The Great Chronological Run-Through

[Deranged Nasat]

"Miri" has its appeal, for certain. I just happen to find it ultimately awkward, and in my mind it's actually worse than a lot of underperforming episodes because there's so much done right, but it can't hold together. The tone and the atmosphere are generally effective and the character work is interesting, but I'm never able to fully buy the backdrop of the plot and so I can't shake the sense that this is all artificial. It's like it's a holodeck program. Everything's in place and quite effectively drawn, and the people are playing their roles well, but I'm not convinced. I don't know if that really makes sense, but there we are.

"Miri"

There's not much to discuss here in terms of the evolving setting, which is itself part of the episode's problem, since the existence of a parallel Earth is something that one would think raises a number of important questions, the answers to which should tell us a lot about how this universe functions. More than this, the atmosphere of desolation and waste is rather effective, and the fact that none of the tragic or disturbing backstory is really explained or placed in any context is frustrating.

I do quite like Miri herself; she's an engaging character and very well portrayed. Jahn too is quite good, particularly since in his case I can actually buy that he's 300 years old, that he's had all those decades of experience and deprivation straining against a physical vessel that isn't built for it, since he has a child's physiology and neurology. Also, the childrens' little ritual society and Kirk's efforts to make his case are genuinely interesting and, I think, effective. There's a lot to like here, but I just can't place it in any worthy context. Why did this have to be - inexplicably - Earth, when later episodes will just go with non-humans that exactly resemble humans? I suppose they realized the error here. This could, and should, be an alien world, surely? If the point of making it a second Earth was to make the desolation more poignant or affecting, that doesn't really work when there's no explanation of what's going on or why.

Continuity

Forgotten History will explain a lot of this; the Earth duplicate is in fact "our" Earth, displaced from another timeline into the Prime universe via random space-time anomaly. We'll visit the Miri-verse in that novel, where the most notable impact on local interstellar history is the absence of Archer to help rediscover the Kir'Shara, meaning that Vulcan remains a military superpower (and is occupying Andor, fending off attacks from rebel factions aligned with the Klingons).

 

[Stevil2001]

I don't think you'll be reading it, but I remember really enjoying the novel sequel to this episode, The Cry of the Onlies.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I don't think you'll be reading it, but I remember really enjoying the novel sequel to this episode, The Cry of the Onlies.

I must admit to knowing absolutely nothing about that. How does its depiction of the planet differ from Forgotten History?

 

[Christopher]

"Miri" is one of my least favorite episodes. It's just plain bad writing to introduce the mystery of a duplicate Earth and then just ignore it for the rest of the episode. The whole thing was just a lame excuse to justify using the backlot for an alien planet (something they didn't even bother to justify in later episodes like "The Return of the Archons," where the aliens somehow have 12-hour clock faces with Arabic numerals).

James Blish's adaptation ignores the duplicate-Earth thing altogether. In his version, it's a colony on a planet of 70 Ophiuchi, settled 500 years earlier by humans fleeing an early-22nd-century cataclysm called the Cold Peace -- which not only puts Star Trek in the 27th century, but puts it in Blish's Cities in Flight universe. It's fascinating in retrospect the way Blish basically co-opted ST as an extension of his own original fiction. It was small enough then, and he was big enough, that he could do that.

I also never bought the "300-year-old children" idea. If these people are 300 years old, then they should've accumulated a lot of life experience and maturity even without their bodies physically changing. Granted, we now know that the brain's judgment centers aren't fully developed until the early 20s, but 300 years of life experience should do a lot to cancel that out. They really shouldn't have acted like children. Also, how did they even survive three centuries without enough discipline or social organization to produce food and clothing and resources, or maintain the buildings? (It would take far less than 300 years for an abandoned city to crumble to dust.)

I never really liked anything much else about the story either -- the disease angle, the characters of Miri and Jahn, the whole Miri-crushing-on-Kirk thing, the whole Rand-jealous-of-a-preteen-girl thing. There isn't really anything here that works for me. And the tech holds up badly in retrospect -- they have to transfer data from one computer to another verbally and punch it in by hand?


