Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Trek Politics. I'm Mary Trump here with my friend and co-host Bob Suska.

Bob, we are going to be talking about an episode that I don't think a lot of people either remember or remember caring for.

So I think we're in for potentially a bit of a surprise.

Yes. Hi, Mary.

As always, spoilers ahead.

This is Miri from Midway through Season 1, written by Adrian Speese, directed by Vincent

McAvety.

The Enterprise receives a distress signal from an uncharted planet that looks exactly like Earth,

the first other Earth encounter in Star Trek. Kirk, Bones, Spock, Janice Rand, and two

somewhat useless red shirts beamed to the surface to find a devastated town that looks strikingly

like an Earth city. While investigating their attack by what appears to be a zombie, so Kirk

takes down the zombie with three punches to the face.

Bones determines this zombie is human, but a human who's aged a century in just a few minutes.

Suddenly they hear a weird thumping noise and run off to find the source of the ruckus.

Inside one of the buildings, they find a young girl named Miri.

She's afraid of the grownups who she calls grups.

She says all the grups on the planet got sick and died, leaving only the children who she calls onlys. To win her trust, Kirk flirts with Mary, calling her very pretty. It's the beginning of a,

shall we say, problematic connection that we'll talk about

later. Mary leads the crew to an old laboratory where they begin to learn about the plague that

killed all the grups. Adding urgency to the story, our heroes all start to develop raised

purple blotches on their skin and worsening arsability, contracting the disease that killed all the grubs.

So Bone sets out to find a vaccine while Spock theorizes that the virus only attacks

...