Star Trek Episode 1.8: Miri

AKA Pre-Teen Wasteland

Our episode begins with the Enterprise picking up an old Earth-style SOS from a nearby planet. They’ve tried answering back, but no one’s responding. This is pretty puzzling because there are no Earth colonies this far out, so what’s an Earth distress signal doing kicking around out here in the boondocks of the galaxy? Even weirder, though, is that as they get closer to the planet, it turns out that it’s remarkably familiar. They have, in fact, stumbled upon a planet that appears to be an exact duplicate of Earth, down to the shapes of the continents. Well, either that or they got really lost and wound up back where they started.

After the titles, Kirk and a landing party (Rand, Spock, McCoy and two redshirts) go down to see what’s what. I don’t know why they brought Rand with. I mean she’s cool, but she’s a yeoman. It’s not really their job to go on landing parties. Ah, who am I kidding, no one sticks to their job on this show.

They find themselves in the midst of an abandoned, desolate town, with the streets filled with junk and broken-down cars. Kirk identifies it as being identical to Earth in the 1900s, which Spock narrows down to 1960. Which is pretty impressive considering that’s three hundred years ago for them. If I was suddenly transported to a replica of a town from 1718 you can bet I wouldn’t be able to date it at a glance, or any amount of glances for that matter.

Fun fact, this set is actually one from The Andy Griffith Show, redressed; Star Trek could hardly afford to build an entire abandoned city street from scratch, after all, but hey, Desliu also owned this show with a ready-built exterior set that just needed to be junked up a bit. Problem solved! As a bonus it provides a nice foundation for Star Trek/Andy Griffith Show crossover fic.

Spock does a scan and says that the place has been deteriorating for at least a few centuries, and that most likely the distress signal is automated since there doesn’t appear to be anyone around. If that’s the case whoever lived here built their stuff to last, considering it looks more like it’s been abandoned for a year or so. There are remarkably un-decayed wooden boxes and boarded-up windows, for example, and while there’s some plant life it’s not spread nearly as far as you’d expect. I’ve seen towns that people were living in that looked worse than this one.

As they walk through the town, Kirk finds an old, rusted tricycle, which he picks up with an expression of mild curiosity and amusement. He casually hands it off to Spock, who glances at it, hands it to McCoy, and keeps walking. But McCoy doesn’t. He stops, looks at the tricycle, kneels down with it, spins one of the remaining wheels.

It’s a very quiet scene that lasts only a few seconds, but it’s something special. McCoy doesn’t scan the tricycle for information or make any comment about it. He just…looks at it. Kirk and Spock barely noticed it, but McCoy gives it a long moment of somber consideration. Of course you can’t tell exactly what he’s thinking, but it’s not hard to guess: this was someone’s cherished toy once, now long since left to rust in the street. Who owned it? What did it mean to them? What happened to them? In the midst of all the suspenseful, exciting mystery of what this place is and what happened to it, there’s a brief moment to just look at the tragedy of it all on a small, human scale.

TOS is well known for being bombastic, shouty, hammy, over the top. And that’s not an unfair assessment a lot of the time. But don’t let anyone tell you that it never did anything subtle.

Anyway, did I say subtle? Enough subtle. Time for some ACTION. Everyone’s startled by a shout from nearby, and before they can react, a figure with unkempt hair, ragged clothes and a discolored face comes running around a corner and tackles McCoy. The guy frantically yells “mine, mine!” as the two of them roll around in the dust, before Kirk and Spock manage to pull him off McCoy. Then Kirk punches him for good measure. Uh, the new guy, that is, Kirk doesn’t punch McCoy.

After they finally manage to subdue the guy by way of Kirk punching him several more times he collapses onto the ground, whimpering about how someone broke his tricycle. He begs them to fix it. And McCoy says, “Of course somebody will fix it.” Because that’s McCoy for you. He just got attacked by a strange, violent, monstrous-looking alien who appears to be barely intelligent, but that’s no excuse to not be compassionate, dammit.