As for The Cry of the Onlies, I remember little about it except that it didn't work any better for me than the episode did. But I do remember that it also ignored the duplicate-Earth idea. I don't remember what it replaced it with, though.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Also, how did they even survive three centuries without enough discipline or social organization to produce food and clothing and resources, or maintain the buildings? (It would take far less than 300 years for an abandoned city to crumble to dust.).

Indeed; we have an entirely unconvincing introduction part way through of the idea that the Onlies' food supply will run out in six months, as an effort to make the general situation more alarming and the need for a cure essential to the Onlies' short-term survival as well as the crew's... which is really awkward when apparently the Onlies have survived just fine for three centuries. What sort of food lasted 300 years? Why was this town storing massive stockpiles of amazingly non-perishable food? Everything exists in some form of illogically functional stasis until the protagonists arrive, at which point it's suddenly the rapidly deteriorating disaster that it should logically be. Which is why the episode doesn't work; even though I personally quite like a lot of the content, the backdrop just doesn't hold together in any logical or coherent way.

 

[Stevil2001]

As for The Cry of the Onlies, I remember little about it except that it didn't work any better for me than the episode did. But I do remember that it also ignored the duplicate-Earth idea. I don't remember what it replaced it with, though.

I don't think it replaced it with anything. I just skimmed the book, and all they say is that scientists on "Juram V" experimented with a youth serum centuries ago; there's no indication whether it's a duplicate Earth or an Earth colony or whatever. Very little (if any) of the book (which is a sequel to "Miri" and "Requiem for Methuselah" and "Dagger of the Mind"!) takes place on the planet, so it's mostly a non-issue.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, "Juram V" is definitely a retcon. "Miri" explicitly stated that Miri's Earth was the third planet in its system.

 

[Sci]

Also, how did they even survive three centuries without enough discipline or social organization to produce food and clothing and resources, or maintain the buildings? (It would take far less than 300 years for an abandoned city to crumble to dust.).

Indeed; we have an entirely unconvincing introduction part way through of the idea that the Onlies' food supply will run out in six months, as an effort to make the general situation more alarming and the need for a cure essential to the Onlies' short-term survival as well as the crew's... which is really awkward when apparently the Onlies have survived just fine for three centuries. What sort of food lasted 300 years?

Twinkies.

 

[Enterprise1701]

If I may ask, Christopher, when you wrote Forgotten History, did you think about covering what the Vulcan Protectorate would have done about the Remans?

 

[Leto_II]

Indeed; we have an entirely unconvincing introduction part way through of the idea that the Onlies' food supply will run out in six months, as an effort to make the general situation more alarming and the need for a cure essential to the Onlies' short-term survival as well as the crew's... which is really awkward when apparently the Onlies have survived just fine for three centuries. What sort of food lasted 300 years?

A question I ask myself each and every time I play Fallout...

 

[Christopher]

If I may ask, Christopher, when you wrote Forgotten History, did you think about covering what the Vulcan Protectorate would have done about the Remans?

I don't recall giving the matter any thought.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

"The Conscience of the King"

This one doesn’t really make sense to me. Having an eyewitness to the events on Tarsus IV seems neither here nor there. If it were just Lenore making a point of this then that would be fine, because she’s disturbed, but others are tied up on this too. Karidian surely can’t be Kodos just because someone who was there 20 years ago says he is; are we to believe that any potential trial could hinge on the testimony of an eyewitness? Besides how unreliable eyewitness testimony is anyway (and this is at a remove of twenty years on top of it), Kirk pulls up and compares photographs, so the likeness is there for everyone to see (pssst, Kodos, go to Adigeon and get a new face if you want to hide), and he evidently hasn’t bothered to come up with a backstory or try to establish false identities with fabricated records so that he doesn’t appear as if by magic twenty years ago. He hasn’t covered his tracks at all; Karidian doesn’t suddenly have security that he wouldn’t have had just because no-one is now alive who was there at the time. Again, if this were just Lenore’s reasoning then that’s not much of a problem (it even adds to the tragedy in that if it weren’t for her murder spree and the obvious implications in the choice of victims then her father wouldn’t have been identified - she's doing more harm than good by any measure), but Kirk and co see it this way too. Does the Federation justice system work on the principle of having someone who was nearby at the time point a finger and say “he did it”, and what’s more without the finger nothing can be done? No, I'm assuming. Who cares if an eyewitness can identify him or not, once the suspected Karidian-Kodos link is made? That's not going to be the sort of evidence that is sought.

