Mudd's Women: One Last Star Trek Review (at least for now!)

I swear I'm not turning this into a Star Trek blog. Just one more Trek entry and I'll get back to other topics, promise.

When last we left our intrepid twenty-first century feminist, Ian Saul Whitcomb, he'd gone through five episodes of the original Star Trek and been dismayed by its paternalism toward women. Dauntingly, he knew the next episode he faced would be "Mudd's Women," a tale of mail-order brides gussied-up by a beauty-inducing drug and taken to a mining colony as goods of commerce. Would the show's woefully dated attitudes make this the most uncomfortable episode yet?

Surprisingly, and to my great relief, no. In fact, the episode stood in stark contrast to its predecessors as the first genuine example of Star Trek as morality play, commenting on the social order of its time and suggesting that things ought to change.

(At this point, I'll give an obligatory spoiler warning, in case you haven't ever in the last fifty years watched this episode ...)

Where previous installments of the series showed the male officers of the Enterprise occasionally comparing notes on the attractiveness of female crew members, the Venus Drug of "Mudd's Women" turns them into gawking idiots, rendered incompetent by their baser instincts. Captain Kirk largely resists -- by taking his awareness of the women's hypnotic effect and making a determined effort to treat them like people and maintain his professionalism. When one of the women, Eve McHuron, complains about the eyes of all the crewmen following her, Kirk apologizes, saying, "They're not usually like that."

So despite the archaic plot device of mail-order marriage (and numerous "ooh-la-la" musical cues as the women slink and sway around), the episode carries a clear anti-ogling message throughout.

More importantly, in the climactic scenes, Eve McHuron chooses certain death over continuing to play the role society has foisted on her. She survives, demonstrating in the process a genuine character and intelligence that sets Kirk up to deliver the episode's crowning message: that there's only one kind of person -- "You either believe in yourself, or you don't."

Finally, six episodes in, I've found the Star Trek that forcefully helped make me the person I am today.

Ahead, warp factor one.

This is not a Music Recommendation

You need to rush out and buy the album "Children of the Stars" by The Orion Experience.



I know my post title says this isn't a music recommendation, and albums contain music, so it seems like I'm being a big fat liar, but stick with me.

The Orion Experience is a plucky New York City band obsessed with making exuberant, hook-filled pop music. They're brilliant, and they must know it, because everybody around them must be telling them they're brilliant all the time. Yet so far as I can tell, nobody's ever heard of them and they've been languishing in obscurity for years.

But when you listen to "Children of the Stars," you find that they don't seem to care. Because even greater than their obsession with blending the sounds of Blondie and the Beatles and ELO and Lady Gaga and a hundred other influences is their palpable belief in proclaiming the beauty of the universe while trying to make our human world a better place.

The album is so packed with optimism, enthusiasm, and encouragement that many cynical 21st Centurians will reflexively dismiss it as cornball fluff. But in spite of the wall of power-pop/glam-rock sound and the over-the-top cosmic lyrical frames, these people are genuinely on a mission to change the world, and the album is dead-set on getting you to pick yourself up and do your part.

Buy it, listen to it, believe in it. Then get busy building the reality you used to wish existed, before adulthood slowly ground it out of you.

Also, the music is really, really good. Sorry, I couldn't help saying so.