144: Star Trek TOS Season 1, “Mudd’s Women"

[@mark_loveless]

Next episode is The Enemy With Inn. (spelling is wrong on Wikipedia) This is an episode about how the Enterprise crew stays at a Hampton Inn and has a terrible experience and argues with the night manager on duty, and it ends of course with a 1 star review.

[@AnnoyingCritic-is7rp]

This is a wonderful episode. This episode tells the story of what women have to do to survive. They have to take drugs to be beautiful. It harms them. They have to be mail order brides - and the analogy is they have to put up with men who aren't perfect. And while women have all kinds of opportunities today, they're still huge abuse and violence against women and fewer opportunities for many. I don't think Mudd was forcing them to do anything. He was giving them drugs for them to obtain their ends of getting men. This is why the end of the episode is so important. He accepts her for what she is. And that they are all beautiful and it was a drugs that were making them ugly. This episode was really based on a western. Gene originaly sold the show as "Wagon Train to the stars". It is a science fiction allegory to our 19th settlers. I kind of like this over TNG's perfect post-scarcity with replicators. One of the criticisms of Gene is that there is too little conflict in scarcity in the Federation in TNG. That would inspire DS9.

[@OldTrekkie23]

Off-topic: in fairness to TNG, season, one and two, there was a writer strike, and they were remaking previous Star Trek Scripps as they were allowed to by the writers Guild. That said, Roddenberry was more prevalent and that was a problem. Now, back to Roddenberry's previous issues :)

[@PaleGhost69]

This episode had more layers of cringe than a soggy onion. Best part was Spock reacting to and observing the effects on the crew. I was half expecting them to be secretly Orion slave girls with the way all the men started drooling.

[@DisposableMillennial]

Dorothy Fontana was the Mother of Star Trek.

[@jdlewis3706]

The Enemy Within is obviously about Kirk wrestling with his life and death struggle with his IBS. I can't wait for the human adventure to continue! 😂

[@paperclipbike]

This episode was tantalising, yet baffling: as Sean said, there was almost something there, but, ultimately there wasn't. I was hopeful for a while that Bones was going to discover that the women weren't human at all, and that the "getting older" scenes when the drug was wearing off were going to lead to mutation back to whatever species they were... but no, they were just desperate, drugg-addled, old (?) women. The mining colony also felt more "Wagon Train to the Stars" than anything deserving a star date...

[@Dan-Simms]

Pretty wild that this was progressive for the time, sure am glad its gotten better but far from perfect yet...sadly some places have started going backwards.

[@daniel385]

I understand the hate for this episode but it does have a redeeming quality. More than any other episode (and I'm including "Where No Man Has Gone Before") this episode convinced me as a child that these characters were traveling in deep space, far removed from the rest of humanity, and they only had their wits and technology to help them survive the 5 year mission. Star Trek lost a lot when it became too easy to call Starfleet for help.