What a miserable fucking trash heap of an episode. Even Patterns of Force was better than this. Yes, you heard me right, the episode about an entire planet that develops a culture identical to Nazi Germany was better than this episode.
At least Patterns of Force thought the Nazis were bad dudes, and had some attempt to explain why in the hell an alien planet would develop Nazis identical to ours. It was a crazy old man from Earth who thought, for some godforsaken reason, that it would be a good idea to recreate Nazism on this alien planet, because that would somehow stabilize things... It's not a good explanation, but it's an explanation!
The Omega Glory, meanwhile, depicts Asians vs Caucasians in a very ill-fated, xenophobic allegory for the Cold War or something. Multiple characters refer to them as "white" and "yellow" throughout, and near the end, Kirk and Spock make the direct connection of Yangs = Yankees and Kohms = Communists, right before the white Yangs carry in an actual American flag and start reciting the pledge of allegiance.
At the very end, Kirk grabs their holy documents - the US Constitution verbatim - and gives the Yangs a lecture about what freedom and liberty means or whatever, while the national fucking anthem plays... And then they just leave, and the credits roll, and I'm left screaming at the television "OKAY BUT WHY THE FUCK DID THEY HAVE ANY OF THAT?!"
The episode takes pains to point out how closely these things resemble our own history, but never takes so much as a second to explain how they got here. Is it trying to make me believe that this planet coincidentally evolved nearly identical to Earth, down to having identical documents and flags?
Not to mention the episode starts with a really interesting hook about a virus turning people into crystallized piles of mineral that literally just self-resolves and disappears from the story halfway through so we can focus on the real meat of out of place, racist, patriotic mush.
The single good moment I can pick out from this dumpster fire is Kirk being held at phaser-point being told to order down 10 phasers and extra power packs for each, so he nods happily and calls the ship, asks them for exactly that, and is met with a confused Sulu saying they can't do so without proper verification. Kirk's smug look saying "that's not how any of this shit works, bud" was nice, in isolation from the rest of the episode. A good moment lost in a sea of garbage.
Rates a 10/10 on the xenophobia scale and a 0/10 on the "explain what the fuck is going on" scale.
This episode is so weird for so many reasons. It was one of the first scripts compiled for the show, and it was written before they’d fully fleshed out the backstory of Trek. It wasn’t even decide what year Star Trek took place in at the time. If I recall, the script assumed the show took place over a thousand years into the future and that the planet in The Omega Glory was just Earth or a planet with a parallel history to Earth, only with World War III going worse or something and… yeah, it’s bad,
I do recall in researching the history of the show one of the angles used to pitch the show to confused executives was the idea of parallel worlds or alternative histories being explored...
If the episode had made any effort to cement this as some alternate path that Earth could have gone down, like Mirror, Mirror with its parallel dimension transporter shenanigans, it could have worked a little better. Would have made a fascinating twist for the crew to realize this is some doomed possible present in a timeline where war escalated to a devastating scale. Wouldn't have excused the racism any, but you could have at least had an interesting concept. A pseudo-Planet of the Apes, Star Trek style...
Maybe Strange New Worlds can take this concept and make it work, ideally with less racism.