“Miri” is a complicated amalgam of Chilly Warfare fears and youth tradition pastiche which appears to have been hijacked in equal measure by half-baked ideas, budgetary restraints, and a failure of nerve.
The vacillation and confusion aren’t precisely enjoyable to look at. However it does undermine the putative message in attention-grabbing methods. Are we actually presupposed to imagine that these bumbling, violent, and duplicitous adults who maintain tripping over plot holes are going to save lots of the kids?
The episode opens as The Enterprise discovers a planet that’s, one way or the other, for by no means defined causes, an actual duplicate of Earth circa 1960. They beam down into an deserted desolate metropolis, the place they discover a bicycle and are attacked by a purple mottled humanoid.
Quickly sufficient, they study that scientists on the planet had been making an attempt to increase life. However their experiments unleashed a deadly plague that drove adults mad after which killed them. Solely youngsters (known as “Onlies”) are left. These youngsters reside for a whole lot of years getting older slowly till they attain adolescence at which level they contract the plague and die.
Because of the sometimes dismal Federation quarantine protocols, the touchdown social gathering inevitably contracts the illness too. Unable to return to the ship, they race in opposition to time to find a vaccine. One youth, Miri (Kim Darby) helps them as a result of she has a crush on Captain Kirk (William Shatner). However the different youngsters are in what’s successfully a Dickensian gang and should not pleasant; they steal the grownup’s communicators, reducing them off from their high-tech computer systems and successfully dooming them.
The youngsters vs. adults storyline has some parallels with the sooner episode “Charlie X”. In that story, an adolescent challenged grownup authority, threatening a Vietnam-era viewers with youth revolution.
There are scenes in “Miri” which might be clearly impressed by the youth protests of the day and the worry of chaos and dysfunction. In a pointed sequence in a former classroom, the Onlies bang on desks and mock their (lengthy useless) academics. Kirk tries to persuade the kids that the plague will finally kill all of them, if meals shortages don’t get them first. However the youngsters take up a mocking chant and even assault him with sticks, refusing to let him speak. Campus cancel tradition is uncontrolled.
The Onlies want some self-discipline, little question. However the actual downside on this alternate Earth is the “Grups,” or grown-ups. It was the Grups, in any case, who unintentionally unleashed a world-destroying bio-plague. The plague, furthermore, turns adults violent and aggressive; because the illness progresses Kirk and his crew get irritable, indignant, and irrational. Children are mischievous and infuriating. However adults are infuriated. They’re harmful. “I bear in mind the belongings you Grups did, burning, yelling, hurting individuals,” Miri says.
“We didn’t do something like that,” Kirk assures Miri. However didn’t they? With Vietnam protests ramping up when the episode aired in 1966, it must happen to viewers that “burning, yelling, hurting individuals” was a good description of how the supposed grown-ups had been conducting themselves in the course of the Chilly Warfare. Miri’s Earth seems precisely like our Earth. Are the adults on the market, who destroyed themselves in an extra of rage, so completely different from the adults again right here, who on the time appeared (and nonetheless appear) decided to destroy themselves in an extra of (nuclear) rage?
Additionally, for somebody who claims to be on the facet of peace and never hurting individuals, Kirk hurts an terrible lot of individuals. When the enraged however unarmed man sick of plague assaults the touchdown social gathering early within the episode, Kirk doesn’t restrain him or ask Spock to nerve-pinch him. As an alternative, he punches him repeatedly within the face until he collapses—useless because it seems. Later when one other sick woman assaults Krik he shoots her with a phaser on stun after which acts stunned when she dies, though at that time he is aware of plague victims are sick and in precarious well being.
Kirk’s relationship with Miri can also be disturbing. The actor, Kim Darby, was 19 on the time, however the character is meant to be simply getting into puberty; she’s developmentally round 13 or 14. Kirk nonetheless flirts together with her flagrantly, telling her she’s fairly and that he likes her in an effort to get her to assist them. When Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) expresses some concern in regards to the relationship, first officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) reminds her that Miri is a few 300 years previous. That’s a queasily flip dismissal, not least as a result of it’s acquainted. Adults mistreating youngsters will usually make the excuse that they’re mature for his or her age.
The conclusion of the episode doesn’t encourage loads of confidence both. After a lot bickering, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelly) figures out a remedy, and the touchdown social gathering returns to The Enterprise. Rand once more is nervous in regards to the youngsters; Kirk has apparently left only a single medical crew to take care of all of the Onlies on the planet. Kirk assures her that social employees are on the way in which, although he doesn’t clarify why they will’t keep to supply support within the meantime. And the way are they vaccinating everybody? Getting them meals and different medical provides? They’ve obtained an enormous humanitarian disaster on their fingers. However after a crack a few want for truant officers and never courting older girls, Kirk shrugs and pulls out of orbit.
Kirk’s violence, callousness, and negligence are attributable largely to the detached expertise behind the digicam. Star Trek writers included some first-rate science fiction creators, however this episode’s scripter, Adrian Spies, isn’t considered one of them. In a single scene the Onlies steal all the touchdown social gathering’s communicators as a result of the Federation officers are apparently within the behavior of leaving their extremely invaluable superior tech simply mendacity round in emergencies. And, once more, nobody ever explains why they’ve discovered an actual duplicate of Earth on the far facet of the galaxy. After they uncover the resemblance within the first jiffy, they by no means point out it once more.
As portrayed right here, Captain Kirk and his crew (with the potential exception of Yeoman Rand) are laughably incompetent stooges who lack curiosity, recklessly expose themselves to illness, kill individuals they declare they’re going to assist, mislead and manipulate youngsters after which smugly pat themselves on the again for abandoning their obligations. No marvel the youngsters don’t belief them.
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Star Trek: The Unique Collection (“Miri”)
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Noah Berlatsky is a contract author primarily based in Chicago. His ebook, Surprise Girl: Bondage and Feminism within the Marston/Peter Comics was printed by Rutgers College Press. He thinks the Adam West Batman is the very best Batman, darn it.
