Mudd's Women

I have two personalities:

Nicest guy you’ll ever meet

and twisted fucking psychopath

I enjoyed Mudd’s Women. Compared to The Enemy Within, it kept a reasonable pace and no scene every overstayed its welcome or dwelt on lingering shots more than was forgivable for the era of television. With that out of the way, let’s focus on the man of the hour, Harcourt Fenton Mudd, and how he appears on the scene looking for all the world like a flamboyantly gay cowboy

He’s a few rhinestones and buckle away from unlimited power.

The pre-credits scene was highly enjoyable - hot pursuit of a wayward ship that strains the Enterprise’s batteries. There’s plenty of technobabble to go around, and the classic Federation theme of trying to protect others no matter the cost to one’s self is right there.

It’s just that the only people they ended up protecting who were worth a damn were the titular women. 

Is Harry trying to start a late-90s pop group or what?

These women must have been pretty hot for the 60s, because every man on the ship went to boner country over them. 

The Trial of Harry Mudd

Kirk doesn’t buy Harry’s shit. He’s hostile to him, and if he bothered looking up the man’s prior record he knows who he’s dealing with. 

At one point, Kirk asks “Any past offenses, Mr. Mudd?”

I guess I could keep mining the character to jerk off about his Discovery appearances, but I really need to get going. 

Mudd is essentially being arrested for driving without a license and failing to file a flight plan. People have said he’s human trafficking, but he’s not - he is in possession of a controlled substance though. 

The women are willing (and probably paying) pawns in Harry’s game. They’re ugly (apparently) and just want to ditch their dull farm planets and get some men in their lives. Who wants to serve their brothers? Who wants to live on a planet full of sea farmers and machines? Not these ladies! Harry is just playing match-maker and trying to make a buck, like a shitty dating service run by a war criminal. 

I don’t get why the ladies are allowed to wander the ship - I don’t get why anyone is allowed to wander the ship, like Charles Evans. This isn’t the Holiday Inn of TNG’s Enterprise, this is a space submarine. Who knows when a Romulan plot or Klingon sleeper agent is going to come aboard?

Indeed, McCoy and Kirk discuss this, but McCoy figures they can’t be salt vampires or Talosian illusions. 

Now, about these women - they take beauty pills? Why don’t they just put on makeup or something? And the end, when the woman takes the placebo she just transforms as if she put on makeup? I don’t buy it. They look tired, they don’t have makeup on, so they’re ugly? These women aren’t ugly, they just have low self-esteem - and that’s basically Kirk’s message at the end. 

“Oh no! I’ve gone from a 10 to a 9! How shall I ever find love?”

The miners don’t really have any room to bargain, they’re not exactly lookers either. They also live in a space-trailer park on a planet that’s under constant dust storms, working in what amounts to a starship-oil field. Childress is a dick, but I think that’s because he’s been spending too much time alone in his space-trailer watching subspace porn and shitposting on the subspace radio network. 

Oh, and playing solitaire with his coasters. I love how TOS tries to futurize even mundane stuff like checkers and chess by making them 3D but when it comes to playing cards they just make them round. I bet these aren’t even a prop, I bet they actually sold this crap in the 60s. It was a weird decade. Another thing - the other miners got married over subspace radio! That’s like getting married on a subreddit! Kirk couldn’t be bothered to officiate?

There’s just not much else to say. 

Rating: 3/5; Don’t Skip

Mudd makes a return in later episodes and DSC, so I wouldn’t recommend skipping it. The episode moves quickly enough and has a lot going on without ever getting boring or full of itself.