Spock assesses the guy as definitely humanoid and Kirk tells him they want to help, but the guy starts gibbering and seizing, then finally collapses, dead. McCoy scans him and says that his metabolic rate was incredibly high, like he was aging super rapidly.

This is interrupted by the sound of footsteps and the landing party takes off running towards the source. A door creaks nearby so they run into the building to find a room that’s been utterly trashed. They track the sound to a closet in the back of the room, which Kirk opens to find a young girl, tears streaming down her face. She begs them not to hurt her, even after Kirk reassures her that they won’t. Kirk sends Spock and the redshirts outside to get some readings, while McCoy wonders what happened to the girl to make her so afraid of the landing party.

As Spock does some scanning outside, we see a hand wiping away grime from the inside of a window to look out at him. Spock sees this too, and goes over to peer through the glass. Meanwhile, the girl is talking about how she remembers the terrible things the ‘grups’ did, and is assuming the landing party will behave the same. Kirk assures her that they won’t and that they’re here to help, but the girl is hesitant to believe them. She thinks they’re playing a game, and insists she can’t play without knowing the rules.

Rand works out that ‘grups’ means ‘grown-ups’ and the girl says that in the ‘Before Time’ all the grups got sick and started acting violent, so the kids—or ‘Onlies’ as the girl refers to them—hid until all the grups died. McCoy realizes this means a plague, but for some reason it didn’t affect the kids, so they’re the only ones left. Kirk talks to the girl alone; she reveals that her name’s Miri and he butters her up a bit by calling her pretty. Kirk. Kirk, please stop hitting on the pre-teen.

Moving on from that bit of creepiness, Spock and the redshirts are still looking around outside, when Spock hears a noise from a fire escape above him. This escalates into a chanting taunt from a group of children, then a bunch of rocks are dropped on them. Spock goes back to tell Kirk that the kids are picking on him, but he and the redshirts couldn’t track them down. Meanwhile there are still questions to be answered: what exactly happened to all the adults, and if there are no adults, what was up with that definitely non-child guy that attacked them?

They decide the best way to find out about this is to seek out some records, so Kirk asks Miri if she knows of any hospitals around. She’s reluctant to take them there, saying it’s a bad place, but a bit more Kirk charm gets her to agree.

Just to be clear here: it’s obvious that Miri has a crush on Kirk, and Kirk is willing to play that up a bit to get her to help them—nothing more than that. Nothing untoward happens, just some flattery and charismatic Kirk smiles. But it still feels skeevy as heck, and it’s uncomfortable to watch, and I really wish they hadn’t put it in there.

All this is cut short anyway when Kirk notices a strange bluish-purple lesion on his hand. Miri freaks out about this, saying that he’s going to turn out like all the other grups—he’ll get angry and try to hurt everyone, and then he’ll die. Kirk reacts to this…well, not much at all, really.

After the break we get an unusually long past-tense captain’s log, saying that the building Miri took them too was also the source of the automated distress call they picked up. Also, everyone in the landing party has developed the lesions as well, except for Spock, because of course he didn’t, he’s not affected by friggin’ anything. McCoy calls the ship to have some equipment beamed down, since everything in the lab is super old. The communications officer (some dude who’s not Uhura) says there are volunteers standing by to help, but Kirk won’t let anyone else come down lest they get infected too (why not send tissue samples up to the Enterprise and have their medical labs work on it as well? Oh, never mind). Spock then goes on to describe the microscope McCoy is using, presumably just to annoy him.

While McCoy is tinkering with his museum piece microscope, Spock and Kirk go through some paper records left behind, which miraculously haven’t decayed at all despite being abandoned for three hundred years. In it they find reports of a ‘Life Prolongation Project’. Hmm, gonna take a guess that that didn’t turn out real well.

