Miri (episode)

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This article is written
from the Real World
point of view
This article is written
from the Real World
point of view
"Miri"
TOS, Episode 1x11
Production number: 6149-12
First aired: 27 October 1966
Remastered version aired: 16 September 2006
← 12th of 80 produced in TOS →
← 8th of 80 released in TOS →
← 2nd of 80 released in TOS Remastered →
← 8th of 726 released in all →
Written By
Adrian Spies

Directed By
Vincent McEveety
2713.5 (2266)
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The Enterprise discovers an Earth-like planet that was devastated by a horrific degenerative disease and is now populated entirely by impossibly old children.

Contents

[edit] Summary

Enterprise in polar orbit of an Earth-like planet
Enterprise in polar orbit of an Earth-like planet

Responding to an Earth-type distress signal many light years from Earth, the USS Enterprise discovers a planet that is an exact copy of Earth. It has the same mass, circumference, density, and atmosphere. Even the topography is identical. Beaming down, the landing party of Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, Janice Rand and two security men discover architecture like that of Earth, circa 1960. But there is debris in the streets and evidence that decay has been ongoing for at least several centuries, and that the distress signal is automated.

Then McCoy is attacked by a diseased man – a man horribly disfigured, insane, and violent. Before Kirk can get any useful information from this man, he dies. Noises draw the landing party to one of the abandoned buildings, where they discover a terrified girl, Miri.

Meanwhile, Spock and the two security guards search the ruins outside. They hear children, and are pelted with debris, but they never actually see anyone; the feral children, who call themselves Onlies, know the area too well, and are too canny.

Talking to Miri, Kirk learns how the grups became ill and insane, burning and killing, and the Onlies had to hide from them until they all died. McCoy realizes that a plague struck this world, and killed most of its people. And then, on Kirk's hand, Miri finds a blemish. Kirk has the disease that killed the grups. Soon, everyone has it except Spock.

McCoy begins to work, bringing a biocomputer and an electronic microscope from the ship. Spock discovers research dating back three hundred years; there was a project, with the goal of prolonging life. But a miscalculation annihilated the adults, leaving only the children. Their development was slowed immensely however, leaving them to survive on their own for the last three hundred years. However, once they reach puberty, they do succumb to the disease. McCoy surmises that within a week, all of the Human members of the landing party will succumb; sooner than that, they will go mad. The Onlies, suspicious of the crew, clandestinely steal their communicators in an attempt to foil their plans.

Later, Rand, now infected with the disease and crying, seeks comfort in the arms of Captain Kirk. Miri witnesses this and becomes jealous of Kirk's attention to her. Miri returns to the Onlies and helps them develop a plan to capture Rand, thereby luring Kirk to them.

Meanwhile, McCoy has discovered the organism responsible, and succeeds in isolating a substance that might be the vaccine. But without the ship's computer, it is impossible to be certain – or to know the dosage.

The Onlies, led by Jahn
The Onlies, led by Jahn

Kirk persuades Miri to help him, by revealing the secret the landing party had kept: that she, and all the children, would get the disease, and that the youngest would starve long before that. She takes him to Jahn, the next oldest child, who leads the Onlies. After a scuffle, Kirk makes the children realize they're doing what the grups did – hurting others.

Returning with the communicators, Kirk finds Spock and a security man at McCoy's side. The doctor, in a move of desperation, has injected himself with the vaccine. He is unconscious, perhaps dying... and then the blemishes begin to fade. The vaccine is a success.

The Enterprise departs, leaving a medical team in charge of the children, who will soon receive the care they need.

[edit] Log Entries

  • "Captain's log, stardate 2713.5. In the distant reaches of our galaxy, we have made an astonishing discovery: Earth-type radio signals coming from a planet which apparently is an exact duplicate of the Earth. It seems impossible, but there it is."
  • "Captain's log, stardate 2713.6. The building Miri led us to also housed an automatic transmission station, which sent out the signal that drew us to this planet. We also discovered something else: that the blues splotches, characteristic of the unknown disease, had appeared on each of us, with the exception of Mr. Spock. There was a well equipped laboratory in the building. Dr. McCoy took tissue samples of each of us, in an attempt to isolate the organism responsible."
  • "Captain's log. Dr. McCoy's biocomputer and a portable electronic microscope have been beamed down from the Enterprise. They will be used in conjunction with computer banks on board ship."
  • "Captain's log, supplement. It's the second day of the seven left to us. We've found nothing. Enterprise is standing by with its labs, computers, ready to assist us. There's no data, no stopping point."
  • "Captain's log, stardate 2717.3. Three days, seven hours left to us. Investigation proves that the supply of food left in the area is running dangerously low. Unless something is done, the children will starve in a few months. In addition, the disease is working on each of us according to Dr McCoy's prediction. Our tempers are growing short, and we're no further along than we were two days ago."

