Star Trek: The Original Series — 1x06 — Mudd's Women
Synopsis
The Enterprise rescues con artist Harry Mudd and his "beautiful" female cargo.
Filler rating: bad filler
Technically Mudd will recur, but all episodes which feature him suck, so they can all be considered bad filler.
Remarkable scenes
- Mudd: "You'll find out that ships' captains are already married, girl, to their vessels. You'd find that out the first time you came between him and the ship."
- Mudd's customers fighting over the women.
Review
Mudd's Women does much to assault the credibility of Star Trek's progressive future which was supposed depict, among other things, a world without sexism. It makes sense that even in the universe of Star Trek that there are groups of people or cultural idiosyncrasies that constitute a throwback, but the way that the plot of this episode treats the whole thing as if it were normative and widespread is offensive.
What's worse is even setting that aside, this episode's plot logic doesn't make much sense. If Mudd's magic pills were placebos, then why did the appearances of the women so dramatically change after taking them? And why didn't any of the security personnel assigned to monitor Mudd report any of the numerous things they overheard to the captain? Add to that Mudd's acting. The less said about it the better. This is easily the worst episode so far.