What Are Little Girls Made Of was written by Robert Block. Yup, the Psycho guy. Here he's got Kirk and Nurse Chapel transporting down to Exo III. The man they are going to see is Doctor Korby, who was Nurse Chapel's fiance. He's been missing for 5 years so you know she's all excited. Michael Strong plays Dr Korby (upper right top row pic) and he's kind of creepy, especially in that green and blue outfit. After he doesn't meet Kirk at the beam down point the captain has a couple of security guards join him. A man arrives, it's not Korby, but he is to take them to the doctor. Kirk stations one guard at the beam down point and the party sets off through the underground tunnels of the icy planet. After they move along the guards are killed by a large clocked figure. Korby says he's been working on a great find of ancient technology but secretly he's got some crazy dream to replace human's with androids. Korby has a android making machine and an ancient android to explain it. He makes a replica of Kirk that gets on board the Enterprise. The android Kirk calls Spock a halfbread. What a dick, huh? Ted Cassidy plays the ancient android. It was a pretty good episode that has a grim ending with only Chapel and Kirk leaving the tunnels alive.
Miri is the 8th episode and it was broadcast October 27, 1966. I only remember the vaguest images and bits of story from the first time I saw these episodes. I remembered images of the kids from this one. Especially Michael J Pollard, in the green jacket. You might remember him from Bonnie and Clyde or any number of other movies and tv shows. He was 27 at the time and he's supposed to be 12 or 13. TV sure stretched your imagination in the 1960's. Oddly enough in the show Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Yoman Rand and some other red shirts, beam down to a planet with a rundown town that looks exactly like Earth of the 1960's. Or at least the rundown movie studio backlot version of Earth in the 1960's. Appearently the town background has been enhanced by some extra CGI in this remastered episode . No matter, it looks good and rundown. It appears that the place is abandoned until an old man attacks them. Spock stuns him and he dies right there in that picture above. I did my own screen caps right off the dvd using VLC Player, one of the best general all around media players. It's free out there on the internet. Back on the planet the crew finds Miri, played by Kim Darby, who is one of a group of feral children. It does well to remind me that a pack of children left unsupervised long enough turn into a savage gang of monsters. Really, often it only takes a few minutes before someone has an eye out. The crew, except for Vulcan Mr Spock, gets some blue and red spots on their skin. Turns out the people on the planet had a disease that occured when they tried to tried to prolong life. It worked and you only aged a month a year, problem was when you hit puberty you got the disease. It aged you real quick and you didn't live long. They can't go back to the ship and the hospital they find is hardly the place to do any work. They get some help from the ship until the kids steal their communicators. It's touch and go as the clock is ticking down and they need to check the cure on the computer and can't. Yoman Rand gets captured, and while Kirk is trying to talk the kids into helping them, McCoy tries out the untested serum on homself. He'll be ok, he's nearly a regular at this point. The kids are saved and the Enterprise sets off of it's next port of call. A pretty good episode that had a pretty goofy setting. I suspect it was what they could do cheaply that drove the story's location. Setting it in a familiar setting helped make the tragic story that much more jarring.
Dagger Of The Mind is the 9th episode broadcast and the 11th episode made. It's directed by Vincent McEveerty who directed Miri and 4 other episodes of Star Trek. He directed a lot of other tv episodes, plus several tv and theatrical movies, in a career that started in 1962 and ended in 2000. During a stop at a penal colony on Tantalus V a prisoner escapes and gets aboard the Enterprise. He tries to hold up the bridge but Spock nerve pinches him. After a bit of examination Spock uses his mind meld for the first time on the show. He discovers that the warden of the prison is crazy and experimenting on the prisoners. Kick soon puts a stop to that. It's a tough old plot device that still works in deep space. Veteran actor James Gregory plays the warden. He was Matt Helm's boss in all the Dean Martin spy spoofs. That's a set worth picking up. Another fairly good and gritty episode with a great preformance by Morgan Woodward as the tormented prisoner.
Comments