McCoy keeps on working while Spock and Kirk try to figure out the whole thing. Spock hypothesizes that it’s the changes brought on by puberty that cause people to become vulnerable to the disease, making this the second episode out of eight so far in which puberty is a plot point. But then, is puberty not a plot point in all our lives?

So this is a puzzler. The adults all died a long time ago. The kids die when they reach adolescence. So, uh, where, uh…where are the new kids coming from? (McCoy specifically asks, “How do they keep the line going?” which I think is both as close as they could come to asking that question on TV in the ’60s and as close as anyone would want to come to asking that question anyway.) Rand, meanwhile, is questioning why, if Miri is essentially a feral child, would she be hanging out with the adults of the landing party. Kirk says he thinks children have an instinctive need for adults. Yeah, no shit, Kirk, they’re children. That’s kind of the whole deal with children.

Spock and McCoy point out, though, that there’s probably another factor at work here: Miri’s obvious crush on Kirk. Spock even says, “She’s becoming a woman.” Yes, starting to feel attraction is the key factor in growing up, which means that as an ace person I am gonna live forever.

More rummaging through dusty papers later, Spock has uncovered some more information: the intended purpose of the Life Prolongation Plan was to make a person age only one month for every hundred years. Only they miscalculated and wiped out the entire adult population. That’s a pretty big miscalculation. But whatever they did evidently worked for everyone who wasn’t an adult, so the kids running around now are the same ones that were around when the whole thing happened, barely aging over the course of three hundred years. McCoy points out that this means the guy that attacked them was probably a kid just like Miri only a short time ago; as soon as the kids hit puberty they’re stricken with the disease and become maddened and disfigured before dying. Also I guess the plague…took out the entire planet? But only some twenty-odd kids in this one city survived? Or are there more out there but we just don’t care about them?

Kirk wants to make contact with the gang o’ rascals, but Spock says they couldn’t even come close to them, the children know the area so well. But he didn’t have Kirk’s secret weapon: Miri.

While Kirk is getting Miri to take him to the kids, we finally get a glimpse of them ourselves, a group of them clustered in a wrecked building. An older kid named Jahn seems to be their leader, and is holding forth about how untrustworthy these grups are. (Jahn was played by a twenty-seven-year-old actor. Ah, show business.) He’s noticed their use of communicators, and hypothesizes that if the kids managed to get a hold of those communicators, the grups wouldn’t be able to talk to their unseen pals. Unfortunately for Jahn he’s having some difficulty with this plan because it’s pretty hard to organize an assorted group of pre-teen children to do anything, especially with his annoying second-in-command running around and shouting “OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE” at the merest distraction.

This is all interrupted when the kids spot Miri and Kirk coming near and promptly go to ground. As Kirk and Miri walk in, the place appears to be abandoned. Everything is silent. But then there’s a scream, and a girl comes rushing out—and she’s got the disease, just like the other kid they encountered at the start. At this all hell breaks loose, and suddenly the room is full of screaming, panicking children. The infected girl jumps onto Kirk’s back and rides him piggyback around the room before he manages to shake her off and zap her with his phaser. This kills her, although Kirk’s phaser was only set on stun. Judging by what happened to the other kid, she was probably pretty close to death anyway.

Miri, clearly very upset about all this, says the girl’s name was Louise (and no, I don’t know why Louise is the only one with a regular Earth name), and she wasn’t much older than Miri herself. Meanwhile the other kids have long since fled, so Kirk and Miri go back to the lab. Spock has found some information that, if confirmed by the ship’s computers, will tell them how long they have left before the disease drives them mad and destroys them. They’ve got a ticking clock, and McCoy says it’s only a matter of time before they destroy each other and the last one destroys themselves. Actually, it’d probably be more like Spock would have to kill whoever was the last to go, and then would be left alone on the planet unless or until he could find a way to make sure he wasn’t a carrier. FUN TIMES.