[edit] Memorable Quotes

"Bonk! Bonk! On the head!"

- Children


"No blah, blah, blah!!!"

- Kirk


"Nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah!"

- Children


"Is this the vaccine?"
"That's what the computers will tell us..."
"Without them... it could be a beaker full of death..."

- Kirk, McCoy, and Mr. Spock


"No, I don't feel all right! None of us feel all right! Can't you see what's happening to us?!"

- Kirk, to Miri, trying to explain the grave situation in which everyone on the planet finds themselves


"Measuring the planet now, Captain... Spheroid shape. Circumference, 24,874 miles. Mass, 6x1021 power tons. Mean density, 5.517. Atmosphere, oxygen-nitrogen..."
"Earth..."
"Not the Earth. Another Earth. Another Earth..."

- Mr. Spock, Yeoman Rand, and Kirk


"I am a carrier. Whatever happens, I can't go back to the ship...and I do want to go back to the ship, Captain."

- Mr. Spock


"Have you found a thing yet?!"
"Would you like to take a crack at it?!"

- Kirk and Dr. McCoy


"You'll have to isolate the virus. Then you two can make a vaccine."
"Is that all, Captain? We have five days, you know."

- Kirk (to Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock) and Dr. McCoy


"Back on the ship I used try to get you to look at my legs... Captain! Look at my legs!"

- Yeoman Rand, to Kirk


"LOOK AT MY ARMS! That's what's going to happen to you...unless you let me help you!"

- Kirk, tearing his uniform sleeves off to show the children the extent of the disease


"Is he dead, Mr. Spock?"
"Not yet."

- Galloway and Mr. Spock, after finding the unconscious Doctor McCoy


"Miri... she really loved you, you know."
"I never get involved with older women, Yeoman."

- Yeoman Rand and Kirk

[edit] Background Information

[edit] Cast

  • John Arndt (Fields) was a regular extra; he also played unnamed crewmen in "Dagger of the Mind" and "Space Seed" and Sturgeon in "The Man Trap". When Arndt appeared in "Balance of Terror", his character was named Fields.
  • Jim Goodwin's character, Lt. John Farrell, was referred to as a "communications man" by Harry Mudd, and Magda learned how to contact the miners on Rigel XII from him. After being a navigator in "Mudd's Women" and "The Enemy Within", Farrell is at the communications section in this episode, his final appearance in the series, although he still wears the gold command shirt.
  • Melanie and Lisabeth Shatner are the daughters of William Shatner and Gloria Rand.
  • Steven McEveety is the son of director Vincent McEveety.
  • Jon and Scott Dweck are Grace Lee Whitney's sons. As an adult, Scott Dweck played a Vulcan medic (extra) in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
  • Darleen and Dawn Roddenberry are the daughters of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
  • Phil Morris, son of Mission: Impossible star Greg Morris, would later appear in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.
  • Keith Taylor replaced Rusty Stevens on Leave it to Beaver as Beaver's new plump friend, Harry.
  • James Doohan (Scotty), George Takei (Sulu) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) do not appear in this episode.
  • It was on the Friday night end-of-the-week party after filming this episode that Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) was sexually assaulted by a member of the show whom she identifies only as "The Executive" in her autobiography The Longest Trek. She was fired soon after and her descent into a very messy life began, which she eventually recovered from and became a Jewish Christian.
  • The security guards simply disappear during the middle of the episode. David Ross reappears after McCoy tests the vaccine. John Arndt can be seen in the background in the final planet scene. Probably to save make-up costs, neither one of the guards has any blotches from the disease.

