Writer: Stephen Kandel
Director: Marc Daniels
Producer: Gene L. Coon
So, here we are, with the second Harry Mudd episode. The only antagonist to reoccur on The Original Series. Not Khan, not Kor, but Harry Mudd. (In fairness, writers were always trying to bring Kor back, and then having to replace him with other Klingons when John Colicos wasn't available). Luckily, Roger C. Carmel is fun as Mudd, and him and Kirk have a good interaction. It's just, I dunno, somewhat surprising that this guy is the one who has multiple episodes devoted to him in the series.
This one, thankfully, lacks the weird commentary on women from the first appearance, although Mudd's skeeviness and bad attitudes towards the other sex still come through. Basically Mudd's taken over a planet full of androids, who hijack the Enterprise and bring it to the planet so that he can escape it at last. But the androids have other plans, wishing to take the ship themselves so they can spread out into the galaxy and leave Mudd - and the ship's crew - stranded.
Of course, Mudd being Mudd the androids have a sizeable population of lovely fembots, played ingeniously by twins so as to imply vast numbers of copies. These androids were originally built ages before Mudd became stranded on the planet, and wish to study the life-forms of the galaxy.
So, it's time to "talk the computers to death" again, but in this occasion it's discovered these androids specifically have a hard time dealing with "illogic". So the episode becomes an excuse for the main cast (everyone except Sulu, as George Takei had to go off and film The Green Berets with John Wayne) to goof around, act silly, and even engage in some bizarre theatre of the absurd style improv games, and other nonsense that guarantees you've seen gifs of this episode online.
And that's about it. There's gags about confusing the androids, gags about Mudd's manufacturing the female ones to be "fully fuctional", gags about Mudd having made an android in the image of his "nagging" ex-wife Stella so he can finally tell "her" to shut up, there's gags about the crew's reactions to all this, etc etc. But eventually the androids all are overwhelmed by the "illogic", the crew get off the planet, and leave Mudd there with about 500 to watch him and ensure he behaves. Because Kirk is an ass.
"I, Mudd" is a fun diversion for an hour, but it doesn't have anything going on to hang the jokes on, and the jokes aren't funny enough to make the lack of substance worth it. I'm not making it up when I say there's a long sequence of essentially the main actors playing improv games, doing "theatre of the absurd" skits, and other "goofy" behaviours that largely fall flat.
Rating: 2 out of 4
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