Spock’s managed to confirm by now what they had hypothesized—that the disease strikes when the victim enters puberty. At that point they have about a month before it kills them, but the older the victim, the more rapid the progress. In fact, as the Enterprise calls in to report, the landing party has one hundred seventy-five hours to go, or seven days. Which is a remarkably precise figure, considering that a.) it’s a disease and they don’t usually stick to a strict schedule, and b.) the landing party are not all the same age. And unfortunately for them the person most capable of solving this thing is also the oldest, so he’s almost certainly going to go first.

At any rate, they’re now on day two, and so far they’re not having much luck—but then McCoy finds some relevant information about what the scientists of the past were trying to do: create a chain reaction of viruses that would prolong the life of the human cell, or something. Kirk tells McCoy and Spock that they need to isolate the virus to make a vaccine. McCoy is all like “YEAH NO SHIT SHERLOCK.”

Interestingly (for a certain value of the word ‘interestingly’) in this scene you can see that McCoy and Kirk have their tunics opened at the shoulder, something which never comes up before or again and is never otherwise hinted to even be a function of the tunics. From this we can tell that McCoy is wearing the black undershirt and Kirk, of course, is not. This really has nothing to do with anything, I just feel the need to keep track of the mysterious existence, or lack thereof, of the undershirts.

Suddenly they’re interrupted by the sound of the children chanting again. Everyone runs out of the room, and while they’re gone Jahn crawls out of an airvent and steals all the communicators. I can understand why Kirk, Spock and McCoy might have left theirs laying around the lab while they were working, but you’d think the redshirts would have kept theirs with them, since security guards who are not present and can’t be contacted are not real helpful.

Having failed to locate the kids, the trio head back into the lab, but not before Jahn’s made off back into the grate. Spock quickly notices the communicators are gone, which as Bones points out is bad news, because without the communicators they can’t use the ship’s computers, and without the ship’s computers they’re not going to have a chance to crack this thing. One wonders if there’s no way they could use the distress signal thing to send a message back up to the Enterprise, but there’s probably some reason why that wouldn’t work. Hopefully a better one than ‘we forgot about it.’

By the time of the next captain’s log, they’re down to three days, and they’re having no luck. The disease is taking its toll: the lesions are spreading and everyone (sans Spock, of course) is getting short-tempered, presumably more so than usual for people desperately trying to find a cure for a disease that’s going to kill them in three days. Also presumably the disease suppresses facial hair growth since all the men are looking remarkably non-beardy for having been stranded down here for four days.

To make things worse, they’ve found out that the remaining food supplies on the planet are running very low, and the kids have about a month of rations left. Yeah, the kids have been living on canned food for three hundred years. That’s a long time! Canned food can last surprisingly long—people have found decades-old cans that were still good—but I don’t know about three hundred years, especially since canned food was only invented about two hundred years ago so we can’t really test that one. (Don’t quote me on this stuff.) And I doubt the kids have been storing the cans in optimum conditions, which would increase the likelihood of the cans themselves going bad and starting to corrode and leak, and once that happens you’re screwed. Not to mention this presumes quite a large amount of canned food existing in the first place, especially since the kids, being kids, probably haven’t been rationing it in the most efficient manner possible.

(Incidentally, did you know that if you Google ‘how long does canned food last’ you get a lot of survivalist blogs? You also do if you Google ‘how long can you survive in arctic conditions’. By the time this project is done my search history is going to look like I’m expecting the apocalypse any minute.)

Anyway, this whole thing is clearly taking its toll on the crew; Kirk and McCoy are sniping at each other, and then Rand has a breakdown and runs out of the room. Kirk follows her, and she tearfully and dramatically reveals lesions on her chest and legs. The shocking impact of this is kind of lessened by the fact that everyone has those lesions now, that’s kind of the whole deal, so it’s not like she’s revealing anything new to us. But it’s understandable she’s freaking out, since, y’know, fatal disease and all that. Kirk gives her a comforting if rather awkward hug and pat on the back, but unbeknownst to both of them Miri is watching the whole thing and slips away with an unhappy look on her face.

