Surely, there can be no truer test of whether or not someone is a die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fan than asking them their feelings on Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the sleazy entrepreneur introduced early in Star Trek's first season. The more zealous fan might feel some affection for the fat old goat, waddling as he did through two episodes of the Original Series and one episode of the Animated Series (as much as anyone can waddle through a primitive 2D 1970s cartoon short), and from what I can gather, he's still all the rage amongst old-school fans. Hell, they're even slapping a younger version of him into Star Trek: Discovery, just for good measure.
I, on the other hand, don't quite understand what all the fuss is about. He's an outdated stereotype of some sort of vaguely ethnic used car salesman, chewing up way too much scenery with a far too ridiculous accent (and in a show that stars William Shatner, Walter Koenig and James Doohan, that's saying something) and boring me to tears with some frivolous throwaway comic relief plots about robot women that would be offensively misogynistic if they weren't already so fucking boring.
But back in 1978, he probably seemed like he was the funniest thing ever featured on Trek, and J.A. Lawrence diligently enlisted his services for - wait for it - another mindless throwaway plot about his nagging robot women, who now want to found their own society, free of Mudd and other humans. Granted, there's a welcome undercurrent of emancipation and equal rights to Lawrence's rather ridiculous-even-for-Star-Trek yarn, but in the end, your enjoyment of his work is probably going to hinge rather heavily on how much you care for Mudd as a character, and I, for one, do not. There is also the fact that Mudd is basically a straw man propped up by his creators to mock and ridicule overtly sexist men, while many of the more subtle and dangerous aspects of misogyny were (and still are) allowed to flourish unfettered. Whatever feminist message was written into Mudd as a character instead ends up a mocking oversimplification of feminist issues that amuses and satisfies no one, save for perhaps the Trek fan so blinded by his obsession with the franchise that he (and it's probably gonna be a 'he' and not a 'she') simply cannot admit to any wrongdoing on its part, a sickness that fans of the Original Series in particular are especially prone to.
It's always interesting to see how weirdly scattered individual Trek fans' feelings toward the respective series of the franchise are. True, the predominant wisdom is to regard Next Generation and/or Original Series as the flagships of the franchise, but that is by no means a universal sentiment. Fans rank the series in every possible permutation, with some swearing by Voyager as the best one, while others feel the franchise peaked during the original cast movies in the 80s. What's even more interesting to me is what individual fans take away from individual series, especially the ones that aren't necessarily their favorites. A Deep Space Nine fan might like the characters on Next Generation, but hate the storylines, while a Voyager fan might appreciate Enterprise's special effects without caring much for any of the rest of it. It's different for everybody, and that's part of what makes Star Trek so great.
Personally, I find many things to love about each part of the entire franchise. To me, the best aspects of Original Series - the parts that still hold up after a half-century - are the characters and the grand-scope ideas (the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans), as well as the aura of excitement and classic sci-fi mystery a la Forbidden Planet, one which Trek has continuously attempted to duplicate throughout the years, but never quite matched. You never know what they're going to find during the course of any particular episode, and if it's a good one, it'll be a creepy one, populated by insidious aliens and fallible humans treading the edge of known space, or it'll be a Cold War analogy, with Klingons and Romulans standing in for the good ol' USSR, while Kirk and Spock deftly outfox them.
What I don't take away from the Original Series is hackneyed drivel like Elaan Of Troyius, Shore Leave, Who Mourns For Adonais, A Piece Of The Action, and, yes, both of the Mudd episodes. There are, quite simply, things which I think we can all quite simply forget about 1960s TV, and there is much throughout Original Series that does not stand the test of time. Offensive stereotyping, filler nonsense and retreads of stories we've all heard a million times; even if Trek was the first to implement a then-novel concept that has since been repeated ad nauseam (both within the franchise and without), the original episode to feature said concept still needs to be, you know, watchable. Wolf In The Fold's now-tired trope of the body-swapping serial killer still works because the original episode is actually pretty good, whereas the nonsense seen in By Any Other Name was already tired before the episode was finished.
Further exacerbating the issue is that several of Original Series' more regrettable ideas, many of them seemingly coined out of desperation due to the show's perennially low budget (Spectre Of The Gun, Patterns Of Force), were later repeated throughout the franchise, with either nazis, cowboys or native Americans popping up in seemingly every other season or so of Trek throughout the years, and this unfortunate tendency towards TOS homages continues to this day by way of Mudd's forthcoming appearance on Star Trek: Discovery. While I'm willing to chalk this up to the people running the Trek franchise respecting and understanding its fans about as much as Donald Trump respects and understands women ("Everyone likes classic Trek, so let's do shitty, contrived rehashes of original crew adventures and watch the millions roll in!"), the fact remains that a lot of the Original Series episodes are just really, really bad, and should in all honesty be disregarded and forgotten. There should certainly not have been any 303-page books written that further detail the escapades of an exceptionally stupid character on a show already capable of some pretty fucking stupid shit.
So is Mudd's Angels a waste of time? Oh yes, absolutely, but again, the answer really depends on how much you like Mudd. So if bumbling ba-dum-tiss comedy that blatantly insults women even as it pretends to understand them is your kind of thing, then by all means, dig up a copy and tuck in. I, on the other hand, will be lovingly preparing my next blog post, one dedicated to a slightly more successful foray into feminizing the boys' club that Star Trek still was in the late 70s, Kathleen Sky's Vulcan! Its secret? A strong female lead character written by a woman. It really is that simple sometimes.