Also, I take it Lenore is arranging the players' itinerary so that she can murder her way through the Tarsus survivors? If so she would have needed to come to Enterprise anyway, wouldn’t she? So surely she would have arranged to “miss” the transport herself. I wonder if the captain of the Astral Queen got two messages, and supposes that Kirk and Lenore are in this together, whatever it is (sexual pursuits, presumably)?

The episode itself has some nice touches, I suppose. It’s refreshing to see some civilian pursuits; house parties, theatre, some domesticity. The Kodos/Tarsus backstory is also a nice idea – it’s a reasonable way to make Kodos a notorious criminal and fugitive while keeping it grounded in something relatable and believable. It’s also another provocative indicator of the existential troubles and identity issues that the Federation is experiencing in its age of great expansion and colonization, where high technology meets the pressures of frontier life, where an expansive union is defined often by the charisma and potential instability of isolated individuals, those who most prominently “go boldly”.

A lot of the issues under discussion come rather out of nowhere, to be honest. It sort of gets to the point where I’m not sure what Kirk, Spock and McCoy are arguing about. Kodos has his moments, though. He and Kirk, and then Lenore and Kirk – that critical scene works quite well, I think. It’s a shame the rest isn’t really impressive.

Continuity

Unless this is changed at some point, since it’s technically not canonical so far as I know and it hasn’t yet been confirmed in the novels (though the location of the character’s home has, so it's really 90% of the way there), Hoshi Sato and her husband were among the casualties at Tarsus. That certainly helps make this more interesting when traveling through Trek in chronological order; this guy murdered Hoshi (and Takashi).

We met Kevin Riley during the events at Exo III, and it’s nice to see a recurring crewman. It greatly amuses me, though, to consider that his being moved “up” from the engineering room may well have been prompted by a desire to never again have him in a position to take control of it while proclaiming himself captain and/or an Irish king.

In other news, McCoy is on the Saurian brandy again. He really makes a habit of this, doesn't he? The scene, besides some nice Spock-McCoy banter, is also interesting for what have since become two rather odd statements. First, Spock declares that his father’s race were “spared” the “dubious benefits” of alcohol, although we see Vulcan alcoholic drinks periodically throughout the rest of the franchise. One assumes that he’s referring to a particular, probably nowadays mainstream, Syrranite-flavoured interpretation of Surak’s teachings that Sarek adheres to. That is, it's not that Vulcans don't make alcohol, simply that Sarek's culture doesn't partake. For all we know, the majority consumer of Vulcan alcoholic beverages is offworlders. Second, McCoy refers to Vulcan being historically conquered. McCoy as a V’Las loyalist: confirmed!

Uhura introduces us to the ballad Beyond Antares. Antares, it would seem, is shorthand in this era for exotic and distant. We’ll see further evidence of this, for example in Cyrano Jones’ efforts to sell Antarian Glow-Water as something arresting when it has, apparently, no actual value as a product. That or he’s labelled some random liquid “Antarian” to capitalise on the glamorous appeal – even to capitalise on the song specifically, for all we know, if it’s popular enough. The Buried Age sort of hints that it's a classic.

The events on Tarsus IV also occurred in the timeline of A Less Perfect Union, in which the Kodos issue is almost overshadowed by the ill-feeling between the Humans and the Interstellar Coalition, which refused Trill relief ships permission to cross the border, preventing a favourable outcome and making the Coalition a favoured target of recrimination.

Benecia is introduced. This Federation colony will continue to be name-dropped on occasion for the rest of this chronology.

Lenore Karidian herself will return in the sequel story, Foul Deeds Will Rise.

 

[Christopher]

To be fair, a lot of the records from the colony might've been destroyed in the upheavals, or deliberately destroyed by Kodos and his loyalists in their flight from justice. And people born on colony worlds might not have records of their identity in central Federation databases, depending on how remote and isolationist the colonies were. (Lots of colonies might be hostile to any federal authority at all. See Firefly/Serenity.) So the testimony of the few surviving eyewitnesses to Kodos's massacre might have been the only way to verify that this man was indeed Kodos, in the absence of any genetic records. Granted, there was that photo and that voice recording, but maybe they weren't conclusive enough.