McCoy calls them back into the room to reveal that he’s finally found the original disease that caused all this, so he can start working on a vaccine. It’s still a race against time, but now they have some hope. Miri comes back in time to see Kirk holding Rand by the shoulders, and apparently that’s the last straw. She runs off and goes back to the other kids to help them hatch a plan to kidnap Rand; she knows the landing party are pressed for time, and getting Rand away will slow them down. Although Rand’s not actually really doing anything to contribute that we can see so it probably wouldn’t actually slow them down any. But it’s clear that Miri’s motivations here have less to do with tactics and more to do with her jealousy of Rand.

We see this pretty clearly as Miri’s plan unfolds; Rand was concerned with the well-being of the youngest kids, so Miri can lure her into a trap by saying one of them got hurt. When Jahn says that the grups might be able to still finish their work with one person missing, Miri says that there will be two people missing, because Kirk– “Mr. Lovey Dovey”–will try to come and find her. Of course, Kirk isn’t doing much to help either. Really, 2/3 of the landing party is currently pretty useless.

Jahn’s annoying second-in-command starts up a chant of “BONK BONK ON THE HEAD” which all the kids repeat while banging on the floor, because they’re violent little hooligans. Later, Spock and McCoy have synthesized some cherry kool-aid which they think might be the cure, but they’re not sure of the dosage. Also Kirk has noticed that Rand has gone missing and is interrogating Miri about it, struggling (and mostly failing) to keep his temper in check.

So now they’ve got to find Rand, and they’ve got to find their communicators, because without them they can’t call the ship and check whether the vaccine they’ve developed is correct or, as Spock helpfully informs us, “a beaker full of death.” On the plus side, Rand and the communicators will probably be in the same place. You know how it is, you lose two things in short succession, they usually both turn up at once.

Well, there’s only one solution to this problem: harshly interrogate a pre-teen girl. Kirk takes Miri by the shoulders and tells her that it’s not only the landing partly that will be doomed if they fail to cure the disease in time, it’s all of the Onlies, because they’ll inevitably get the disease too as they grow. And Miri’s next in line because she’s starting to become a young woman. We know that—apparently–because of her crush on Kirk, which is used repeatedly throughout the episode as a sure sign of burgeoning adulthood. Frankly, I could have done with less of the adult men discussing a young woman’s developing sexuality in this episode, but w/e. Anyway, Miri protests that the disease only happens sometimes, but Kirk proves her wrong by showing her a lesion on her own arm: she’s got it too now.

Meanwhile, the kids are playing teacher in an old classroom, with Rand tied to a chair in the corner. She’s appropriately put out by all this, since after all being kidnapped and tied up is bad enough under any circumstances, but having a bunch of kids do it is just adding insult to injury. Their taunting of her is interrupted by Miri opening the door, which is surprising because she’s not supposed to have come back yet. She also seems super uncomfortable and awkward as she hovers in the doorway, and the reason for this is revealed when she finally opens the door all the way to reveal Kirk standing beside her.

Jahn and the kids react to this with shock followed by jeering (their fallback reaction to everything). Kirk slowly walks through their midst with pretty much the expression on his face you’d expect from a man who’s been stuck on this dang planet without so much as a proper cup of coffee for over a week now, and now has a bunch of children yelling in his face. He tries to talk to them, but this only results in being told off about how there’s no yelling in the classroom, and then a chorus of “BLAH BLAH BLAH!” This results in what is quite possibly Kirk’s single greatest line of dialogue.

Perhaps in awe of this legendary bit of screenwriting, the kids shut up for a minute, long enough for Kirk to talk about how, if they don’t help the Enterprise crew, there’s soon not going to be anything left: no games, no Grups, no Onlies. All this does is prompt Jahn to give a nod to a kid with a club, who tries to come up on Kirk from behind, but unsurprisingly the preteen isn’t much of a match for him. Undeterred, Jahn continues his offensive, leading the kids to slowly close in on Kirk while menacingly (and annoyingly) chanting “nya-yah-yah-yah-yah.” Kirk tries to explain to them about the disease, how it’s going to claim them all eventually if they don’t let the crew help, but annoying sidekick boy attacks him from behind and Kirk goes down in the ensuing mob.

