183: Star Trek TOS Season 2, “I, Mudd”

 In this episode of Trek in Time, we’re talking about the many shapes of Androids in Trek, despite the fact that all those shapes are humanoid. Anyway, we’re gonna talk about why they all ignored one another. That’s right. We’re talking about I Mudd, episode 37 overall, eighth of the second season, but 41st in production, and originally broadcast on November 3rd, 1967.

Welcome everybody to Trek in Time where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast, so we are talking about 1967. We’re getting very close to moving into 1968. Matt, how exciting is that? Super exciting.

Who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci-fi and I write some stuff for kids. And with me as always, is my brother Matt. He is the guru and inquisitor behind the YouTube channel, Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you today?

I’m doing well. I just to, when I watch this episode, Sean already knows what I’m about to say. I got a projector and I a hundred inch projector screen. It’s awesome to watch movies on. I watched this episode on that and I was like five minutes into it and thought this is a weird way to watch the original series.

I texted Sean an image, Yeah, of Kirk talking to Harry Mud and just wrote, just the way the creators of Star Trek never envisioned this being watched. I think you should drop that photo into this video so people are watching on YouTube can see it. It is ridiculously big. Yes, they are larger than life size.

It is as if the two of them suffered from Gigantism and are crawling out of Matt’s wall. Before we get into our conversation about this episode, we always like to visit your comments on our previous episode. So Matt, what have you got for us this week? Well, from, we have some new listeners watchers. Uh, they’re catching up.

Uh, we have one from the episode from Enterprise Fight or Flight. Mm-hmm. Uh, from night of the Living, Fred. Great username, by the way, who wrote, so I started with Your Strange New Worlds episodes and then have caught up on the original series episodes and now I’m going in stardate order and rewatching Enterprise in between the original series episodes.

I’m in a temporal cold war with myself apparently. That’s very good comment. I like that. Love it. And then, uh, Baba Rudra, who comments on our Still To Be Determined podcast from occasion. Dropped a comment that said, Sean, my God. So now I’m going to need to binge your pod. I have things to do, guys, but yes, I am that much of a nerd.

Thank Vaal for 1.5. He commented on the Apple episode, which was all about Vaal. Yes. So welcome Babarudra. Yes, welcome. Yeah, I, I was on Reddit recently and saw somebody in the Star Trek community say like, how do people. Am I the only one who just immediately fast forwards through Enterprise’s theme song? I immediately flashed back to how many times you and I talked about how terrible that theme song is.

Yeah. And I could now wonder is this person potentially rewatching the show because of us? This is that our legacy that we force people to go listen to that theme song.

And then I had, I had to share these ’cause there’s a couple of wrong answers only that were from Mirror Mirror talking about the deadly years. I thought were worth sharing, so I’ll read them right here. Yes. Uh, new commenter, music for robots by robots said, quote the deadly ears. In this episode, Spock is approached by an elite Vulcan Strike force, known only as the deadly ears, A covert ops team so silent, so logical, so sharply eyebrowed that entire rebellions have surrendered at the mere rustle of their robes, their goal, recruit Spock, and finally balance the squad’s coolest ratio.

Kirk gets nervous fearing a Spock defection while Bones just mutters something bitter about pointy eared hob goblins, and pours another brandy. Torn between duty and the chance to wear an all black Vulcan stealth tunic with unnecessarily dramatic shoulder pads. Spock ultimately declines citing loyalty to the enterprise, and Kirk’s very real fear of being the least interesting one on the bridge.

I like that, which, yeah, our viewers should feel free when it’s time for wrong answers only. Feel free to change the title. Yes, go with the puns. Do whatever you need to do, which is also Dan Sims added one, which was also wrong answer, only for the deadly ears. After discovering a new star system, the crew of the USS Enterprise are all, let’s say.

Incapacitated due to a loud low frequency sound, which is they what they call the brown note. There you go. Fortunately, Spock is the only one not affected, so it is up to him to save the day. Thank you as always to our viewers and listeners for those. And now that noise you here in the background and those flashing lights, why?

Yes, that is the read alert. It’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Matt, I will give you a little bit of heads up. This one struck me as a little confusing, ’cause the last one wasn’t, the last one was worse, but this one still has its moments. Okay. Captain Kirk and the crew have a second run in with the conman Harry Mudd.

