I try not to read or remind myself too much about episodes before watching, but when I read the netflix description of this episode being about a planet of children I cringed. I feel about child actors, especially in trek shows, about how captain Picard feels about actual children. But this episode, while had a few cringe worthy moments, held together pretty well. The premise is the crew detect an ancient SOS distress signal and when they follow it the planet is exactly like the earth! And I mean exactly down to the continents and even language, but more on that later, The only thing missing is most of the people.
Kirk, Spock, yeoman Rand, and two redshirts beam down to the planets surface and find themselves in an abandoned city. When Spock picks up a tricycle from the road he is assaulted by a humanoid creature with some pretty bad zombie/old makeup. After a few punches from Kirk the creature collapses dead. McCoy scans it with his tricorder I guess discovers that it is human, but this is never discussed. He also discovers that the human has rapidly aged or is hundreds of years old, I wasn't quite clear. After poking around some more they find the eponymous Miri, a teenage girl who immediately falls in love with Kirk.
After scanning and looking at old medical records they figure out that the people on the planet were working on a virus that would make them live essentially forever. The only side effect was that it drove mad and eventually killed anyone older than 15 or 16. To make things worse everyone on the away team other than Spock now have the early signs of the disease. It is a seven day race against time to make a vaccine. This is when we start getting scenes of the other children. The actress playing Miri actually does a really good job, the other child actors less so.
After some shenanigans involving stealing the communicators and kidnapping yeoman Rand the episode comes to a conclusion with Kirk confronting the gang of rascals and convincing them to give back the communicators mostly by letting them hit him with various weapons. But to make sure that long and tedious scene is even more meaningless McCoy injects himself with the untested vaccine, passes out, but then recovers in moments as the vaccine takes effect. Cut to Kirk back on the bridge of the enterprise talking to yeoman Rand about how he is sure it will all be fine.
Review segment: Far better than I expected from the description, but still not the most classic of episodes. Suffers a bit from, "everything gets resolved in the last five minutes," syndrome. Still one of the better kids of trek ep.
6 out of 10
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