I just solved a problem in "Miri." You remember the situation: kids stole the communicators, and that's the ballgame for McCoy, because he was tethering on his communicator's data plan to get his desktop computer online with the Enterprise, his cloud computing provider. Now he's got no phone. (But Star Trek had mad skills at predicting the future.) So what happens if Miri clams up, won't talk without her lawyer present? [Hint: It's the kid who also serves as the teacher and the policeman. Now he's got three jobs. Bonk-bonk!] Solution 1: The security guards are equipped with Phaser 2, which is far more powerful than Phaser 1. They can use Phaser 2 as signal lamp to Morse the ship up there, just as the laser beacon was used in "The Squire of Gothos." The Enterprise will be holding station overhead in such a desperate crisis, not blithely traveling around the far side of the planet, because they might be needed quickly. The phaser light would be strong enough to get Sulu's attention, but nowhere near enough to damage the ship at that range. Just flashlight the ship to beam down another communicator. Solution 2: Go into one of the abandoned houses and grab the biggest mirror you can find. Use it as a heliograph, which is a tilt-and-flash sun signalling device. The Enterprise will see that in a hurry. Solution 3: Maybe Spock's tricorder could be used as a signalling device. I saw a movie once (a little help here?) where an airline pilot had a hijacker in the cockpit, so he used his IDENT button on the dashboard to secretly Morse the Air Traffic Control tower. I'll bet the tricorder can do that. Solution 4: The planet attracted us in the first place with a radio station sending SOS. And we beamed down to the transmitter's location. So let's see if we can use it to signal the ship. This is a last resort, because you're fussing with rickety old (and foreign) equipment, and the ship has probably stopped listening on that frequency because the signal was so simple and just repeating. But it's a chance. Conclusion: if Miri hadn't cracked under questioning, there were still plenty of ways to contact the ship. Kirk, Spock, and the guards all should have had the Phaser 2 idea instantly, if nothing else. Tactical thinking!
Or when the ship couldn't raise them at the allotted check in, they could have scanned for the crew and beamed down another communicator. They know their last known location, there aren't exactly a lot of other life forms on the planet, they should be able to pinpoint the current location of the other communicators, and it should be obvious that the crew and communicators are not in the same place. This isn't Scotty's first rodeo. Or caber toss. Or whatever.
No Scotty in this one, he was on vacay. Farrell seemed too anxious to form a coherent thought, so the landing party was screwed.
That works, except I don't think they had any spare hours to wait for a check in time to come and go. McCoy needed every minute he could get on the ship's computer to find a cure for the disease.
Hmm, a quick check of the ep shows that Spock (and the computers) estimated the landing party had 170 hrs or about 7 days. The ep is explicit that the communicators were taken on the second day of the seven and the there were only a few hours of the seven remaining when the communicators were recovered. Which means the Enterprise sat up there for five days with no comms. Never realized that before.
Yeah, 5 days of no comms or any apparent successful attempts to communicate I also thought it was a bad choice to have all the communicators in the lab. Two should have been with the ones not in the lab to stay in touch with each other (Rand's and Galloway's).
That's true. We all laugh when that potential murder victim leaves their phone on. But in the particular facts of this case, it doesn't really track that well. The population of the planet is small and the communicators have all been moved to a location that's different to the away team and there's been no new communication since then. I think Sulu and Scotty are canny enough to have worked that out by day 3. Trek suffers plausibility issues because they skip the part where they send down a MALP to scout the situation.
All sci-fi is bound by the time in which it was written. Granted, some writers seem to be unusually prescient. But does that mean they foresaw the Internet (and all that implies), or that we can look at a story in retrospect and see things that even the author had not? In Heinlein's Starman Jones (1953) he had human mathematicians working with a binary display computer to do the delicate astrogation of hyperspace jumps. Yet only a little over a decade later (1966) Heinlein had a self-aware computer reifying the spirit of a political revolution in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. In both cases, it was the needs of the author and the story that drove such factors, and not real-world engineering of the time. Zap suggested a number of plausible ways to "solve" the problem set by the story. In retrospect, and with some knowledge of modern sensing devices and drones, etc, it is hard for us to imagine the problem described by "Miri." (The biggest gap in TOS is the lack of "robots," which we take for granted today. They are not humanoid—dishwashers don't have to be—but even the talking 'bots are a long way from self-awareness.) Still, even a story written within the zeitgeist of the times can have its gaps—like the 5 days without comms pointed out by BK613.
We also have a super early episode, "The Man Trap" where if given a reason the Enterprise should be able to track every single person on the planet below within a 100 mile circle of the lab and react if something should happen. So the technology was there but the writing chose to ignore it or perhaps it was cut out due to time or budget...
Fives days, huh? Aah, poor redshirts. Guess who drew foraging, cooking, scullery and latrine duties... That would be some foolie but do you think it would work?
Yes this is very much the problem with magical technology. In Picard season 3, you have the crew scrambling to install transporter inhibitors on the bridge and I was thinking, this technology has been around for 200 years, why don't they have transporter inhibitors fitted all over the ship as standard? Surely the only point in having a transporter room is as a choke point? After the first thousand times the cloaked Romulan vessels beamed your bridge crew out into space while you were napping, or the second thousand times the Klingons beamed over a boarding party as soon as there was a gap in your shields, or the third thousand times the Cardassians beamed over a warhead, surely somebody would have thought, yeah, we have a serious gap in our security here, guys. Even sillier, none of the enemies have thought that this is a good idea either. Nero was chillaxing with his shields down on approach to Earth and had no way to prevent enemies from beaming onto his ship. For a paranoid species, he sure was naive.
Agreed. One notable difference between TOS and the other series is that shields automatically came up in TOS on approach of ships so you couldn't start the fight with a sneak transporter or weapon attack. Watching "Miri" again it seemed also interesting that Spock scanned the planet but didn't mention anything about the number of people were on the planet or their locations.
My idea of solving “Miri” would start with ditching the identical Earth idea and simply make the planet very similar to Earth, but obviously looking different. Then simply make it a long lost colony that cut itself off from Earth. Indeed this is pretty much what James Blish did in his adaptation of the episode. From a tech point of view Kirk had issued standing orders no one was else to beam for any reason until further notification. The Enterprise could certainly detect their life signs from orbit so as long as individual signs didn’t start decreasing in number of them detected. If all remains stable thethought is everything is still okay. But the beacon idea is decent one, just not thought of until “The Squire Of Gothos.”
A pretty grim aspect of "Miri" is that Kirk orders no one to beam down even if the landing party is too ill to respond to avoid further contamination and to just standby and help with communicating computer variables. So for 5+ days the Enterprise crew must've assumed that the landing party's lack of communications meant that they were too ill to respond and had turned into the creatures and were going to die from the disease. I wonder how long they would've stayed in orbit to observe or confirm the landing party deaths before leaving...