Star Trek episode "Miri"

"Miri"

Season 1, episode 8.

Another Earth with the same continents and everything is discovered. The one rotten thing is that the story never explains why the planet was a duplicate of Earth, or even why the story called for that. It was like they wanted to do a time travel story of the future of Earth, but then switched it to another planet.

This one, a really good episode actually, brought up a couple stupid geek questions.

1: How are three punches to the face better than being stunned by a phaser? The opponent died immediately thereafter. Whether he was attacking or not, how are physical punches to the face less damage than the phaser stun?

2: Kirk and the party contract the disease. This brings about the most obvious science fiction question asking if we have learned anything from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, or learning from the Aztecs being decimated by disease from the New World. Let's just beam down anywhere and hope we don't contract anything.

In the end, Kirk punches one opponent to death and "stuns" another one to death (only because of the sickness and being on the verge of death anyway), so I guess that kind of answers the question of stunning or punching, although I would still think stunning would be better.

This is the precedent for the novel The Cry of the Onlies, which I am going to have to find and read now.