Miri

I didn’t remember this episode being anywhere near as icky as it is.

A planet turns up that looks amazingly like Earth. However, all the cities are deserted. Or at least so it appears. The team that beams down soon discovers that the empty buildings are actually inhabited by a tribe of feral children (some of whom were played by the kids of regular cast members).

One of the kids, an adolescent girl named Miri, falls in with the “grups” (the kids’ slang name for grown-ups like the Enterprise crew). Her cooperation is clearly motivated by the crush she has on Kirk. And here’s the icky part: Kirk indulges her, openly exploiting her affection while basking in the attention she pays to him. You’re too classy, Captain Humbert. The last time I watched it I was the age of the “Onlies” (the name the kids use for themselves), and I didn’t notice the inappropriate “romance” element as much. But recent re-watch just gave me the creeps.

From Miri and records left behind by the grups, our heroes figure out that the adults were working on a virus that would halt the aging process when the project backfired on them and killed everyone on the planet who’d gone through puberty. Sadly for the landing party, the virus is still around. Everyone but Spock is swiftly infected, developing tempera-paint-looking sores on their arms, legs and faces.

As tempers flare and McCoy struggles to find a cure, the Onlies – led by their eldest, an obnoxious teenager named Jahn (Michael J. Pollard) – go on the offensive. First they steal the team’s communicators so the grups can’t make use of the Enterprise’s computers. Then Miri stumbles upon a tender moment between Kirk and Yeoman Rand. Feeling jilted, she returns to her compatriots and persuades them to kidnap the yeoman. This leads to a showdown between Kirk and the kids. He tries to reason with them. “Bonk bonk on the head!” they chant in reply.

Eventually the captain settles the hash of the wild brats, and McCoy – by testing a serum on himself – finds a cure for the virus. Hooray.

Even setting the child molester motif aside, a few things bothered me about this episode. First, like “The Omega Glory,” the time frame is somewhat off. The kids’ life cycles have supposedly been unnaturally prolonged, perhaps by decades. But they’re only just now running out of canned goods left over from when someone was old enough to know how to can things. Second, I thought the planet-that-looks-just-like-Earth element strained the limits of credulity and contributed nothing to the plot. This could have taken place on a planet that looked nothing like Earth and still been just as good. So it has an "alternate reality" set-up but a "message piece" follow-up.

Speaking of which, the worst part was an element that would mar other episodes as well: the whole hippies-versus-squares thing. It’s hard not to see the Lost Boys “Onlies” as youth counter-culture, particularly because Jahn wears a ratty, over-decorated Army jacket just like the ones popular with hippies. That casts the whole drama as establishment America knowing what’s best for their stupid, unruly children. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the whole hippie thing, but I think it deserved more respect than this.

Episode rating:

Stardate: 2713.5

Episode type: Message piece

Written by: Adrian Spies

Original air date: October 27, 1966

What Are Little Girls Made Of? / Dagger of the Mind

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