[edit] Story

  • The hook - a planet that is not only Earthlike, but also an exact copy of Earth - never really figures into the plot. (Compare Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development.) Presumably, an Earth duplicate was used in this episode simply because it would have been prohibitively expensive to create an entirely alien culture. Nonetheless, this plot point has led to speculation, mostly in the form of fan fiction, about how this planet came to be. This is also discussed in William Shatner's book Preserver.
  • Two significant plot points – the discovery of the radio station that sent out the automatic SOS and the discovery that the children will soon run out of food – are mentioned in voice-over log entries but not depicted. Presumably this was due to time and cost restraints.
  • In his first volume of Star Trek episode adaptations, James Blish supplies a backstory that is vastly superior to that of the "identical Earth" premise depicted in the television episode. Blish wrote that Miri's planet is the fourth planet orbiting the star 70 Ophiucus, and is a beautiful Earth-like planet having one large and two smaller continents connected by islands. Ophiucus IV (or Ophiucus 4 – Blish never names the planet) is located between twelve and fifteen light years from Earth and had been the first planet outside Earth’s solar system to be colonized, in this case by refugees from the so-called "Cold Peace" in the early 2100s, about 500 years before the events depicted in the television episode. These colonists were isolationists who violently repulsed the first attempt to contact them by a later expedition from Earth, and so no further contact was attempted. As it turned out, the Ophiucus system was in a "backwater" part of the galaxy that subsequent years of Earth-based space exploration passed by, and so the belligerent colony was easily ignored and almost forgotten. Around 300 years before the events shown in Miri, scientists on Ophiucus IV developed the experimental life-prolongation project that resulted in the deaths of every adult on the planet. Yet despite their close proximity, the distress signal sent by the colony didn’t reach Earth because Ophiucus IV stood between Earth and the center of the Milky Way, whose radiation created interstellar static that drowned out the SOS signal the colony had directed towards Earth.

[edit] Sets and Props

  • If not the first, this is one of the first episodes to feature outdoor shooting.
  • The planet-side exterior sets are the exteriors from The Andy Griffith Show, redressed.
  • This is the first appearance of McCoy's portable biocomp, which he will use later in "The Omega Glory". Yeoman Rand uses a piece of equipment that is possibly the portable electron microscope requested from the ship. This can be seen in later episodes, as well – in fact, it strongly resembles the device Scotty uses when he is controlling the view screen playback in "The Menagerie, Part I".
  • The alley in which Spock and the guards have debris dropped on them is seen again in "The City on the Edge of Forever", when Kirk and Spock are accosted by the policeman.
  • Kim Darby was much older than thirteen or so when she played this role (she was 19), which was probably why she wore such baggy clothes.
  • DeForest Kelley displays a feeling of sad reverence as he gently handles the abandoned tricycle on the planet.

[edit] Effects

  • The signal coming from the planet can be heard in The Outer Limits episode, "The Man Who Was Never Born".
  • The Earth sphere model from this episode is reused later in "Shore Leave" (painted green and printed backwards) and "Arena" (painted a hazy orange). Stock footage from this episode of the Enterprise orbiting "Earth" is reused in "Assignment: Earth".
  • The planet has the exact same geographical configuration of its continents as modern Earth, only without any clouds.
  • This is not only the shortest episode title in the original series, but it is also the only title that is rendered on screen in italics. However, the end credits are not in italics, and the font style seen there was never used again.

[edit] Production Timeline

[edit] Remastered Information

Miri's Earth gets a CG face lift

North America on screen

The Enterprise leaves orbit

The remastered version of "Miri" was first aired in many North American markets as a "bonus" episode during the weekend of 16 September 2006, alongside "Balance of Terror". These were the first episodes to be "remastered" by CBS Digital and featured a flawed CG-model of the Enterprise that was eventually replaced. [1] The episode is notable for the replacement the original, highly unrealistic shots of Miri's homeworld with brand-new computer-generated versions. The episode was rerun (finally airing in some markets for the first time) on the weekend of 23 June 2007. [2]

[edit] Video and DVD releases

This release included "The Empath" and was unrated, dating its release to prior to the Video Recordings Act 1984.

[edit] Links and References

[edit] Starring

[edit] Guest Stars

[edit] Featuring

[edit] Uncredited Co-Stars

[edit] Stunts

[edit] References

1960s; Bartlett Stable; Biggs' Toys; biocomputer; distress signal; foolie; grup; Life Prolongation Project; microscope; Miri's planet; nitrogen; onlies; oxygen; Palmerton Cafe; Rusk Hotel; vaccine; virus

[edit] External link


Previous episode produced:
"Dagger of the Mind" 		Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 1 		Next episode produced:
"The Conscience of the King"
Previous episode aired:
"What Are Little Girls Made Of?" 		Next episode aired:
"Dagger of the Mind"
Previous remastered episode aired:
"Balance of Terror" 		TOS Remastered Next remastered episode aired:
"The Devil in the Dark"
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