Of course, the episode was written before we had DNA analysis, and I think a lot of modern forensic science in general had yet to catch on widely at that point. So crimesolving was a lot more about eyewitness accounts and confessions and whatnot. It does date the episode quite a bit.

 

[dstyer]

^Makes me wonder how this particular episode might be "updated" into the Abrams-verse. . . Maybe IDW will handle that at some point in the 5 year mission stories.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

To be fair, a lot of the records from the colony might've been destroyed in the upheavals, or deliberately destroyed by Kodos and his loyalists in their flight from justice.

I'm a little surprised that we haven't yet gotten a focus on Tarsus IV in the novel 'verse. The April story from Enterprise Logs ties in with the relevant events there, but it wasn't compatible with this continuity and so was one of the stories from the anthology that I didn't include.

And people born on colony worlds might not have records of their identity in central Federation databases, depending on how remote and isolationist the colonies were. (Lots of colonies might be hostile to any federal authority at all).

That's a good point. I was considering mentioning DNA; that is, surely if Kodos ever submitted to a medical scan his DNA would be on file and so discovering Karidian's identity should be easy. (I imagine the Federation keeps records, and that even casual examinations record things like DNA, given the sophistication of the technology). But now that you mention it, there might not be anything in the records if Tarsus is particularly independent, either for reasons of policy/philosophy or out of simple logistical necessity.

I'm wondering, because I can't recall, if Tarsus comes up in discussion in Vanguard at any point - "The Ruins of Noble Men" seems a likely candidate. I'll have to check, because I'm sure that the Kodos event colours debate in this era on colony administration and self-sufficiency/removal of federal or homeworld oversight.

Of course, the episode was written before we had DNA analysis, and I think a lot of modern forensic science in general had yet to catch on widely at that point. So crimesolving was a lot more about eyewitness accounts and confessions and whatnot. It does date the episode quite a bit.

I did consider making that general point in its defence, and I'm thinking my post might read as a little unfair to the episode (it seems to be me complaining for the most part). Of course, the nature of reality is no excuse for awkwardness in Trek

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

Of course, the episode was written before we had DNA analysis, and I think a lot of modern forensic science in general had yet to catch on widely at that point. So crimesolving was a lot more about eyewitness accounts and confessions and whatnot. It does date the episode quite a bit.

That's a good point. I suppose it's possible that Kodos had any records pertaining to him (including DNA) destroyed after he fled the planet, though that doesn't explain how Kirk would have been able to find a photo of him in the Enterprise computer.

--Sran

 

[Idran]

I'm wondering, because I can't recall, if Tarsus comes up in discussion in Vanguard at any point - "The Ruins of Noble Men" seems a likely candidate. I'll have to check, because I'm sure that the Kodos event colours debate in this era on colony administration and self-sufficiency/removal of federal or homeworld oversight.

Ying mentions it as the start of a pattern of the Federation tightening colonial oversight and reducing colonial freedom after the fact of a colonial crisis, yeah.

And still Ying wasn't done. "Twenty years ago on Tarsus Four, the system failed spectacularly. When famine threatened the colony, Starfleet sent ships to help, but they didn't get there before the colony's warped leadership exterminated half the population in order to save the other half. Our entire colonial system has been paying for that crime ever since. Each new crisis has led to stricter laws, tougher regulations, tighter controls, forced relocations, and less freedom to live as the colonists choose--which is the reason many of them became colonists in the first place!"

I'd give a page reference but I transcribed that out of the ebook version. Right near the end of Chapter 5, though. (The other colonies she was referring to with crises, just for the sake of completeness, were Azha-R7a, Ingraham B, Deneva, Omicron Ceti III, Cestus III, Janus VI, and New Paris.)

 

[KRAD]

We met Kevin Riley during the events at Exo III,

Psi 2000, actually. Exo III was "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

 

[Deranged Nasat]

We met Kevin Riley during the events at Exo III,

Psi 2000, actually. Exo III was "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

D'Oh! Thanks, KRAD.

I'm getting my ice planets confused.

 

[Christopher]

Also, they're both equally silly names for planets.