A moment later he staggers out again, now bleeding from a few places, and confronts Jahn head-on. Head-Jahn, so to speak. When Jahn refuses to listen to Kirk telling him about how the disease will claim Jahn soon, Kirk just straight up tears his shirt sleeves down the middle to reveal the massive lesions now covering his arms. That’s right, another one for the ripped shirt count, this time self-inflicted. Man, tissue paper, I’m telling ya.

Kirk goes on, using a nearby girl as a prop to point out that once the disease kills off the older kids, the younger ones will soon follow with no one left to take care of them and the food rapidly running out. Miri comes to his defense, showing Jahn the lesion on her arm as proof that Kirk is telling the truth, but Jahn won’t buy it—Kirk is a Grup, so why listen to him?

Time to go on the offensive, then—quite literally, as Kirk straight up throws annoying sidekick boy off the table, then dares the kids to look at the (literal and metaphorical) blood on their own hands. He points out that the kids are doing everything that makes them hate and fear the Grups and the mutated kids—hurting, yelling, maybe even killing people. He begs them to let him help them, before it’s too late.

Back in the lab, Spock and McCoy are—shockingly—having an argument. They have the vaccine, but without access to the ship’s computers they don’t know if it’s safe to use. McCoy wants to go ahead and test it, arguing that while the vaccine might be fatal, the disease definitely is, and they’ve got very little time left and who knows if those communicators will be found before the disease claims one of them? Spock’s not hearing it, and, seeing this whole argument as pointless, leaves to go check on Kirk before things can get any more heated. Unfortunately, in the process, he commits the classic fatal error of leaving McCoy alone in a room with a dangerous vaccine that needs to be tested on someone. So, after a moment of quiet contemplation, McCoy strays over to the fatal hypospray and matter-of-factly jabs it right into his arm.

Now, let’s be real here, McCoy has a martyrdom streak a mile wide, and given any situation where he has the opportunity to throw himself on a syringe to save other people, it’s not real unexpected that he would take it. But in this particular case, I think you can guess at something more going on with his thought process. McCoy’s the oldest affected member of the landing party, meaning that when it comes time for the disease to start taking people, he’s probably going to be the first to go. And since he’s the one with the most medical knowledge, him being out of commission is going to deal a serious blow to everyone else’s chances of survival. Given that, and that he doesn’t currently know if the time he has left is more like hours or more like minutes, or how long it’s going to take Kirk to get back with the communicators if he does at all, it’s not terribly surprising that he would decide that if he’s gonna go he can at least make sure he goes in a way that provides some useful information for those left behind.

But that’s not all. McCoy takes the whole ‘first, do no harm’ thing super seriously; it’s a consistent character trait of his that, given the choice between bringing pain on himself and dealing it out to someone else, he’ll pick the former every time, even to the point of death. And if the disease causes him to go full zombie-monster, he would be bringing pain on someone else—even if by some miracle the rest of party managed to take him out without him hurting any of them, they would still have to deal with the emotional trauma of having to kill a close friend. Of course it wouldn’t be intentional on his part to cause that harm, but he’d still be causing it. And McCoy’s not about that. At least if the vaccine kills him, it’s not going to harm anyone else in the process. They’d be hurt by his death, yes, that might be unavoidable–but they wouldn’t have to shoulder the guilt of personally killing him.

Is this the most logical course of action to take? I mean…no. But I think it’s very in-character for McCoy, who after all is often not the most logical of people, especially not when it comes to the principles that he holds dear. (Not to mention that the poor guy probably isn’t thinking too clearly in the first place, after several days of working to exhaustion in a struggle against a fatal disease.)

At any rate, the vaccine works very quickly—within moments, McCoy is spasming, then collapses on the table and just about manages to cry out for Spock before falling to the floor.

