On my way home yesterday, I stopped at Newbury Comics looking for a Seagal movie for the weekend (DON'T YOU JUDGE ME), and I ended up buying (in addition to Marked For Death) a copy of the Nicolas Cage Wicker Man. I've seen Wicker Man probably six times now. I'll almost certainly be watching it again soon. In addition to the legitimately good movies in my collection collection, I also own copies of LXG, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Sound Of Thunder, Blade Trinity, Batman and Robin, The Swarm, Viva Kneivel, Grizzly, Ninja III: The Domination, Gymkata, Death Wish III… Oh, and all the Friday the 13th movies except the latest one. I don't mention this to brag (okay, maybe a little to brag), but to provide some context. Because when I say I found the last tenminutes of "The Omega Glory" to be wildly entertaining—I'm not saying they were actually good.
We've had some weird episodes in our run so far—"Wolf In the Fold" springs to mind—but, at the risk of being immediately contradicted, I'd say "Glory" has to've take the weirdest turn yet. For the first two-thirds, it's pretty straight-forward, if tedious. The Enterprise visits the planet Omega IV, and they find another ship already orbiting Omega, the U.S.S. Exeter. The Exeter doesn't answer any hails, and when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the soon-to-give-his-life-for-the-cause Lt. Galloway beam over, they find a bunch of empty uniforms and piles of white crystal. McCoy studies the crystals, and tells Kirk that they're actually the corpses of the missing crewmen; the water has been drained from their bodies.
So right now, you're thinking, it's some kind of monster. We've had the Salt Vampire, some kind of aqua-hungry nosferatu doesn't seem entirely out of the question. Disappointingly, though, this is all just the result of a horrible biological weapon that originated on the planet below. When Kirk and the others make the next step down to Omega (a helpful final log entry from dying officer informs them they'll be doomed otherwise), Captain Tracey, the last surviving crewmen of the Exeter, is running a village full of Siberian looking people named Kohms, and using his phaser technology to help wage wars against the rival Yangs, a white and warlike tribe that, according to Tracey, is too savage to be negotiated with. Tracey breaks the bad news to Kirk that he and his men are now stuck on Omega; they're all infected with the disease that killed the crew of the Exeter, and staying on the planet is the only way they can keep from dying of it too.
Of course, things are a wee bit more complicated than that. Spock and Galloway soon discover Tracey's phaser battles, which directly violate the Prime Directive; then Tracey shows up, no longer even pretending to be nice, kills Galloway, and lays the situation on the line for Kirk. He believes he's found a functional immortality on Omega, and one that, with some help from McCoy, he'll share with the rest of the galaxy—for a price. I started getting worried that this was going to turn into Star Trek: Insurrection (a movie I didn't hate when I first saw it, but has such a terrible reputation among my friends that I shudder even at the name), but I needn't have. The immortality hope is a fool's gold. The natives on Omega are just exceptionally long lived because of the effect of the virus on natural selection. Which doesn't exactly make sense, but the short answer is, this is not anything that would travel.
While McCoy's figuring this out, Kirk and Spock are thrown into jail, and Kirk has a chance to get friendly with a captive pair of the vicious Yangs. The fight sequence here is fun; by now, the Kirk/Spock byplay is so well drawn that it manages to shine in even the worst episodes. Spock figures out that the bars on the cell windows can be pulled free, and Kirk and the Yang man team up to clear their window. But Kirk is too trusting, and as soon as he turns his back, the Yang knocks him over the head and makes off with his female buddy. (If you suspect that this will be important later when the Yangs re-enter the episode, give yourself a cookie.)
The escaped Yang gathers his fellows together for one big attack on the village, and not even Tracey's phaser prowess can save the Kohms. The budget constraints on the series really show here, as we don't actually see anything of the battle; Tracey does his best to sell a wild-eyed monologue describing the carnage, but it doesn't quite work. One of the problems of the first part of the episode is that we spend so much time with crazy Tracey and Kirk and the others that we never get any real sense of the conflict between the Yangs and the Kohms, which turns out to be a lot more important than you'd imagine.
Just how important? Well… are you ready for this? After Tracey and Kirk do some running around, the Yangs arrive and take everybody captive. The Kohms have been wiped out, and while Kirk and Spock and McCoy are waiting for their fate to be decided, Kirk muses on how the biological warfare that most likely forced the Yangs out of the cities, turning them into the bloodthirsty savages they've become, is an awful lot like the Cold War back on Earth. And then he says, in a line of dialogue that heralds the death knell of sense in "Omega," "Huh, Yangs sounds like Yankees." And Spock says, "And Kohms sounds like Communists."
That's because—they are! And this isn't Earth, and nobody ever even hints at a parallel universe. Instead, the screenplay (by Gene Roddenberry himself) posits the parallel evolution of a humanoid race that not only developed political conflicts resembling our own right down to the names… Aw jeez, I almost feel bad for telling you this. I feel like I'm spoiling somebody's birthday. I mean, I'd actually heard about this in advance, but it caught me completely by surprise, and while this is actually a terrible, terrible episode, there's something wonderful in finding out for yourself just how bad it gets.
But hey, they don't pay me the big bucks not to deliver on my implications, so here goes. The Yangs worship an American flag. And one of them (the one that bonked Kirk over the head earlier) starts speaking to the flag in a phonetic rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance. Kirk joins in, because he's got this wacky idea that he knows what's going on here, but before he can convince the Yangs he's right, Tracey starts trying to turn the Yangs against him. He points out that Spock looks a lot like the picture of the devil in the Yangs sacred book (and yeah, the resemblance is pretty goddamn ridiculous), so we get some trial by combat nonsense. Kirk wins, Spock gets Sulu and some red-shirts to beam down, and now that Kirk has things in hand, he gets out the Yangs most precious document, and gives them all a big speech about how awesome democracy is.