Kirk struggling through the skin reaction and madness of the rapid-aging disease of "Miri"The Enterprise responds to an earth-like distress signal only to discover what appears to be an earth duplicate over 100 light years from actual earth. Yeoman Janis, Spock, McCoy, Kirk and the standard expendable security personnel beam down to the surface only to discover what looks like earth in the mid-1900's. According to Spock's readings the environment has been deteriorating for a few hundred years (since the area would have been newly intact). Looking at an abandoned tricycle, McCoy is suddenly attacked by a worn, and imbecilic adult-sized humanoid that is emotional over the broken tricycle, and suffering from some strange form of seizure. The man quickly becomes so upset he simply dies. During a tricorder examination by McCoy we discover that metabolically its as if the man aged a century with a couple of minutes. Suddenly hearing strange noises, the crew chases down what turns out to be a teenage looking girl afraid of being hurt. While Janis, McCoy, and Kirk stay with the girl, whose name turns out to be Miri, Spock and the security detail go outside to look for any further signs of life. The girl tells the crew about Grubs that do bad thing. We realize that she means grownups, and her fear of the crew is because they are grownups too. It turns out the grownups all became ill and died, leaving only the children alive on the planet. During Spock's search we discover other children that are in the area and working together to taunt (and attack) the newly appeared grownups. Quickly, all of the crew except Spock become infected with blue splotches that Miri explains are characteristic of the disease that killed all the Grubs. Miri takes the crew to the hospital where McCoy examines tissue samples from the crew, while Kirk and Spock read files found in the hospital. The files reveal that the adults of the planet had been in the midst of a life prolongation project three hundred years previously, before they all died. The mystery, then, becomes how there could continue to be children on the planet when they die immediately upon entering early adulthood.
Episode Tidbits
Miri has apparently lived a life devoid of adult input, and yet she is clearly drawn to staying with the adult crew members of the Enterprise. Janis asks, if Miri has lived her whole life as a wild animal, why would she now be so willing to stay with the adults now. Kirk responds that he believes children instinctively need adult interaction so that they can receive input of what is right and wrong. Spock supposes, however, that it is more than mere childhood need that guides Miri, but instead also her romantic-sexual needs that are developing due to her entering puberty.
This episode considers a different version of the Peter Pan fantasy--what would it be like to stay young forever, or at least hundreds of years? Roddenberry has shown his interest with these early Star Trek episodes to be to explore either a fantasy or fear common to the American imagination of the time, and to use that exploration to expose both the limits and the lessons of that fear or fantasy. In this episode, we discover the horror of the Peter Pan fantasy--children forever are not fully fledged people.
This episode also asks us to consider the dangers of technology without adequate knowledge of its effects. It reminds us that if we do not know what we are doing the technology we use to modify and improve our lives may be the very thing that undoes it. "Miri" cautions us to take care in trying to search for the fountain of youth--such a search would leave us inadequate humans, if we succeed, and could be what kills us when we don't.
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