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While Dr. McCoy sought cure, crew learned of planet war.

Dr. McCoy, being a scientist, was unmindful of the circumstances around him. Spock, Raintree, and Kirk suspected things were not as they seemed on the surface. The yellow-skinned "Kohms" treated Tracy as a god. The "Meraks," on the other hand, though savage in manner, did not seem the type of animal portrayed by Exeter's captain. Could these primitive people destroy a more advanced civilization? Or was the reverse true? Tracy insisted the Meraks were the aggressors. Kirk pondered the conflicting "truths."

Dr. McCoy was interested only in finding the agent that rendered all life on Omega immune to all illness. Age 400 was not unusual - perhaps everlasting life was possible! "Who is who?" Which is which? Those were questions philosophers might answer. The doctor's work was with fact not fancy. He dealt with known factors. His crude lab was far from up to date; yet he labored on - until he had isolated the virus. "Strange -" McCoy observed. "It resembles some of the mutated viruses developed during Earth's bacteriological warfare experiments in the late 1990's."



NOTES:

  • Another picture virtually identical to the one used by Viewmaster, but it's actually taken from much later in the episode, after Kirk and Spock escape from jail.

  • In the actual episode, the white-skinned savages are called "Yangs", rather than Meraks. "Yangs" is a corruption of "Yankee". Viewmaster never tells us the meaning of "Meraks", though it's presumably a corruption of "Americans".

  • Coincidentally, "Miraks" (slightly different spelling) is also the name that the Kzinti race from Starfleet Battles was changed to for the computer game Starfleet Command II, to avoid tussling with Larry Niven over the rights to the name. One letter differently, and the Starfleet Command team might have had to fight with Viewmaster instead of Larry.

  • Viewmaster has toned the story down a bit here. In the actual episode, Spock and "Raintree" find Captain Tracy's reserve phaser packs among the bodies of several hundred "Merak" warriors who had attacked the city a week before. Since Viewmaster is re-telling the story to make Tracy the aggressor (more on that later), this has to be discarded, and replaced with some nebulous story about Tracy attacking the Meraks for no particular reason.

  • The way Viewmaster tells the story here, Dr. McCoy is the ultra-logical one. References are made to Spock being alien, having powers of extra-sensory perception, and wielding a wicked FSNP, but there's nothing in here to suggest that Vulcans are especially logical.

  • All those people who parrot the Party Line rationale that Star Trek became so popular because it postulated a positive future always forget the fact that Trek's future involved World War III in the 1990's.



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    by Graeme Cree

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