Title: Miri
Airdate: 10/27/1966
Plot Summary
The Enterprise finds an alternate earth, right down to the continental shapes. Sure. On the planet, they find that people live hundreds of years old, but only as children. Once they hit puberty, they develop a hideous disease, go crazy, and die within 7 days.
Kirk, McCoy, and the rest of the human away team contract the disease and have to race against time to find a cure. In the meantime, a group of children still alive on the surface work against the team and their only hope is for the leader, Miri to get their equipment and find the cure. Not just for the landing party but to save this planet.
Risk is our Business
Kirk manages to get Miri to finally accept his help because she gots the crush on him.
Logical
Spock is the only one not affected by the disease but is still confined to the planet as he considers himself a carrier.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy almost becomes the “He” in the phrase “He’s dead, Jim” when he takes a cure, a possible “Beaker full of death.” When the first diseased person attacks and then dies in front of them, he says “It’s dead.” I bet Kelly was already trying to find variations on the phrase.
Canon Maker
This will establish earth copies are strewn around the quadrant.
Canon Breaker
By the time we get to the Next Gen-era, this idea will never be referenced or revisited again.
Man It Feels Bad To Be a Red Shirt
Two redshirts beam down with the rest of the landing party, three if you include Rand. Amazingly no one dies. Though Rand adds another moment that probably started her on a long road of therapy in the future.
Technobabble
There isn’t anything special on this one except for the work on creating the cure. They do mention there’s only 6 months worth of food left for these kids that are 300 years old. If they aren’t making new food, I doubt any food would last 300 years that they could’ve been eating. Except Twinkies of course.
I Know That Guy:
Two fairly successful actors start on this show, one is Kim Darby, who would go on to a memorable role on True Grit. Gen X kids will remember her as the mom from Better Off Dead. Michael J Pollard also played one of the “kids” although he was 27 at the time and looked about 43. Pollard’s big Gen X role was playing the Q role in Tango And Cash though he would most be known for his role in Bonnie And Clyde.
The rest of the children were played by various kids of the cast and crew including Shatner’s daughters Melanie and Lisabeth, Grace Lee Whitney’s son Scott, and Gene Roddenberry’s daughters Darleen and Dawn.
The other two, Phil and Iona Morris were brother and sister. Phil Morris would go on to become a prolific voice actor, would appear in later Star Trek III as well as Deep Space Nine and Voyager, one of a very few actors that appeared in the original series, movies, and the Next Generation era series.
Of course he’s always be known as Jackie Chiles, the Seinfeld Johnnie Cochrane parody lawyer.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Miri, weirdly, was banned in the UK on BBC until the early 1990’s, the nature of the complaints really was never revealed. I’m not sure why as Miri really a middle of the road episode, leaning on the bad side.
For one, the trope of “an exact copy of Earth” is used and not for the last time. It’s a ridiculous idea. Maybe if they went to another universe, ala Mirror Mirror, I could accept the idea, but another planet evolving exactly like earth, right down to the shape of the land masses stretches credulity more than an MSNBC host telling how healthy Biden is.
I know why they did it, there’s this whole studio backlot with a whole town just waiting to be used. It was used on The Andy Griffith Show for years and was used again many other times on the show to save money.
But even those uses of this backlot didn’t require a copy of Earth to work. And this really is just a race against the clock to cure the disease with the added annoyance of kids being as irritating as possible. Even though these kids were 300 years old, they all acted as immature little brats. It might’ve been interesting if they acted in chronological age, with the wisdom and maturity that would’ve come with it.
Then they could’ve cured the disease quickly, making the conflict and drama more about these kids having to deal with basically being adults in kids bodies, and having to deal with cleaning up a ravaged world. Eh, that’s just me spitballing but that gives you an idea of how dialed in I was into this episode.
One thing that does help is the dialogue. When Spock reveals he is a carrier, he can’t go back to the ship, he comments “and I would like to go back to the ship.” Later Kirk tells McCoy to go through the records, recreate the thinking of those who created this disease, and come up with a vaccine. McCoy replies, “Is that all Captain? We have five days you know.”
Then as things get tense, tempers flare and desperation sets in, they do a good job conveying that. But it’s not enough.