This time finding him as the king of a planet of Androids. The enterprise is captured by an Android, which takes the entire crew to an uncharted planet in the galaxy. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty and Chekhov land with the Android on the planet to find Harry Mudd as the king of the planet and about 200,000 Androids to serve him. He reveals that the Androids want to learn about and serve humans and demand more specimens.

Harry Mudd plans to leave the entire crew of the Enterprise behind and take the Starship. By unraveling the weak points of the Androids, the crew of the enterprise damaged the main control unit, Norman, reprogram the Androids to serve their original purpose of settling the planet, gain control of the enterprise, and leave Harry Mudd behind to live with the humorous androids.

That last sentence, which is practically three paragraphs long, is the one that left me going what?

This episode originally broadcast on November 3rd, 1967. What was the world like at that time? Matt, you do remember correctly? Yes. To Sir With Love. The theme song from the movie to Sir with Love was the number one song. Take it away, Matt. If I close my eyes, it’s like I’m listening to Lulu herself. And in theaters?

Why? If you were wondering if people were saying the South would rise again. Yes, they were. Gone with the Wind. Still the number one film in its return to theaters as part of its 30th anniversary. And in television we’ve been looking at the Nielsen’s and we’ve been trying to compare apples to apples, and we typically have looked at the top programs, but as I’ve mentioned before, 1966, the first season of Star Trek, we talked about a lot of the shows that are at the top of the list for 1967.

So I decided to do a little digging. And look for other programs that were also running. And after a little bit of head scratching, suddenly I recalled something that I knew this entire time. Why yes, if I just clicked my shoes together, I could go home anytime I want. No, that wasn’t it. It was this, The Prisoner was originally broadcast in 1967 and it was earning about a nine in the Nielsen’s.

So Star Trek was a slightly more popular show at an 11. Prisoner is of course the British Television series created and starring Patrick McGowan as number six, an unnamed British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village after resigning from his position. It is a head trip.

It is a great program and it is fun and challenging and at times camp and confusing and is not in any way, I think, actually explainable. That is part of the joy of the program. I recently discovered to my full enjoyment, the original program that McGowan had made previous to this, which there has always been fan speculation that the prisoner is supposed to be the sequel to Danger Man, McGowan himself has said that’s not the case, but there’s a lot of overlap in the two programs.

And what’s fun about Danger Man? Is that it is arguably a better spy program than the early James Bond films were. It is smart, it is sophisticated, and he’s effectively playing a James Bond style character. I encourage people who like Spycraft and like that kind of program, check out danger, man. And if you like the sci-fi, the weird, the somewhat fantastical, check out The Prisoner.

Sean, I got a question for you. Yes. Who is number one? I will be seeing you.

And in the news at this time on Friday, February, sorry, February what? Friday, November 3rd, 1967. Why, in almost an homage to what we talked about last week in the deadly years, which of course Matt and I thoroughly thrashed. We talked about, we talked about how at the time the expectant expected life of a male in the United States was 70.

It was a little bit longer for a female with the social security kicking in at 65. So the expectation was not that somebody would live very long past retirement and just like that, a week later in the news, there’s a payroll tax rise of 6 billion put into the, as they call it in the New York Times, old age bill.

Mm-hmm. Man, it was a attempt to inject more money by taking money out of people’s payrolls and injecting more money into the social security system. There’s also an article about China topping the list of potential dangers to not the United States, but to the Soviet Union. And there’s also a story about Vietnam with the US saying Vietcong could take part in a peace parlay.

Well, we all know the spoiler of that story. On now to our discussion about this episode, I Mudd, as I mentioned just a few moments ago, Matt and I spoke last week about the deadly years, and one of our complaints about the deadly years was what was the point. And one of the things that we brought up was, well, the next generation seems to have hidden its rough edges, slightly better, so that when you watch the early seasons, at the time of original broadcast of next generation.

You didn’t get quite as much of a sense of like uneven. It all felt of a piece. And then as the show evolved into seasons three and four, you felt like, oh, the show is actually changing and it’s something even better. Whereas here, the dynamic is fairly uneven. So you end up with good episode, bad episode.

Good episode, bad episode. I’m curious, Matt, where does this one land for you? I know where it lands for me, but where does it land for you?

This is a good, bad episode. Exactly. That was, that’s where, that’s where it landed for me too. Go on with that. It’s, the reason I say it’s a bad episode is I, this is a Saturday morning cartoon. This is the, the, the tuba and the slide whistles and the prat falls and the like. I can’t stand it. It’s stupid. I can’t, I, uh, uh, uh, why is this in Star Trek?

