Very Pretty: Captain Kirk and Miri

I like Star Trek. Always have.I like almost every iteration of it: the “classic” series with Captain Kirk, The Next Generation, Voyager, even Enterprise.Except Deep Space Nine. It always seemed to me like the adventures of a shopping mall in space.But I have to admit that a good many episodes of the original series make me cringe. I recently rewatched one called “Miri,” and this time I was beyond cringing. I was appalled.“Miri” aired on NBC on October 27, 1966, early in the show’s first season. Adrian Spies received sole writing credit, although the story editor, Steven Carabatsos, rewrote most of the dialogue, and Vincent McEveety directed. The title role went to Kim Darby, then nineteen, who would later play Mattie Ross in True Grit. On screen in this Star Trek episode she reads as a girl of perhaps twelve to fourteen.Here’s the story:The Enterprise answers an old-fashioned distress call and finds a planet that is, inexplicably, a duplicate of Earth. Three centuries earlier, an…