Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #130 Star Trek: “The Omega Glory”

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I conceptualized Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 as a movie column but when patrons started nominating television shows and series and even the occasional book for it I thought, “Eh, why not?” for a very simple reason: I need the money. Hoo boy do I ever need the money! 

But I also like the work and the challenge of writing about all of Batman Beyond or individual episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and now the original Star Trek. 

A few weeks back I had loads of fun writing up two of the stupidest episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation in “Sub Rosa”, where Beverly Crusher infamously becomes erotically obsessed with what she thinks is a horny 800 year old Scottish sex ghost, and “The Outrageous Okana”, which packed two mind-bogglingly stupid plots into one episode. In one, a holographic 1980s comedian played by Joe Piscopo teaches Data (and by extension, all of us) about comedy. In the other, a low-rate Han Solo wannabe nearly incites a space war with his devastating sexual swagger. 

With this column I’m turning my attention to an episode of the original Star Trek that is a fascinating combination of stupid and smart, prescient and embarrassingly dated, borderline uncanny in its thematic obsessions and hilariously misguided and offensive. 

With its deeply confused, deeply confusing take on race, “The Omega Glory” would radiate contemporary resonance even if its plot didn’t also turn on a deadly virus that nearly destroyed a planet and all of its inhabitants. 

The episode begins with Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and some dude we’ll never see again beaming aboard sister ship the USS Exeter and discovering that everyone onboard has disappeared, leaving behind only their uniforms like they were taken up in the Rapture or obliterated with a laser gun or obliterated with a laser gun shortly before they would have been raptured. 

It turns out the crew were victims of a deadly disease. The sole survivor is uncomfortably intense Captain Ron Tracey (Morgan Woodward), who was stranded on planet Omega IV when his fellow crew members perished en masse. 

The wild-eyed starship officer is convinced that the unique qualities of Omega IV won’t just protect him and the crew of the Starship Enterprise from dying of the deadly disease that took his peers but serve as an outer space Fountain of Youth with the power to bestow immortality.

Omega IV is home to warring groups: The Kohm, a race that survived brutal biological warfare by developing super-powerful immune systems and The Yang, a group derided as “savages” seemingly incapable of sophisticated thinking, or even language, no better than animals, really. 

Here’s the crazy part, and I hope you are sitting down for this. The Yang are white! They’re outer space caucasians yet they dress and communicate like a stereotypical 1967 conception of Native American culture, if Native Americans all looked like blonde hippies in ostentatious fur coats. 

Captain Ron Tracey, who has clearly contracted a case of what in Ren & Stimpy is known as “Space Madness” looks down on the Yang as sub-human, to the point that he was willing to go against the Federation’s Prime Directive (look at me using terminology possibly correctly like some manner of super-nerd!) and shoot a bunch of Yang warriors with his phaser in defense of The Kohm. 

Kirk and Spock make a discovery as shocking as it is insultingly stupid about the warring races they have encountered: “Yang” once stood for Yankee, while “Kohm” is obviously a derivation of “Communist.” How is that possible, you might ask? 

Well, it seems that Omega IV developed exactly like a little planet you might be familiar with called Earth, right down to having the same language and the exact same customs and rituals, only because of a deadly biological war instead of evolving into the culture that gave the world John Mayer, Ally McBeal and Jell-O molds it instead devolved. 

In “The Omega Glory” when white people de-evolve over a period of centuries they end up looking and acting like Native Americans. If that sounds unbelievably racist to you I can assure you it is! 

We all know that if white people were to de-evolve over a period of centuries they’d all end up rabid Trump supporters, not white Native Americans in outer space. 

Like Trump supporters, the primitive, superstitious and weak-minded Yang revere empty symbols of America’s greatness. With much ceremony, an American flag is trotted out so that their leader Chief Cloud William (Roy Jenson) can recite sacred “freedom words” you and I know as the Pledge of Allegiance. 

You better believe these patriotic space savages would stand up for the Star-Spangled Banner, unlike some unforgivably non-patriotic earth athletes I know. 

In “The Omega Glory” the Yang consider “freedom” a “worship word”, just as they consider the American flag and Pledge of Allegiance sacred even as they seemingly have no idea what any of these words or concepts mean. 

In that respect they’re like like contemporary right-wing keyboard warriors who fill their timelines with worship words and phrases like “Freedom”, “Patriot”, “Christian”, “2nd Amendment”, “Veterans”, “Constitution”, “Truth”, “Save the Children”, “Q”, “We the People”, “Declaration of Independence”, “Warrior” and “Founding Fathers.” 

When Cloud William describes himself as a “speaker of the holy words” and “leader of warriors” he sounds unmistakably like a Trump cultist posting meme after meme about how one must stand for the flag and kneel before the cross.   

After smartly critiquing the folly of jingoism and the emptiness of patriotism disconnected from ideology and ethics, “The Omega Glory” concludes with a flag-waving celebration of patriotism, American-style, in the form of Captain Kirk reading the preamble to the American Constitution as a way of both celebrating the glory of genuine patriotism and shaming the unforgivable folly of the Yang’s blurry, bleary imitation. 

Shatner delivers the words to the preamble of the American Constitution as if he wants to fuck them. Shatner derives an almost sexual pleasure from reciting verbiage this juicy and rife with meaning. He’s in spoken-word, The Transformed Man mode here, ringing every last bit of drama and exhilaration out of this timeless staple of history classes throughout our increasingly shitty country. 

By the end of his monologue no one could possibly doubt just how much this cheeseball Canadian loves America, a country that has given him so, so much and asked for so very little. 

USA! USA! USA! 

Sorry, I was getting a little carried away there. When Kirk gazes proudly and more than a little lustfully at an American flag to end the episode you half-expect him to pull a Donald Trump and start fondling and/or dry-humping it as an expression of the truest, horniest kind of patriotism: the kind that involves literally boning an American flag to show just how much you love your country and hate everybody else’s. 

Like a true Liberal of his time, Roddenberry couldn’t help but be more than a little racist in his critique of the ugly, insidious nature of racism. 

He similarly couldn’t attack the toxic, dangerous nature of nationalism without without also making clear that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with nationalism as long as it involves being deservedly proud of living in the greatest country, not just on earth, but in the entire universe. 

“The Omega Glory” ends on a note of unabashedly hokey patriotism but it’s fairly artful, even eery, before it descends into a world of ham-fisted metaphor and allegory. 

“The Omega Glory” is so insightful in its portrayal of the downside of nationalism that it’s frustrating to see it conclude by whole-heartedly endorsing nationalism, American-style. 

It turns out we don’t need a deadly plague to de-evolve as a people: we just need to embrace a mindless perversion of patriotism as a national religion that obsesses over empty symbols while ignoring the high-minded ideals they’re supposed to represent. 

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