Stardate 2713.5 through 2717.3
Approximately 2266
The crew of the Enterprise pick up a distress signal from a mysterious planet that is an exact duplicate of Earth. When Kirk, Bones, Spock, and Janice arrive on the planet they learn that not only is it an exact copy of their home planet Earth, but one that is stuck in 1960. Soon after their arrival they are attacked by an old man-child that Bone's determined has a very high metabolic rate which makes the attacker grow old abnormally fast.
Turns out this planet is fully occupied by children, and when the children enter puberty they contract a disease that makes them grow old rapidly and become violently insane. Luckily for the children who reside on this mysterious planet, it takes them hundreds of years to enter puberty, making each child hundreds of years old. Kirk and gang run into a frightened girl named Miri who is right on the cusp of a womanhood awakened by Kirk's charm.
I have a few gripes about this episode, the first being the simplistic view of children, Especially children who managed to become hundreds of years old. In this episode the children on the planet are significantly older than the crew who came down to investigate and for some unexplained reason the children act like caricatures of themselves. They sing silly songs to taunt, they play silly games, and they can't grasp concepts a impaired teenager could figure out. You would think with hundreds of years worth of experience under their belts these kids would be much sharper than the way they are portrayed. When Kristen Dunst was cast in Neil Jordan's "Interview with the Vampire" (1994), she was only 12 years old. But the writer, Anne Rice, understood that if a child became immortal and was permanently stuck in a 12 year old body she would have much of the same worldly wisdom as an immortal adult.
I guess the bigger complaint I would have concerning the children would be that they are all played by child actors. Child actors are generally the absolute worst and I hate seeing them on screen unless they are one of the rare talents. So when you give incompetent child actors a script that makes them act like what an adult thinks a kid acts like you'll more than likely end up with more than a few embarressing moments.
This brings us William Shatner. In many ways Willilam Shatner reminds me of Nicolas Cage. Love them or hate them both actors give whatever role they are in their absolute all. I happen to love this kind of "putting your whole naked self out there for the world to see" kind of acting. Shatner says the most absurd lines (like "NO MORE BLAH BLAH BLAH!") to a group of children with a hilarious amount of sincerity and conviction. This is not my favorite episode of TOS but it's another check in the "William Shatner is pretty cool" box.
All in all, there are far too many embarrassing, blatantly '60's, moments for me to give this episode a high rating. Cringe factor aside though, there are many unanswered and potentially more interesting aspects. The biggest unexplored question is why is there an exact duplicate of 1960's Earth floating around in open space? It seems ridiculous but it's never really answered, and the crew never seemed all that surprised that this planet exists. I feel that this would disturb me far more than old children.
