Star Trek's First Parallel Earth Still Feels Terrifying

Early in the run of Star Trek: The Original Series, creative forces behind the scenes were shifting. While the casual fan might assume that creator Gene Roddenberry was just shepherding a team of sci-fi writers to churn out scripts, there were a few other cooks in the kitchen. In the first dozen episodes, there were a few different script editors, producers, and story consultants who wouldn’t end up sticking around for the rest of the series. John D. F. Black is probably the most famous of these folks, who was eventually succeeded by line producer Gene Coon, and script editor Dorothy Fontana. However, also in this early mix was Steven W. Carabatsos, a story consultant who worked on the first 11 episodes of TOS and, as a result, had a bigger impact on the show than you might think.

Sixty years ago, on October 27, 1966, when “Miri” aired, it was one of Carabatsos’ most interesting rewrites of a TOS episode, which was credited to the writer of the original pitch, Adrian Spies. The 8th episode aired overall, “Miri” represents a kind of mishmash of TOS sensibilities, and debuted one Star Trek concept that both embodied Gene Roddenberry’s dramatic style for the series and also proved what made this show so different from other sci-fi TV of the time.

If it’s been a while, “Miri” is a deeply unsettling episode of the classic Trek, which is partly on purpose, and partly somewhat accidental. The basic set-up here is that the Enterprise finds a planet in which, when humans hit puberty, they turn into raving zombie monsters before perishing. This part is supposed to be scary and strange, and is a reminder that a lot of early Trek played with horror tropes in a way that later episodes didn’t. (The insane asylum/murder episode “Dagger of the Mind” aired after “Miri,” the following week.) But the part that’s odd and unsettling about the episode is more about Kirk flirting with a teenager, the titular Miri (Kim Darby), which, we’re told, is okay because she’s actually hundreds of years old because of some immortality experiment on the planet.

Almost nothing about “Miri” makes sense, even by early TOS standards, which isn’t to say it’s a bad episode; but one has to rewatch this one mostly for vibes, rather than quality. That said, the basic set-up of the episode before all the puberty-turns-you-into-a-monster stuff is somewhat outside of the story’s weirdness. In order to over-explain why the sets look the way they do, we’re told that this planet is a direct duplicate of Earth, despite not being in the Sol system. The teaser has Kirk staring at the viewscreen in wonder and saying: “Another...Earth?”

This trope popped up a few more times in TOS, and it actually comes from an early document created by Roddenberry titled “Star Trek Is...” Basically, in this pitch document, Roddenberry explains that to avoid certain bug-eyed-monster tropes found in other sci-fi, Star Trek’s writing would take the “Parallel Earths” concept and apply it to almost all the episodes. This is connected to “The Drake Equation,” a then relatively new theory formulated in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake, which hypothesized a fairly large amount of intelligent life in our galaxy. Roddenberry’s pitch then was somewhat revolutionary in TV sci-fi, as it posited a soft, pseudo-scientific explanation for why we would encounter so many humanoid “aliens” on the show.

But what’s weird about the terrifying parallel Earth in “Miri” is just how literally this concept is presented. This isn’t a “Class-M” planet that reminds us of Earth; we’re meant to think this is a literal duplicate of Earth. Which, now, almost scans like Star Trek not having enough confidence in the loose philosophical storytelling idea of the parallel Earth concept, and instead, feels like a moment the show is over-explaining itself.

What’s interesting here is that at this point in TOS, we actually hadn’t seen that many aliens at all. Yes, by episode 10 (aired after “Miri” but filmed well before), we had Balok in “The Cormobite Maneuver,” but his more sci-fi alien visage was revealed to be a ruse, and the true Balok was a laughing, human-ish baby. The salt vampire in “The Man Trap” was very clearly a throwback to a 1940s/1950s sci-fi monster, but that wasn’t really wasn’t standard fare for Star Trek. Pretty much all the other episodes to this point dealt with humans gone wrong, or, in the case of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” humans getting robot bodies that went wrong.

And so, in the parallel Earths concept, one can actually see Star Trek having a bit of restraint when it came to goofy aliens. Contrast this with Lost in Space or even early Doctor Who, and you can see just how much this guiding principle made Trek different. If we don’t count “The Menagerie,” since it uses elements of “The Cage,” it takes the series until the 18th aired episode, “Arena” — with the famous Gorn — to really present another non-human-looking alien.

For all of its flaws, “Miri” is an episode where the classic Trek seems to be holding back a bit from going too goofy. The concept might seem silly today, but the deadly seriousness of the episode survives. There’s nothing truly camp about this episode, nor could you imagine it airing during the more lighthearted second season of the show. And that heaviness is probably because this wasn’t meant to be a strange, new world, but instead a version of our world, gone wrong.

Star Trek: The Original Series streams on Paramount+.