges on misunderstood relics, it might be their ancestral lands are on a different continent altogether, and they are merely finishing an invasion job launched and botched by their ancestors. The Khom village does not exactly convince as "ancient Yankee"... Any more than it does as "ancient Communist Chinese", for that matter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Is he supposed to have the original constitution? Or the Bible from the Capitol building? You'd think that the most commonly found books in a post apocalyptic world would be bibles. There'd probably be a lot of dictionaries to be found as well. Clearly they didn't preserve those.

 

All the more reason to think these are "genuine relics", for whatever value that concept...

The Constitution certainly is a facsimile if not an original, rather than merely a generic reproduction of the contents. The Bible probably likewise. In order to still exist, despite all the mangling (Kirk callously folds the Constitution, giving it a nice crease!), these would have to be copies, that is, either nth generation facsimiles, or then 1st generation ones created either fairly recently or then out of futuristic materials in ancient times.

Our options here thus are that the religion quoting the Constitution is a fairly recent one, perhaps based on documents recently uncovered (when Cloud Williams stormed the vaults of New Beijing née Washington?), perhaps introduced to the Yang society by a recent meddler from Earth; that the religion is indeed an ancient one but introduced by a meddler possessing a time machine and the secret of making paper superdurable; and that the religion is indeed an ancient one and the documents were made durable by native technologies superior to what the simplistic Commies/Yankees analogy would allow for. It is the last option that steers us the farthest from the idea that the origin of these Earth documents would be Earth, and closest to the weird speculation on "parallel development" down to fine detail including penstrokes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'd venture to say that the rest of the planet may have been rendered uninhabitable at one time or another due to the war and although now cleansed of the horror as the Enterprise didn't pick up any unusual radioactivity on Omega IV was avoided by both tribes due to the memories of said devastation aeons ago!
JB

 

So at the end of this episode, Kirk says "Alright, party's over. Let's get the hell outta here"

And that right before that he tells Sulu and the redshirts(who literally just beamed down) "Take Captain Tracey back up to the ship."

What?! Don't you mean "Lock up captain Tracey, and keep him sedated, then wait here a few days so you don't die after beaming up and kill everyone else on the ship. As a matter of fact, tell the ship to find a nice rural area and start beaming people down, 50 at a time, for 4 days per group. And start quarantining off sections of the ship to accomplish this. We're gonna be here a few weeks."?

Is this a genuine plot hole?

 

Captain Ron would remained redeemable if he had not done one thing early on:

Vaporize Kirk's wounded redshirt for no apparent reason other than to convince Kirk that he meant business.

Tracey is a man with nothing to lose. He's too dangerous to be left.. awake!

 

IIRC, Tracey had already been cured of the virus simply because he'd been on the planet long enough. So there's no danger in taking him back to the Enterprise.

The landing party from the Exeter infected everyone else on their ship because they were only planetside for a short time.

 

Exactly, so Sulu and the two security people should definitely not take Ron up to the ship..

 

I want to comment that Tracey and Kirks 'use' of the Bible is hilarious. They both putting a lot of stock in their remembrance of shit. And assuming the Yangs will concur. Pics of the Devil or *a* devil...tongue turning to fire...God striking down...servants...no heart.....good always winning over evil.

"Does not your book say not to wear clothes of mixed fiber??? LOOK AT HIS TAG!! 50% cotton!!...no its in there...here, let me look. Deuteronomy I think. Hold on...."

 

Maybe McCoy actually did manage to come up with an instant cure.