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Posted: |
Sep 26, 2014 - 12:32 PM
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By: |
Heath
(Member)
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Omega Glory by Gene Roddenberry.
Here's why. It's McCoy's line, as follows.
"The crew didn't leave. They're still here... These white crystals, that's what's left of the human body when you take the water away which makes up ninety six percent of our bodies. Without water, we're all just three or four pounds of chemicals. Something crystallised them down to this."
Bang! That fantastically brutal line put everything about how the physical universe actually works into an immediate and stark perspective. There is no god. There is no father christmas. There are no guiding spirits looking after us. There is only chemistry, bio-chemistry, electro-chemistry, physics and the mathematics of probability. Anything else we may perceive is just coincidence, and, in a universe as big as ours, such coincidences WILL happen. I was maybe 8 or 9 years old. That line changed my life, in a small way initially but it grew to inform me that the universe is a far more interesting, scary, and beguilingly fascinating place than anything presented by the tired and all too "human" religious power hierarchies that still dare to influence us.
Thank god* for Gene Roddenberry if indeed he did write that line. Unfortunately, Omega Glory comes off the rails immediately afterwards, and turns into trite crap about the "stars and stripes" or something. But for a few precious seconds, it reached for real stars and actually touched them.
* ha ha.
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Thank god* for Gene Roddenberry if indeed he did write that line.
That episode was all his. It was barely changed from when he originally wrote it as a potential second pilot episode after The Cage failed to sell the series and nobody on staff was gonna rewrite the boss.
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Posted: |
Sep 27, 2014 - 8:29 AM
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By: |
ToneRow
(Member)
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Seems to me, Heath, that "The Omega Glory" contains your favo(u)rite line of dialogue from STAR TREK - which does not imply that this episode is, overall, the greatest.
The core is the parallel Earth notion, which Roddenberry appears to have derived from speculation upon the then-current cold war between superpowers U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.
I don't get the impression that Roddenberry's dialogue for Dr. McCoy was to promote atheism but rather to surprise the viewers and the Enterprise crew who were looking for a "missing" crew that wasn't really missing but crystalized. The diseased-crew aspect was a plot device to get the landing party down onto the planet for the parallel Earth story.
I agree, though, that McCoy's line is thought-provoking and interesting and I can see why you love it as much as you do.
If you're interested, several DOCTOR WHO serials address the topic of creation more directly than ST's "The Omega Glory".
There is the Peter Davison serial called "Terminus", written by Steve Gallagher, which proposes that the entire universe was the result of explosion of fuel.
An earlier serial, "City Of Death" during Tom Baker's tenure, similarly speculates that life on Earth was caused by an exploding craft which sparked a pool of amino acids.
Circling back to classic TREK, I consider the 2nd season's "Who Mourns For Adonais?" to be STAR TREK's ultimate stance on theology.
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TWO POEMS, On the One hand, and On the Other
I.
The religious believer must have been very surprised when, after he died,
II.
If God is only a figment of my imagination,
Thank god for my Imagination.
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That's the one where they are on some kind of parallel Earth and has the ridiculous scene with the US constitution and the American flag, right?
That's one of the worst episodes. Lazy and obvious faux sci-fi.
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