Spock and the redshirt he was talking to come rushing in to find McCoy passed out cold on the ground, clutching the incriminatingly empty hypospray. He’s not dead yet, though, as a quick feel for a pulse reveals. And I would be remiss to not point out that Mr. Look-At-Me-I’m-So-Logical-And-Unfeeling takes the time to hold McCoy’s hands in his own as they wait.

Just after the nick of time, Kirk comes rushing in with a crowd of children, talking to a recovered communicator. (Side note, that’s Shatner’s own daughter Lisabeth that he’s holding in that scene, one of several relatives of the cast and crew that played the kid extras in the episode. They tried to get Nimoy to bring his kids too but he wanted to keep them out of show business.) Someone on the other end is telling him that they’ve got three hours and eleven minutes left. Because you know how diseases work, they can be calculated right down to the minute. Science!

The parade draws up short at the doorway, though, as Kirk sees what’s going on. He rushes forward to kneel down beside Spock, although the way his torn sleeves are flapping around like bellbottoms for arms undercuts the drama slightly. As the two of them watch, the lesions on McCoy’s face start to fade away. After all, when you receive a vaccination for a disease, it instantly causes all your symptoms to disappear, even the ones that have left physical disfigurements on you. Science, I tell you! Science!

But the important thing is, looked like the vaccine worked, to Kirk and Spock’s visible relief. Kirk gets up and wanders off, pausing to give Miri a reassuring head-pat, but Spock stays by McCoy’s side, commenting that he’ll “never understand the medical mind.”

Some time later, everyone’s back aboard the Enterprise and heading out, now that they’re all conscious and de-blemished and wearing complete shirts again. Kirk evidently left a medical team behind to look after the kids, saying that he’s already contacted Space Central—whatever the hell that is—to send out a more complete social services squad. And ain’t that gonna be a fun challenge, rehabilitating three-hundred-year-old children who have been surviving on their own in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Where do you even begin with that? Who knows, it’s not our problem anymore!

Rand comments that Miri really loved Kirk. Kirk replies that he of course would not return a preteen girl’s affections, because he never gets involved with older women. Ha ha, yes. Let’s move on now. Please.

The Enterprise heads off into the closing credits. And if you’re wondering, wait, what about that whole thing where the planet looked just like Earth, what was that about—well, you’re going to have to keep wondering, because it never got brought up again once they landed on the planet, and it’s not gonna get brought up again within the series, although in the nature of Star Trek continuity problems there were some expanded universe sources that took a crack at it.

The whole thing is really very silly—like I said, without the funds to construct an entire alien city from scratch, they had to shoot on an existing city set doled up a bit to look abandoned. Since this was still the young, idealistic days of TOS, back when they actually still felt the need to justify why alien planets looked suspiciously like Earth, they had to come up with that whole thing about it being an Earth clone for some reason, even though that causes things to make less sense. You’d think they could have just passed it off as being an old Earth colony—they might have had to shorten the amount of time since the plague killed everyone to make the founding date of the colony more reasonable, but that wouldn’t really have affected the story in any way. Honestly, I find the whole three hundred years thing to be pushing it to begin with, given both that that’s a long time for a group of kids to survive on their own, and that the town doesn’t look nearly that old. But I digress. They did what they did, and now the rest of us have gotta deal with it.

Another interesting fact about Miri is that it was one of four TOS episodes banned by the BBC during their reruns of the show during the 70s and 80s. Apparently they got some complaints about it and decided that the episodes all dealt “most unpleasantly with the already unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease.” Which is pretty damn rich of the BBC, considering what Doctor Who was getting up to during that time period.

Crew death count for this episode is—despite McCoy’s best efforts—zero, but we have one ripped shirt count for Kirk destroying his sleeves. I hate to break it to the BBC, but we’re not done with madness, torture, sadism and disease just yet. Tune in next time for three out of four in Dagger of the Mind.