That’s why it’s bad. But it’s done well in that, for what it is. It’s amusing. It’s funny, it’s got an interesting dynamic with Mudd and the captain and the androids. It’s, it’s an enjoyable, bad episode. Where last week was a just bad, bad episode. I did not wanna shut this one off, but I was kind of like, I wish this didn’t exist, but I’m enjoying it.

Yeah. For me, this one is one that I remember it clearly from childhood. Yeah. So like I have a lot of nostalgia around this one. There are elements of it that haven’t aged well since the late sixties, but they haven’t aged well in such a vanilla way that like, mm-hmm. There’s a lot of sexism in this.

There’s a lot of like, oh, the nagging wife is a big punchline here, but it’s so, like you said, it’s so broad and so cartoonish that it doesn’t really matter. And it’s obvious that they saw Harry Mudd as being a strong foil for Kirk. I also think it’s obvious, and this is something we talked about in the last episode, you can tell by the performance of when the actors feel like something is not going to work.

You can see the like, oh, I’m just gonna say these lines, and then we’re gonna move on and shoot the next scene. And you can see when they believe in it. And in this episode, I believe they believed in it for the humor of it. Yes, I believe that they thought it would be fun to do this. One complaint I had was they underutilized Uhura after making her a key point in the beaming down to the planet.

She’s silent for multiple scenes. She doesn’t say anything for multiple scenes. Sexism. Eventually she does talk. Sexism. Yeah, and I was like, I was like, I have a feeling that somebody was like, oh, she should go down to the planet. But they didn’t know why or what to do with her until it was like, well, we’ll offer her beauty and youth.

That will be what a woman would want. So that’s why she’s there. Yeah. And then they have the very weird turnaround of like, and then Scott and Scotty suddenly shows up and I get the feeling like they actually wanted Scotty there the whole time, but they thought, oh, well let’s take Uhura down instead.

So you end up with some sexism. You end up with all of that being thrown at the screen. Very normal for a 1960s show, but you can tell is particular the scene where they do the weird, we’re gonna make the robots malfunction by being illogical. They’re full blown bonkers. And they’re not phoning it in they, no, they’re not.

They’re not. They’re all committed when Chekhov has to do his, stand completely still and launches into multiple jumps. I could only think how exhausted that that actor must have been after doing that for however long. The setting off of the explosive, the death of Scotty when they shoot him with whistles.

Yeah, and Shatner loves comedy and he’s good at it. One of my favorite lines of this, Sean was the and woman Android saying, why should we leave you? And he just goes, because we don’t like you. BB goes there. It was just like, you could tell he was having fun. Yeah. He was having fun with this. Yeah. And I think that’s part of the reason why I found it enjoyable to watch.

Yeah. Because the actress looked like they were having a good time. I think they like guest star too. I think they like the guest star of Yes. Uh, Harry Mudd, where when you get that kind of performance from a guest star, it makes it easy for the regulars to lean on and he is so unabashedly scene stealing.

And, you know, literally it’s Q like twirling a mustache. He’s like Q and, and he leans into all these things of just like the way he growls certain words and the way he leecherously looks around. And this episode is particularly sex charged without anybody actually saying, oh, you have sex with these androids.

Like nobody has to say it because it’s, oh no, super communicated of. And I took a particular interest in making the Maisie series and like all of that, when you get Chekhov sitting in the chair drinking what is ostensibly wine or something like that. Yeah, the whole sex conversation. Him saying, so leecherous Harry Mudd created you, alright, this is gonna be great.

Like it is everybody, like everybody’s suddenly on board with all of these things and you end up with. It’s very quickly wiped away, but you end up with scenes where it looks like Kirk is having to convince his crew not to accept this offer. Like they play very lightly with it being a dilemma. And then he quickly is like, snap into shape Mr.

And everybody’s like, yes sir. And then everybody’s over it and, and quickly moves on. But the, the bonkers illogic scene, the humorous performance. I’m sorry, but the, the final moments with the Androids when he is, when Mudd is confronted by multiple versions of 500. Yeah. And, and he’s sputtering about the inhumanity of what is being done to him.

