The most striking thing about ‘Miri’ is the moment you realise — possibly in the pre-titles sequence — that they’re actually going to do something a little bit different this week. No strangers impersonating members of the crew. No humans becoming super powerful! It’s a brave new world!

Oh, alright, the crew does start acting irrationally later, but it’s not particularly important. More disappointingly, the interesting “we’ve found a copy of Earth” angle isn’t particularly developed. In fact, it isn’t so much as referred to ever again. This is a planet which has exactly the same continents as Earth, and yet no one seems particularly interested in how it came to exist.¹ For people on a mission to seek out new life and civilisations, they’re surprisingly lacking in curiosity. I bet if they invented a time machine, they’d just store it away in the hold and never use it. Ahem.

The real story this week isn’t about parallel Earths, but instead about pandemics and kids growing up. Earthesque, for want of a better word, is a planet devastated by a crazy virus that has left only children alive in its wake. Miri is one of those kids, and she’s about to get the disease — as are Kirk and his team. Will they die before they find a cure? Will Yeoman Rand explain why she’s on the away party? Will the adults be able to cross the generation gap and communicate with a bunch of ratbag kids?

Disturbingly in a story filled with youngsters, it’s becoming apparent that Kirk’s flirtatiousness is getting out of hand. This week, he starts hitting outrageously on a 16 year old. He doesn’t even seem to realise he’s doing it any more. Luckily for him, Miri turns out to be 300 years old and thus totally legal. This sparks a love triangle between Kirk, Miri, and perpetual victim Janice Rand, during which Rand tearfully talks about how she keeps trying to get Kirk to look at her legs, and Miri tries to get her friends to kill the Captain. It’s all very entertaining.

Finally, let’s run down the checklist. Kirk’s shirt does get torn this week, but in a new and exciting way as he rips open his sleeves. The Enterprise crew continue to be varying degrees of incompetent; the usually logical Spock this week displays tremendous negligence, leaving the irrational McCoy alone in a room with a potentially fatal concoction — a concoction which McCoy has just told Spock he wants to try. You’d think the much-vaunted Vulcan logic might have helped him predict what would happen next. Bad Spock. Most disappointingly, a man dies in front of McCoy and Kirk, the doctor examines him, and simply reports: “Dead”. The victim is male. McCoy is talking to Jim. And yet: “Dead”. If I were playing a drinking game, I’d feel cheated.

1. Well, no one except the writers of spin-off novels, including Shatner himself, according to Memory Alpha. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Sunday, August 16th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as Star Trek, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.