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Miri

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Title :
Miri
Series :
Rating :
2
Overall Ep :
12
First Aired :
27 Oct 1966
Stardate :
2713.5
Director :
Year :
Writers :
Season Ep :
1 x 12
Main Cast :
Guest Cast :
John Arndt as Security Guard #2
Kim Darby as Miri
Jonand Scott Dweck as Boys who stole phasers
Kellie Flanagan as Blonde girl
Ed McCready as Boy creature
Steven McEveety as Redheaded boy
John Megna as Little boy
Phil Morris as Boy in army helmet
Eddie Paskey as Lieutenant Leslie
Michael J. Pollard as Jahn
Darlene Roddenberry as Dirty-faced girl in flowered dress
Dawn Roddenberry as Little blond girl
David Ross as Security Guard #1
Irene Sale as Female creature
Irene Sale as Louise
Lizabeth Shatner as Blonde girl in red-striped dress
Melanie Shatner as Brunette in black lace dress
Keith Taylor as Jahn's friend
Stunts :
Bob Miles as McCoy's stunt double
YATI :
Whilst Miri's planet is identical to Earth in terms of the geography, it has one huge difference from our planet - there isn't a single cloud visible anywhere in the world. This is something changed in the remastered version.
Great Moment :
I like Rand admitting how she tries to get Kirk to look at her legs, followed by showing the horrible scabs on her legs. It's a very human moment for her.
Body Count :
One Grup dies attacking the landing party.
Factoid :
The original script established that Janice Rand was 24 years old in this episode, and had her contemplating leaving the Enterprise. Of the seven episodes Rand appears in, it's also the only one in which she leaves the Enterprise.

Vincent McEveety directed this episode from a wheelchair as he had recently broken his leg.

At four letters, "Miri" is the shortest episode title in the original series. It's also the only one shown in italicized type on the screen.

After being shown in 1970, Miri was not shown on the BBC again until the 1990 because it, along with "The Empath", "Whom Gods Destroy" and "Plato's Stepchildren" were considered to deal "most unpleasantly with the already unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease."

Plotline

The Enteprise follows an Earth-style planetary distress call and finds itself at a planet which is geographically identical to Earth, something amazing to everybody on board. There is no response to their hails so Kirk leads a landing party to the surface in the vicinity of the transmitter. They find themselves amongst architecture very similar to Earth in the 1960s, another remarkable parallel, but the entire area seems to be long deserted.

As they explore a man appears, attacking the group before collapsing and dying. He is horribly disfigured by some strange disease. The security officers with the landing party see another figure running into a building. They chase the figure down, finding a terrified teenage girl who calls herself Miri. She calls the landing party "Grups", a contraction of "grown ups", and states that Grups are dangerous and violent. Apparently almost the adults on the planet are dead and long gone, but Miri reveals that there are still some youngsters alive and in hiding. The grown ups died of the same affliction as the man they encountered earlier, becoming angry and violent, leaving the children terrified of any adult.

As they continue to investigate the planet the members of the landing party begin to develop the same purple sores on their own bodies - they are all infected with whatever killed the adults on the planet. The lone exception is Spock, whose Vulcan physiology apparently makes him immune. They search an old hospital for clues to the illness, and gradually the truth emerges - the population of the planet engaged in an experiment to prolong their lives almost indefinitely. However, something went wrong. In adults, the project created the illness which led to disfigurement, violence and death. They realise that all this happened some three centuries ago - the children survive because in them the life prolongation project works perfectly, slowing their ageing to a crawl. But despite this the children do still age, and as each one reaches puberty the effect turns into the deadly condition which killed all the other adults on the planet.

As the landing party works to devise a cure, the children discuss what to do about the "Grups" and the threat they represent. They steal their communicators, cutting them off from the support of the medical staff on the ship and so making the search for a cure far more difficult. Miri at first remains with them, developing a crush on Kirk. But when she sees Kirk comforting a distraught Janice Rand, Miri becomes jealous and sneaks away to talk with her friends. She convinces them to kidnap Rand in order to get rid of the woman she sees as competition.

Miri goes back to the landing party and is confronted by Kirk. He pressures her to help them further, revealing the truth that the children are all doomed to die as they turn into the Grups that they so fear. To emphasise the point he shows Miri that she is already starting to develop the purple scabs herself.

Miri takes Kirk to see the other children. He tries to explain the situation to them, though they at first refuse to listen and even attack him. Eventually Kirk manages to convince them that their way of life cannot last much longer, pointing out that the attack on him proves that the older children are already starting to become violent as they hit puberty. They finally agree and surrender to Kirk.

Back at the hospital McCoy manages to create a cure for the disease. Without the computer assistance from the Enterprise he has little choice but to test it on himself. Fortunately it works, and the children and landing party are all restored to normal. Back on the ship Kirk requests that Starfleet send some support to help the children so that they can finally grow up and begin the long process of reclaiming their planet.

Analysis

Never did like this episode very much. It kicks off on a bad note with the "it's exactly like Earth!" thing. This comes across as a sideways way to justify filming on the existing studio sets - filming in an Earth town, so make the entire planet identical to Earth. The show would revisit the idea of parallel cultures with "Bread and Circuses" and "The Omega Glory", even going so far as to suggest a law of parallel development in one episode. That's kind of silly in itself, but making the geography of the planet identical to Earth just makes the whole thing an order of magnitude more unlikely. And it's not like the geographical similarity actually contributes anything to the episode, even. The only effect it has for the rest of the episode is that we see the Enterprise orbiting a globe of the Earth rather than whatever planet of the week they usually see.

Outside that, the story isn't up to much. The idea of a life prolongation project wiping out the adults and leaving the children is kind of an interesting concept, but it leaves us dealing with a bunch of kids for the episode, and that's rarely a good thing. Seeing Miri crushing on Kirk, and Kirk practically encouraging it, is more than a bit creepy to modern eyes, whilst the scenes with the kids are a typical adult view of how kids behave.

All in all then, not a good episode. But it's kind of awkward and ultimately pointless, considering that they never really do anything with it. Later we would see planets which had societies that paralleled Earth societies for one reason or another, which is pretty unlikely in itself, but they always had the good sense to put them on alien planets that had compatible environments to Earth without being identical. planet being identical to Earth doesn't feature at all in the plot outside of that first scene

Special Edition

The usual remastered shots of the Enterprise. Most notably the planet has been redone, curing the problem of a completely cloudless Earth which was an issue with the original episode.
© Graham & Ian Kennedy Page views : 50,140 Last updated : 27 Jul 2022