Fixing a Broken Plot Element

The episode "Miri," from the first season of classic Star Trek (aired October 27, 1966) isn't a great episode, but I think it's a pretty good one. It involves an Earth-like planet on which experiments in increasing life expectancies went rather horribly awry. All the adults have died from a disease that makes them insanely violent. The kids all now live for centuries, but they do age slowly. And when they do hit puberty, they succumb to the disease as well.

The Enterprise landing party gets infected, which means they are in a race against time to find a cure. The local kids, in the meantime, don't trust them (understandable because adults in their experience all become insanely violent) and work against them. Most notably, they steal the communicators, which means Dr. McCoy can't use the ship's computers to test a possible cure.

The title character (nicely played by Kim Darby) is the only kid in the episode who isn't perpetually annoying. She does help the Enterprise crew at first, because she has a crush on Kirk. But she later gets jealous of Janice Rand and also turns against them for a time, though she'll have a change of heart after being targetted by a Kirk Speech.

There's a reasonable level of suspense and some nice interaction between the crew--most notably an all-too-rare scene involving Kirk and Rand that reveals how much she cares for him (something she can't normally discuss because of their difference in rank). McCoy also gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome near the end.

Also, Kirk gets beaten up by children. Kirk is, of course, the best of the Star Trek captains by far (AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANYONE SAY ANYTHING DIFFERENT!), but for some bizarre reason, its fun to watch him get knocked down a peg by a gang of snotty brats.

But I want to talk about a rather weird plot hole. For budgetary reasons, the planet had to be extremely Earth-like and, in fact, the set of Andy Griffith's Mayberry was used when the episode was filmed. So how does the script (written by Adrian Spies and re-written extensively by Stephen W. Carabatsos) explain this?

The answer is: It doesn't bother to explain it. When the Enterprise first approaches the planet, everyone is surprised that it's size and atmosphere are absolutely identical to Earth, but then this is NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN! It is a bizarre--well, not really a plot hole, since the main plot of the story makes sense--but a plot element that goes annoyingly unexplained.

BUT WAIT! An explanation does exist. James Blish's short story adaptation (published in the first of twelve Star Trek anthologies) gives us a reason for how Mayberry ended up on another planet.

At first, I thought that this was something Blish got from the original shooting script that was left out in a rewrite or post-production edit. But according to the Star Trek wiki, the script never bothered to explain alien-Mayberry at all. So Blish came up with a reasonable explanation from whole cloth.

It turns out that the planet is actually a colony settled by people from Earth. They fled Earth several centuries earlier during a time of global strife. Star Trek's often inconsistent references to Earth history hadn't yet been developed at all this early in the series, but in retrospect it's easy to assume this was during the Third World War or the slightly later Eugenics Wars.

So they had cut off all contact with Earth, only sending a distress signal when their longevity experiments went awry and the grown-ups started dying.

It's such a simple and logical explanation. Even granting that TV scripts were often rushed through rewrites and production because of tight scheduling, it's amazing that the talented writers who produced this particular script didn't come up with something similar. The "It's identical to Earth, but not let's never mention that again" route the script took just gets on my nerves.

It should be mentioned that a later episode--"Bread and Circuses," which features a 20th-Century Roman Empire--cites "Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development" to explain that humanoid races can develop along similar and sometimes near-identical sociological lines. So this can be retroactively applied to "Miri" as well as a few other episodes. An article at the Star Trek site Memory Alpha gives more details on this.  Also, the episode "The Paradise Syndrome" mentions an ancient alien race known as the Preservers who apparently seeded species in danger of extinction on many different planets, which is why there's so many humanoid aliens in the Star Trek Universe.

There's also an Expanded Universe novel which explains that Earth-identical planets such as the one in "Miri" have arrived in our universe from parallel realities. A Shatner-verse novel apparently decides that the planet was a recreation of Earth made by the Preservers.

All are perfectly legitimate SF concepts. Of course, during the original run, Star Trek (like most shows from that era) was not concerned with an internal continuity between individual episodes. There are both strengths and weaknesses to this approach. One of the strengths is that there's plenty of room for later writers and fans to have fun coming up with theories of their own to explain apparent inconsistencies.