For me, it’s campy fun. I, I watched this episode and I have the fun that is missing from the previous episode, the deadly years. This episode strikes me as fun. It doesn’t have a point though. I just wanna bring that up. It ultimately, sadly, doesn’t have a point, and that’s where the conversation turns to all things Android.

Yeah. Did you find yourself like, I don’t know about you, but I watched the remastered version, so it has slightly better special effects, like when the Norman robot shows his abdomen and it’s like, whoa, that’s pretty cool. Yeah, and I found myself thinking, I wish they had done more with. It’s not what they were doing in 1967.

It’s no. Can I just like quickly say like, what was going through my head? Yes. I, I, it might be the same thing that was in my head. Go ahead. I wish there had been more long-term planning in Trek in the original series. It took them a while to get around to that in Next Generation as well, where some intriguing ideas are presented and then dropped entirely and you never revisit them.

It’s the norm for television, but I wish this episode had tied into what are little girls made of where you had the androids that referred to the old ones. I wish this had tied into that. I wish, yeah, this tied into next generation. I wish that this was somehow research that Dr. Soon had gotten ahold of.

And went about designing Data with this as the progenitor. I wish there had been more of that. I think that that would’ve been really fun. The idea of there are these androids out there that were built by something so long ago, nobody knows what it was, and they at some point got turned into humanoid robots that eventually become Data and then it becomes, the Data is the one who then becomes the self-replicating, creating a new species as opposed to it’s just simply a tool in the shed. I think that that would’ve been fascinating, but that’s not what they were doing. Yeah. For me it was the same thing. It’s like my idea was not that, but it was, I wish they had played around with this.

Are these sentient life forms or not? Kind of a thing. We’re here to serve you. It’s like, why are you here to serve us? It makes no sense, like exploring that and maybe having, instead of having Kirk and Crew trying to convince them, or I mean, to put them into the logic loops to win them over and to break them, which they’ve done in previous episodes, why not try to convince them through logic of, you don’t have to serve us.

It should be what you want. What do you wanna do? Yeah. Like that kind of a thing, and kind of turn the tables on them and make them go, huh? Yeah. You know what? We’re just gonna do our own thing down here, you know, like, and let them go. It’s like it would’ve been more interesting to me to have them explore a robotic life form versus they’re here to serve humanity and be sex bots.

Yeah. And nothing more. Yeah. Also, but it was 1960, so whatcha gonna do? It’s 1960, so they’re just gonna be like, it was sex bots. Wow. Yeah. A final note. I love the fact that they do not deal at all with the fact that Norman has been able to get aboard a star ship ostensibly as a member of the crew. Yep. To steal the ship, correct.

His stealing of the ship. I found oddly fun and reminiscent of when Data steals the ship. Yes. We’re just like, I can go around and do all this stuff and do it so fast. Nobody’s gonna be able to realize that I’m doing this until it’s too late. Like, yes, that is a fun thing to see an Android do, but you have that initial scene where Bones is like, there’s something about that guy and he won’t show up for his, his, uh, physical, despite the fact I’ve told him he has to come three times and like, okay, first of all, that implies that he is actually in your ship’s register.

Yes. He’s in uniform, he’s shown up. He is not responding to orders. Correct. And the first office of the ship is like, that’s because you’re a bad doctor. Don’t. Don’t overthink. Don’t overthink it, Sean. That’s what I’m talking about. This is a bad episode. This is a bad episode, but it makes up for that badness with the charm.

It’s a very charming episode. Fun. It is a charming episode. It’s fun. Yeah. Yeah. But viewers, listeners, where do you land on this one? Do you like a butt of a, I was gonna say a bit of of Android humor and what was gonna come out my mouth was a butt of Android, which then puts me strongly in Sexbot territory.

Yeah, it does. Do you enjoy a bit of Android humor and using illogic once again to disarm the machine, or did this one not land for you? Let us know in the comments and we’re back to wrong answers only. And this one is the trouble with Tribbles. So please, oh yeah, jump into the comments. Let us know what that one is about by telling us what it’s not actually about.

Don’t forget liking, subscribing, comments. Those are all easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you’d like to support us directly, you can go to Trek in Time Show. Click the join button there. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads, and it also makes you an Ensign, which means you’ll be signed up for our spinoff show Out of Time in which we talk about programs that don’t fit within the confines of this show.

We hope you’ll be interested in checking that out. Thank you as always for taking the time to watch or listen, and we’ll talk to you next time.