Star Trek TOS, Season 1: Miri

The message of this episode is similar to a message from other Star Trek TOS episodes that I already reviewed: transhumanism is bad, really really bad.

Specifically, in this episode, the Enterprise discovers a planet where three hundred years ago, scientists were trying to develop a virus that would make everyone live for thousands of years, but instead it backfired and everyone died from a horrible disease. In the previous episode, What Are Little Girls Made Of, we learned that it’s also wrong to try to achieve immortality with robot bodies.

Everyone died except for the children, who age extremely slowly and don’t die until they enter puberty, at which time they contract the horrible disease and die.

This episode has the assumption that without adult-enforced discipline, long-lived children develop into a dystopian society reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies.

There is also an assumption that emotional and cognitive maturity comes from the biological aging of the brain, and children with non-aging brains will remain children forever. Rally bratty children in this case. Spock compares them to animals and mice.

Of course the landing party of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Yeoman Rand (?) and two red-shirts also get the disease. This is the second time in the series where they get a really bad disease that almost kills them. You would think the lesson would be that they should wear hazmat suits when they visit strange planets. On the other hand, they were wearing hazmat suits in the first disease episode, The Naked Time, but the suits didn’t work because they were made from shower curtains. So maybe the lesson learned was why bother wearing the suits if they don’t work?

Another lesson I learned from this episode is don’t bring a blonde-wigged bimbo along with a landing party. And in fact, in this rare case, they did actually learn the lesson, because this is the last episode where Yeoman Rand has a major role.

The landing party discovers Miri, who is supposed to be a girl who’s just entering puberty, maybe she’s supposed to be around 13 years old. Captain Kirk uses his alpha-male charisma on her, like he does to all women he meets down on planets, and acquires her cooperation as a result. And then Yeoman Rand gets extremely jealous of Miri, and that causes Miri to get jealous of Rand and mad at Kirk for paying attention to Rand instead of her, which leads to Miri convincing the other kids to kidnap Rand so they can then lure Kirk to find her so they can punish him.

The highlight of the episode is the actress who played Miri, she did a completely convincing job of having a crush on Captain Kirk. Her highly competent acting only reminds us of how horrible an actress Majel Barrett is, and to a lesser extent Grace Lee Whitney who plays Rand. Barrett was completely unconvincing in being attracted to Spock in “The Naked Time,” and being the fiancée of Roger Korby in “What Are Little Girls Made Of.” Truly an example of a bad actress being hired only because she’s sleeping with the boss.

The girl who played Miri (who was actually 18 or 19 at the time this was filmed) went on to play Mattie in the movie True Grit where John Wayne won an Academy Award.

Because this is not a great episode, it makes me want to nitpick things. Like how at the beginning, they discover a planet that looks exactly like Earth. That’s really mysterious, isn’t it? How did that happen? But then they completely forget about that. Maybe early on in Star Trek, they didn’t think it would make sense for aliens on a distant planet to speak English and look exactly like humans, so they came up with the idea of a planet being a parallel Earth.

And then there is the problem of the disappearing red-shirts. They beam down with two red-shirts, but then midway into the episode the red-shirts simply disappear. No they don’t show them being killed, they just get written out of the story. Where did they go? And Kirk really could have used them, because we see Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Rand all leave their communicators on a table in a lab in the hospital while they leave the room to respond to a strange noise outside the room, and then we see the bratty kids sneak into the room through an air vent and steal the four communicators. Isn’t there some Star Fleet protocol that says you aren’t supposed to leave all of your communicators lying around unattended on hostile planets?

Now they can’t communicate with the ship, and without communication with the ship they can’t access the ship’s computers for help in concocting a cure for the virus. But what about the two red-shirts? Don’t they have communicators? But everyone has forgotten about them. My theory is that they originally intended for the two red-shirts to get killed, but then afterwards they decided that it didn’t play well to have the red-shirts killed by children, so they cut out that scene or never filmed it in the first place.

Reading other modern reviews of this episode, most of them are creeped out by Kirk using his alpha-male charisma on a 13-year-old girl. But apparently no one in 1966 thought it was a problem. And I don’t see the problem; it makes sense for Kirk to use his alpha-male charisma in this situation, because they needs Miri’s cooperation. It’s not like they had sex, or even kissed.

Notes:

Kirk’s ripped shirt: Kirk’s shirt gets ripped in various places, but we see less skin than most other ripped-shirt episodes.