Rand would have been a better fit here - was she written out of this episode for a reason?
According to MA, citing The Star Trek Compendium, the producers didn't want to show Kirk and Rand hooking up, however briefly, and they were already considering removing Whitney from the show due to personal issues.
Yes and perhaps he simply, and rather pedestrianly, wanted to establish his own little fiefdom, where he didn't have to hew to Federation medical principles and could come up with even more entertaining fun and games.
Once again gleaning info from MA, this is apparently correct. In the original script, Dr Adams' previous work with criminals had caused him to develop a negative view of humanity and so he gave in to his dark desire to hold power over others. Gene Roddenberry didn't like that angle as he felt that humans in the future would have overcome such sentiments, so he removed the explanation for Adams' actions from the episode. Fair enough if Gene didn't like the original idea, but not including an alternate motivation is madness.
I don't think that Rand would have worked as well. For one thing, there would have been no reason to bring her along since she probably didn't have any psychology training.
But neither did Dr Noel. Oh, they claimed that she did, but she's quite clearly awful at her job. A trained psychologist not noticing that an entire colony had been lobotomised? At least if Rand had gone with Kirk there would have been an excuse for why he was the one to figure out that something suspicious was going on.
Miri (0)
Nothing that happens in this episode makes any fucking sense.
Let's start with the obvious. The crew of the Enterprise make the most astounding discovery in the history of human exploration; a duplicate Earth that split off from our history in the 1960s. Everyone forgets this fact literally three minutes into the episode. The people of this Earth discovered the secret to prolonging life thousands of years. Where was this amazing advance made? Surely in a high-tech research lab or university in New York, or London, or Moscow. No. It was made in a clinic in a small-town. A clinic which just so happened to have a transmitter that could send a distress signal out into space for 300 years. Because the people of 1960s Earth decided that asking aliens for help was a sensible plan.
KIRK: Captain's Log, supplement. This is the second day of the seven left to us. We've found nothing. Enterprise is standing by with labs and computers ready to assist us. There's no data, no starting point.
MCCOY: I think I've found it!
The comic timing of McCoy's discovery is impeccable. It's not supposed to be funny, but it is. The entire search for the cure was badly handled. Dr McCoy and Spock may be better educated than 1960s Earth scientists, but showing them discovering the cure that eluded an entire civilisation in a matter of days with only the contents of a dusty old lab was silly. It was a cheap attempt at wringing drama out of an episode with an absurdly flawed premise.
Discounting her role as a background extra in the next episode, this is Yeoman Rand's final appearance in the series, and her primary purpose in this episode is to be jealous of a teenage girl. Yeah, I'm not too sad to see her go. As for the eponymous Miri, I don't have a problem with her being infatuated by Kirk, it's natural for a teenage girl to be attracted to a grown man. But did they have to play it so creepily with the soft lighting and the romantic background music during their scenes together? Admittedly, Miri is 300 years old, so she's well past the age of consent, but I still think it's probably not a good idea to play up the romance angle between them.
Oh, and then there's the annoying kids. Why hadn't they starved to death? Or surely they'd all have died by now from infection or cholera or whatever. Unfortunately, a dozen or so children survived long enough to blight this episode and all of our lives. “Blah, blah, blah!” Shut the fuck up! They steal the communicators, tie up Rand, and beat Kirk with clubs, but Kirk manages to defeat them with his signature move: the dramatic speech! So Kirk becomes king of the children and gets their stolen communicators back. Not that any of that matters because McCoy had already synthesised and tested the cure while Kirk was gone. Thus wasting all our times.
SPOCK: It could be a beaker full of death.
At that point in the episode, a beaker full of death sounded like an appealing way out.
I'm sure that some of you probably found something to like about this episode. But I honestly can't think of a single positive thing to say about it. The story makes no sense, the kids were extremely annoying, and above all I found it boring.
Captain Redshirt: 2
