Writer: Adrian Spies
Director: Vincent McEveety
Producer: Gene L. Coon
This episode isn't good, guys. In fact, it's pretty bad.
I honestly don't know what the point is supposed to be. There's some effective elements here, in a spooky post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror mode, but it really doesn't work as Star Trek.
The Enterprise comes across a radio distress call, coming from a planet that's an exact duplicate of Earth. They beam down and find the ruins of a 1960s era civilization that's been destroyed for 300 years (giving us a rough estimate of when the show takes place, by and by). All that's left are children, who die of a maddening disease when they reach puberty.
So our heroes, being adults of course, contract the disease when they beam down, and now must cure themselves before it kills them, all while being attacked by the feral children of the planet. In this they are aided by Miri, a young girl on the verge of adolescence with a crush on Kirk.
There are some interesting ideas here. The disease was caused when a group of scientists working on life prolongation accidentally unleashed a virus that destroyed the adult population -- but it worked on the children, who age a month every hundred years, but when they hit puberty they die. It's a haunting scenario, and maybe would have been interesting as a Twilight Zone episode seen from the POV of this civilization.
But ultimately, what's it all about? There's maybe something in here about the 1960s generation gap conflict, but that was a conflict between disillusioned revolutionary teenagers and middle aged satisfied adults. By rendering the younger generation as unruly, dangerous, bratty children in need of adult supervision, well... it certainly doesn't display a good or even interesting understanding of the conflict.
Ultimately "Miri" contents itself with the adolescent crush on Kirk by Miri, with "creepy" scenes of unruly children, and with angry sniping between the crew as the clock ticks down. It's not enough however, to sustain the episode -- which never even bothers to answer it's central mystery: how the hell is this planet an exact duplicate of Earth?
I mean I know it's so that they can create a post-apocalyptic world of feral children using the studio backlot of regular kids in messy clothes, the same kind of budget reducing reasoning that led to Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development, Class-M worlds, humanoid species and so on that let Trek later get away with gangster planets and Nazi planets and Roman planets -- but why is it exactly Earth, same continents and everything, and not just a similar world? That the episode draws attention to it in the beginning and then never answers demonstrates just how bereft of thought the script is.
In behind the scenes news, this episode marks two transitions. For one, Gene Roddenberry has stepped back from being the primary showrunner at this point. Being so hands on with the show had burnt him out, causing problems in his personal and professional lives. At this point he steps back to the role of "executive producer", still involved with the show, but in a more supervisory capacity. Replacing him as showrunner is Gene L. Coon, a man who would shepherd Star Trek past its early stages and into a more well developed show, introducing many key elements of the world and solidifying them.
The other change is this is the last episode of the show featuring Janice Rand prominently, as Grace Lee Whitney was written off the show. Official reasons given included a desire to explore different love interests for Kirk, as well as the actresses' alcoholism, but in recent years it's come out that she was the victim of an attempted sexual assault on the part of an unnamed executive (likely Roddenberry) and this led to her dismissal. Absolutely unfortunate to Whitney as losing the job led to a definite descent in her personal life, but I can't say I'm sorry to see the character go.
Janice Rand is a character that I suppose could have had some real potential. After all, this idea of the Captain/Yeoman sexual tension seems to have been part of Roddenberry's original conception of the show. But where the two should have perhaps been portrayed more like James Bond and Moneypenny, with a level of give and take between them, instead, Janice just seemed like a poor girl destined to be assaulted, stalked, leered at and endangered by each week's problem, while in my opinion the necessary sexual chemistry between her and Kirk never materialized.
Either way, what happened to Grace Lee Whitney was shitty, and this was a pretty lousy episode to go out on.
Rating: 2 out of 4
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