Duplicate Earth in Miri

Was there every going to be more to this duplicate earth than what we got in the episode? I know stories go through numerous changes and edits and sometimes elements are left over from earlier drafts so as I was reading the WTF thread I thought did the writers ever mean for there be more to having an exact duplicate of earth?

 

Evidently not. There's nothing more about it in the final draft script:

http://www.fastcopyinc.com/orionpress/articles/miri.htm

And the Star Trek Compendium's discussion of the first draft doesn't mention anything about the "other Earth" aspect. I think it was just a throwaway element inserted for two reasons: a) to provide an effective teaser to grab the audience, and b) to justify the use of location shooting at the Culver City backlot to stand in for an "alien" planet (which is a whole lot more affordable than building a ruined alien city would've been).

This was the '60s, after all, and when it came to stories about space in the mass media, there was a sense that anything was possible, yet at the same time mass audiences and TV writers didn't have much experience with the full range of SF imagination you'd find in literature. So sometimes you got stories where people went to an alien world and found it was just like home... except everyone was 70 feet tall! Or except they were all telepaths! Or except most of them were left-handed! Audiences back then would've accepted it.

I've always had the impression that Adrian Spies was feeling toward a parallel-timeline sort of story. Miri's Earth collapsed at a 20th-century level 300 years before the episode, and it's pretty much what Earth itself would be if it had fallen prey to the same kind of experiment-gone-wrong. But such ideas weren't yet clearly delineated in the mind of the SFTV viewer or television writer of the era, so instead of presenting an actual method for crossing timelines, Spies just went with a more brute-force kind of "alternate Earth," one that a spaceship could just stumble across.

 

For the record, I'm a left-hander, and not an alien!

I do wonder if the idea was that this world WAS an 'alternate Earth' in a Twilight Zone sense, without really thinking about the implications of it just sitting there WITHOUT being in an 'alternate reality' of any sort...

 

The Twilight Zone analogy is probably a pretty good one.

 

Actually, I recently watched the very immaculate collector's set of Twilight Zone's first season, and an awful lot of the writing used in TOS's first batches made a lot more sense when viewed from that light. Not a bad way to go, dramatically, but it makes for some messy science-fiction at times. (Miri, as a good example.)

 

Writers were encouraged early on to think in terms of anthology-style stories, ala "Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits" and to use the flexibility of the Trek format to work them into the continuity of the series regulars. "Miri" is just one of the stranger examples of it.

 

What are the popular theories of Miri's earth & the one with the Comms & Yanks?

One thought: A civil war with the Q, where there literally tossed around worlds, and brought some to the Trek galaxy.

Perhpas Starfleet has some knowledge of it, but will only share it with Captains if they find an alternate earth (like the Enterprise did).


Here's a question -- are there alternate Vulcans? Or Romulus? Or ...?

 

The original draft of "Omega Glory" mentioned that the planet was likely a human colony dating from the early space exploration years. Sadly, the timeline involved would be insanely off for the other points mentioned. (This really would have solidified the episode in a lot of ways if more hints had been thrown in as you went, rather than an absurdly bad final act.)

"Miri" is nearly impossible to explain, short of Magrathea. Even if you cite the Preservers (which is often used to explain TOS's worlds), you still don't get an identical Earth out of it. Any theories start requiring 'three degrees of fandom' which generally equates to crap writing.

Spock mentions that Vulcan itself may be a seeded world, meaning that it may ALREADY be an 'alternate' in the sense of Trek's 'parallel developments'. Romulus certainly is, of course, since it's a colony of Vulcan. TNG shows a couple of more Vulcan colonies as well.

Straight up Miri-like clones? Never shown, but there's no more reason to assume that there isn't than there is reason to assume there is.

 

Maybe the planet escaped from a parallel universe so their Earth is now missing. Then there's also that Roman Empire Earth.

 

In one of the Shatnerverse novels, someone lists off the precise duplicates of major planets that have been found. Something like ten Earths, six Vulcans, three Andors, four Quo'nos's, and so on. The information was classified because, really, that sort of thing would be intensely disturbing to find out on all sorts of levels. IIRC, it was theorized they were all controls for large-scale experiments on the development of civilization, so the force that set them up could do apples-to-apples comparisons. I think it was also suggested that the Mirror Universe might've been a similar large-scale sociological experiment.

Incidentally, this reminds me of one of my favorite gags from Five Minute Enterprise, from the Cowboy Planet episode:

Archer: This is just weird. What's the Wild Wild West doing in the Expanse?
T'Pol: One Earth scientist has proposed that independent planets sometimes evolve on parallel courses.
Archer: That Hodgkin quack? No way.
T'Pol: Then perhaps the inhabitants patterned their civilization on a Western novel left here centuries ago.
Archer: (sigh) Go investigate the alien settlement with Trip. If you won't be serious, there's no point in talking.

 

You could much easier explain Roman Earth as a colony (particularly when you remember the Apollo episode) that split off eons ago. The only thing that wouldn't make sense THERE is the Roman use of colloquial English. Something that the audience could have ignored if they hadn't made such an effort to point it out.

As for Miri's planet, again, the 'escaped from a parallel universe' runs into the 'three degrees of fandom' issue again. Granted, nearly any explanation is going to do that...

 

My way of dealing with "Miri": The Revisionist Deconstruction of Apocrypha, or to put it another way, no, the planet in question wasn't really identical to Earth, down to the continental configuration. Rather, it was a Class-M world with conditions within fractions of a percent to Earth.

I know, I know, once you start down this road, foreve will it dominate...sorry, wrong universe. I recognize the slippery-slope here. But, do you want to be faithful or do you want it all to make sense?

 

In regards to the TNG thing... the only other Vulcanoid race we saw other than the Vulcans and Romulans, was the Mintakans, and they were not a "colony" of Vulcans, but a separate Vulcanoid species.

That was actually what I liked best about that whole episode... that it showed us that even a non-human humanoid could be repeated through the galaxy, and everyone didn't have to look just like humans. There could be more than one or two species that look just like Vulcans as well. Pity we never saw any Klingonoids or Ferenginoids, hehe.

 

Actually, we did get some Klingonoids in the form of Talarians in TNG's "Suddenly Human". They had leather like uniforms kinda like Klingons, and a lite version of head ridges. And of course, they were a warrior race.

As for Feregnoids, there was a bizarro version..."We look for things...to make us go..."

 

Yeah, that duplicate Earth thing was a bit of a WTF moment, wasn't it? I did assume they were going somewhere with it, but evidently not. I love the fact that, even though it made absolutely no sense whatsoever, it is nonetheless canon and when we watch DS9 or Voyager we have to remember that somewhere out there is a planet that looks exactly the same as Earth.

 

Lots of terraforming by the Preservers or their equals?

 

They were going for a way to save money.

 

The Dopterians are identified as being related to the Ferengi, even sharing a similar brain structure.

 

Not really, since 'Earth-like cultures' were already analyzed in Star Trek even this early on. What would the 'save money' really accomplish? Stock shot of the planet (they already had lots of those)? Dialog references in the teaser that are completely dropped afterwards?

 

Using "Mayberry" and existing props and costumes. Which was one of Roddenberry's selling points to the suits. I assume the episode was written with that in mind.