Script: Stephen Kandel
Story: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Harvey Hart
Producer: Gene Roddenberry.
Ugh. "Mudd's Women". For years, the Harry Mudd episodes have been fan favourites. Harry Mudd is, in fact, the only "antagonist" the original Enterprise crew encountered multiple times over the series! So clearly this episode must have struck a chord with someone at some point. But it's really hard to imagine what that chord was, because this episode is bad.
What's all the more insane, is this concept is one of the first Gene Roddenberry came up wth for Star Trek, and was suggested as both the first pilot and second. Good thing the network said no, and for the same reason they also waited on airing this one til the series had been on a while -- it's an episode about space hookers, for cryin' out loud!!
It's an episode where it's really hard to figure out what the point is supposed to be. Now, obviously, the premise of "wiving settlers" and the crooked con artist are the kind of old Western tropes that I guess you might expect when you remember that Star Trek was pitched as a Western in space.
But despite this episode's arguable themes of "beauty is about confidence" and "a good wive is a partner, not a trophy", it's reeeeeallly hard to see this episode as anything other than an excuse for the camera, crew, and cast to oggle some sexy 60s babes and for Roddenberry to try his luck on the "casting couch". Ugh.
With this being only the fourth episode, it's a bad look for our cast of Starfleet officers in a utopian future without prejudice who work in a co-ed space navy to be standing around dumbfounded oggling women. The whole deal with sailors and women is supposed to be that they're girl crazy because they've been without for so long. There are women on the Enterprise! So the episode comes up with this crazy space drug the women take to be extra super hot and thus give our characters a reason to look like jackasses. But then, in the ending of the episode, it turns out the drug is Dumbo's feather and the ability to magically will make-up and good hairdoes onto your body was just a matter of believing in yourself!
It's fucking nonsense. It's also early enough in the series that things are still a bit off. Spock is still smug af, Uhura's still in a gold uniform -- she gets a bit more to do in this episode, but not much, because her even existing begs the question "what do the women Starfleet officers think of all this?" I wish the show could've gone so far as to show them affected by the super hypnosis beauty of Mudd's Women too, but alas.
Everything's a bit weird, from Mudd's old school Pirate clothes, to the miners on Rigel who's homes look like futuristic trailers from the outside, but like fucking Fred Flintstone's house on the inside. Everyone's just a bit too comfortable talking about buying and selling people, and generally acting like the Star Trek future is much less like the utopian tomorrow it develops into, and much more like a kind of anything goes Wild West galaxy where Starfleet is like Texas Rangers or US Marshalls.
One thing I really notice watching the early episodes of the series that I do like, though, is a greater focus on the rest of the crew. The Enterprise feels alive and full of people. Sulu gets a lot of good lines and wry observations. You see this more in the early shows, more of a sense of focus on more than just Kirk and Spock, and it goes away I think largely for budgetary reasons. Sulu helping steady Navigator Farrell, who's just a bit too hypnotized by the women, is a good bit.
It's also worth pointing out that in an episode about sexy women wandering the ship in their William Ware Theiss skimpy sparkly dresses, getting the men all riled up, Captain Kirk does not engage them. He does everything he can to avoid their seductions. Why? Because he's a professional and not a fucking creep! The idea that Kirk's a total horndog is one that I think has come about as a result of exaggeration and parody over the years, and solidified in Chris Pine's portrayal of Kirk in the two JJ Abrams Trek movies as a kind of SNL caricature of a walking sexual harassment lawsuit. Kirk in the Original Series has a lot of flames, but he's not the wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon.
Ultimately, the problem is the episode has very little to say to justify its objectification of women. While the themes of the episode (confidence is attractive, wives shouldn't be trophies) are good, they're expressed through basically the worldview of a 1960s womanizer. So "confidence" means you can will yourself into being hot, and not being a trophy means staying home to cook and clean and sew.
It's fucking weird, and really cringeworthy.
That said, the most successful element of the episode is, indeed, Harry Mudd. I'm not his biggest fan, but he works as a goofy smarmy scoundrel adversary for Kirk. Their interplay works where nothing else does. So I can see why he comes back. If I had to guess, I'd say Mudd is Stephen Kandel's addition to this story, and all the weird space hooker stuff is Roddenberry.
Rating: 1.5 out of 4
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