Star Trek: S1E6 Mudd's Women review

Well congratulations, Star Trek. It took six episodes to get here. You did a pretty good job. And then I met Harry F. Mudd. I'll let you guess what the F. stands for.

The Venus drug? Excuse me? Let's try that in French, see how mad I am in a different language. Excusez moi? Nope, I wash my hands of this enormous nonsense, which combines a basic "beauty is on the inside" morality play with some colonial-era frontier sexism. Roomie's sitting over there not quite clear on why I'm annoyed, which I'm going to chalk up to having watched this at a younger age or in a different mindset.

For me, this is just plain sexist. Simplistic, reductionist, however you want to position it, this episode is a tremendous heap of junk. Why the blazes would Eve agree to be marketed as a sex object in order to... what even was the point? Were they offered money by Mudd? Did he promise them good lives? That planet's a windblown, empty hellhole whose population (three!) consists of impatient, randy, sexist douchemonkeys who are all on board with flesh capitalism. Boy it's a good thing there weren't four, or you might have had to sell off a woman who isn't a one-shot character! So no, I don't get what the incentive was, especially for Eve who the script takes time to tell us about.

Yes, I get that the show is like 40-50 years old, but we had been doing pretty well up until now. I don't understand how the women aren't basically chattel in this whole scheme, how it's any of Mudd's business or how he persuaded them to let him be their pimp and wife-delivery scheme. I don't really want to, either, because at this point I already feel like I put more thought into the plot than the writers did.

Maybe I'm misreading. Maybe I'm cranky because the pain was quite severe during the episode and my next T3 isn't for another 18 minutes. Maybe I'm not being as fair to the era as the show needs me to be. But you know what? I don't think any of that (well I am in pain but I don't think that matters). I think this was just a short-sighted episode cribbed from some Western novel or frontier adventure idea that forgot that a modern society from even the era in which this show was made, let alone the supposedly more advanced society that Enterprise comes from (which is on Earth), should be more equal and a hell of a lot less sexist.

So this is what we're calling a crash point. When we hit a crash point, I'm going to stop watching straight through and switch to only a pre-made list of episodes based on recommends from the forum, the comments and of course my friends. I may come back at some point to watch the rest, but for the moment I think I've seen Star Trek's low point.