I, on the other hand, don't quite understand what all the fuss is about. He's an outdated stereotype of some sort of vaguely ethnic used car salesman, chewing up way too much scenery with a far too ridiculous accent (and in a show that stars William Shatner, Walter Koenig and James Doohan, that's saying something) and boring me to tears with some frivolous throwaway comic relief plots about robot women that would be offensively misogynistic if they weren't already so fucking boring.
But back in 1978, he probably seemed like he was the funniest thing ever featured on Trek, and J.A. Lawrence diligently enlisted his services for - wait for it - another mindless throwaway plot about his nagging robot women, who now want to found their own society, free of Mudd and other humans. Granted, there's a welcome undercurrent of emancipation and equal rights to Lawrence's rather ridiculous-even-for-Star-Trek yarn, but in the end, your enjoyment of his work is probably going to hinge rather heavily on how much you care for Mudd as a character, and I, for one, do not. There is also the fact that Mudd is basically a straw man propped up by his creators to mock and ridicule overtly sexist men, while many of the more subtle and dangerous aspects of misogyny were (and still are) allowed to flourish unfettered. Whatever feminist message was written into Mudd as a character instead ends up a mocking oversimplification of feminist issues that amuses and satisfies no one, save for perhaps the Trek fan so blinded by his obsession with the franchise that he (and it's probably gonna be a 'he' and not a 'she') simply cannot admit to any wrongdoing on its part, a sickness that fans of the Original Series in particular are especially prone to.
It's always interesting to see how weirdly scattered individual Trek fans' feelings toward the respective series of the franchise are. True, the predominant wisdom is to regard Next Generation and/or Original Series as the flagships of the franchise, but that is by no means a universal sentiment. Fans rank the series in every possible permutation, with some swearing by Voyager as the best one, while others feel the franchise peaked during the original cast movies in the 80s. What's even more interesting to me is what individual fans take away from individual series, especially the ones that aren't necessarily their favorites. A Deep Space Nine fan might like the characters on Next Generation, but hate the storylines, while a Voyager fan might appreciate Enterprise's special effects without caring much for any of the rest of it. It's different for everybody, and that's part of what makes Star Trek so great.
Personally, I find many things to love about each part of the entire franchise. To me, the best aspects of Original Series - the parts that still hold up after a half-century - are the characters and the grand-scope ideas (the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans), as well as the aura of excitement and classic sci-fi mystery a la Forbidden Planet, one which Trek has continuously attempted to duplicate throughout the years, but never quite matched. You never know what they're going to find during the course of any particular episode, and if it's a good one, it'll be a creepy one, populated by insidious aliens and fallible humans treading the edge of known space, or it'll be a Cold War analogy, with Klingons and Romulans standing in for the good ol' USSR, while Kirk and Spock deftly outfox them.
What I don't take away from the Original Series is hackneyed drivel like Elaan Of Troyius, Shore Leave, Who Mourns For Adonais, A Piece Of The Action, and, yes, both of the Mudd episodes. There are, quite simply, things which I think we can all quite simply forget about 1960s TV, and there is much throughout Original Series that does not stand the test of time. Offensive stereotyping, filler nonsense and retreads of stories we've all heard a million times; even if Trek was the first to implement a then-novel concept that has since been repeated ad nauseam (both within the franchise and without), the original episode to feature said concept still needs to be, you know, watchable. Wolf In The Fold's now-tired trope of the body-swapping serial killer still works because the original episode is actually pretty good, whereas the nonsense seen in By Any Other Name was already tired before the episode was finished.
Further exacerbating the issue is that several of Original Series' more regrettable ideas, many of them seemingly coined out of desperation due to the show's perennially low budget (Spectre Of The Gun, Patterns Of Force), were later repeated throughout the franchise, with either nazis, cowboys or native Americans popping up in seemingly every other season or so of Trek throughout the years, and this unfortunate tendency towards TOS homages continues to this day by way of Mudd's forthcoming appearance on Star Trek: Discovery. While I'm willing to chalk this up to the people running the Trek franchise respecting and understanding its fans about as much as Donald Trump respects and understands women ("Everyone likes classic Trek, so let's do shitty, contrived rehashes of original crew adventures and watch the millions roll in!"), the fact remains that a lot of the Original Series episodes are just really, really bad, and should in all honesty be disregarded and forgotten. There should certainly not have been any 303-page books written that further detail the escapades of an exceptionally stupid character on a show already capable of some pretty fucking stupid shit.
So is Mudd's Angels a waste of time? Oh yes, absolutely, but again, the answer really depends on how much you like Mudd. So if bumbling ba-dum-tiss comedy that blatantly insults women even as it pretends to understand them is your kind of thing, then by all means, dig up a copy and tuck in. I, on the other hand, will be lovingly preparing my next blog post, one dedicated to a slightly more successful foray into feminizing the boys' club that Star Trek still was in the late 70s, Kathleen Sky's Vulcan! Its secret? A strong female lead character written by a woman. It really is that simple sometimes.
Ha! Your writing is so so entertaining. I will def read your next blog post because sometimes those dudes just don't get it....and need a lady, of course.
ReplyDeleteMudd was always slimy... one of the least entertaining and most annoying characters in Classic Trek. Why they chose to bring him back to Star Trek Discovery is beyond me. I get that it was an attempt to tie the new show to the original series, but surely they could have found a better link.
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