Miri

Miri is a bland episode. It’s not completely boring, but it’s also just not very interesting. 

The Enterprise discovers a planet that looks exactly like Earth, down to the dimensions and atmospheric composition. The series will go on to do this three more times, in what it calls “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development.” 

Gene Roddenberry included the concept in his original pitch as a way to keep budgets down and also to maintain audience’s frame of reference with familiar settings, costumes, and technology.

To our jaded expectations here in 2017 it’s lazy, but I give 1966 a pass since this was the first real sci-fi/fantasy adventure show on a shoestring budget that fought tooth and nail with the network to stay alive. If later series had pulled it, it would have been a lazy plot device to reuse sets and costumes (Who Watches the Watchers old west Vulcans notwithstanding.)

Moving on.

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Yeoman Rand, and two redshirts beam down to the planet to locate the source of a mysterious “Earth-style” SOS signal. What they find is a rapid-aging disease and creepy children among the ruins of a civilization that ended in the 30s. 

And trike-boy, who the plot reveals lived for 300 years, hit puberty, and turned into a purple mutant whose age caught up with him. It’s a sad scene as this giant, mutated child mourns for his broken tricycle just before dying. 

Not before Kirk and Spock beat the crap out of him, though. 

They investigate, discover a little girl named Miri who develops a crush on Kirk, the away team contracts the disease, they have 170 hours to develop a cure in the ruins of a laboratory full of the last native research, Miri gets jealous of Rand as everyone gets pissy in their final hours, the creepy kids are creepy and steal the communicators, Miri betrays Kirk so Rand can get captured and Kirk can have some action in the final 15 minutes (because McCoy looking at samples in slides just isn’t very interesting.) In the end, the day is saved and they leave a medical team on the planet to rehabilitate these 300 year old kids and cure the disease. 

Bojack Horseman and Mr. Peanutbutter, c. 1966

There’s nothing interesting here, plain and simple; in fact, the questions raised by the episode are far, far more interesting. This planet developed similarly enough to Earth that the natives spoke English and wrote in recognizable roman characters. Did the cars run on fossil fuels? If so, did they have a civilization of Voth that fled the planet before an asteroid hit it? Was the solar system the exact same, or was it only the planet? Did the Preservers take native Americans from this planet as well?

So many questions. 

Jahn C. Reilly c. 1966

There’s not much to talk about. The child actress playing Miri is good enough to be remarked on, the guy playing Jahn looks just like John C. Reilly, the other kids are creepy...

Kirk is revealed as quite the charmer here. He’s kind and almost fatherly to Miri, patient and gentle without coming off as creepy. It’s times like these that Shatner the actor is really appreciable. 

Oh, there’s some stuff about Janice and Kirk’s relationship, but seeing how this may be one of her last appearances it’s pointless to care about it. Yeoman Rand exists to be leered at, victimized, and captured. My headcanon is that she transfers off the Enterprise and that’s why we never see her again, and her experiences embitter her to the point where she snaps at Tuvok in Flashback. 

I’ve run out of things to say, and I’m impressed I managed to say anything about this episode at all. 

Rating: 3/5; Skip

It’s not a bad episode, but it’s just not essential viewing.