Star Trek, TOS: Miri

[eleanorigby]

Ok, so we all got distracted and didn't keep this going. I am here to correct that (at least for this week). I believe Miri is next (I am going by the CBS site; I have no idea if this was filmed next or aired next). This is an interesting episode--a planet of children. Puberty is a death sentence.

Miri crushes on Kirk and is jealous of Rand. An unsightly acne like growth sprouts on the skin of "grups" and the virus responsible kills adults. It's a weird world the landing party enters: 1920s cars, 1960s tricycles, no obvious food source, kids dressed all by guess (that at least is likely). The kids (and may I digress here and say that the casting director rounded up some of the ugliest children in Hollywood? Miri is quite pretty, though) all seem to be developmentally delayed in some sense. I confess to muting the show when they start on their chanting.

Then again, I suppose this Lord of the Flies type place would encourage chanting. I really hate the kid with the hammer.

I feel this episode is somewhat muddled--this is supposed to be "another Earth"--it matches all the characteristics of our Earth, and yet there is very little in the way of social commentary. Kirk does refer to "you have become your enemy" when he is trying to convince the kids to return the crew's communicators, but really, it's mostly a race against time and a love triangle (with Kirk in the middle, of course).

and one last thing:

[JamesT]<assumes anguished expression> "I'm a grup and I'm here to help!" [/JamesT]

[Zuul]

Yeah, I was always puzzled by the lack of social commentary in this episode as well. Why set up a world that's an exact copy of Earth and then fail to make any observations about life on Earth? Apparently, though, the backstory behind the episode was changed:

In his first volume of Star Trek episode adaptations, James Blish supplies a backstory that is vastly different 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.

From here.

[eleanorigby]

I didn't know Shatner's kids were in it! Ok, I take back "the ugliest kids" remark, but some of them ARE remarkably unattractive, including the older boy (the leader). Something about him makes me want to smash his face in. And he is past puberty, IMO.

But Miri's casting was excellent--and well done by the actress.

[Zuul]

Miri was handled well, which is good considering she was the title character of the episode. Between her behavior and the comment by Rand at the end about her having truly been in love with Kirk, I wonder if we were supposed to assume there was some sort of greater maturity or awareness in the kids than was shown, due to their lengthy lifespans.

If that's the case, I don't think they handled it very well. They were portrayed as incredibly immature. In that linked page there are some quotes from Shatner's daughter about how at the time she was embarrassed at how childish the costume she had to wear was and how she felt it was way too immature.

So was making the children so incredibly immature a deliberate choice and in that case did it have a meaning within the context of the episode, or was that simply a failure on the part of the writers?

[eleanorigby]

I think for some of those kids, it was a case of "delayed dev" or maybe they were just morons. I THINK the writers wanted to show feral children. IMO, they should have used The Artful Dodger as a model, not the Brady Bunch with group lobotomies. And then I thought that maybe the writers wanted Miri to stand out as special. Well, she sure did. She's the only one who seems human, and how did she achieve that, surrounded by emotionally and intellectually stunted people?


I must say that the costume designers on ST:TOS must have been dropping acid hourly, given what they came up with. I realize their budget was small, but honestly, I could have done better in a thrift store!

[dread pirate jimbo]

I think the immaturity displayed by the children is supposed to indicate that without proper teaching and training from adults (sorry, I mean grups), children would all just be a bunch of feral little savages with no education and no higher reasoning skills -- this is perhaps the social commentary of the episode, if there is any. From my observations of children of bad parents, I'm not sure the writers were all that far off. But I digress...

This episode has its moments, particularly moments where the crew interact, as is often the case. The arguments between Spock and McCoy are particularly heated at times and we get to see McCoy once again at his best -- identifying and fixing scary space diseases.

Kirk, as always, is very pretty.

[Zuul]

Oh, yes. McCoy really was at his best in this episode. He has some great lines and his frustration is just about palpable when he's asked about his progress.

[pepperlandgirl]

Miri was handled well, which is good considering she was the title character of the episode. Between her behavior and the comment by Rand at the end about her having truly been in love with Kirk, I wonder if we were supposed to assume there was some sort of greater maturity or awareness in the kids than was shown, due to their lengthy lifespans.

If that's the case, I don't think they handled it very well. They were portrayed as incredibly immature. In that linked page there are some quotes from Shatner's daughter about how at the time she was embarrassed at how childish the costume she had to wear was and how she felt it was way too immature.

So was making the children so incredibly immature a deliberate choice and in that case did it have a meaning within the context of the episode, or was that simply a failure on the part of the writers?

My reading of the episode was that the children behaved that way because it was a game. In other words, they forced themselves to act like they were still children even though they were maturing faster than their bodies were. Like they were pointedly rejecting everything it meant to be a "grup".

I really love this episode. I love Spock and McCoy working together to solve the problem. I love the way it mirrors Charlie X in a way. Except this time it was a coming-of-age story about the all-too-painful first love/crush. I love the line "NO BLAH BLAH BLAH" and how scary the children were. I might have some more intelligent thoughts later. I need to re-watch it.

[eleanorigby]

And man, is he pretty in this one...