Too Much Star Trek
If you’ve come to me today for insight on Omicron or the meaning of Christmas or the inherent self-destructiveness of Bitcoin, I have bad news for you. Thanks to last fortnight’s unexpected burst of sincerity, I am hoist onto my own petard, and must now expectorate not one but two missives on a corny old television show most of you probably wouldn’t watch unless I went full Clockwork Orange on you and propped your eyelids up with little surgical steel frames. If it’s any consolation, I am beginning to appreciate the horror of seventy-nine episodes and how much of my life I’m trading for a few laughs about William Shatner’s impeccably mowed chest, which makes its sixth appearance here in seven goes.
Mudd’s Women
Once, while I was mired in my middle teens, a local TV station put on a twenty-four hour Star Trek marathon, an event I observed as any good Catholic would Christmas Mass. I stayed awake around the clock, maintaining an outpost of pillows and blankets in front of the TV—no doubt to the dismay of my sister who was thus prevented from watching The Smurfs—well-larded with snacks and soda and a notebook in which I kept careful note of the number of dead at the end of each episode, as one does. I have a vague recollection of missing at least portions of one or two in the interest of eating or taking a shower or possibly just evacuating a set of overstressed bowels—I can’t speak with any certainty as the records have been long lost. Mudd’s Women was either not among the episodes on offer that long day, or perhaps it was one of the ones I earmarked for the taking of repast/relief. It’s a singularly unappealing title; not only are you about to watch a show about someone named Mudd, but Mudd apparently possesses some sort of harem. How can one possibly get excited about this?
Mudd, it turns out, is this sort of intergalactic swashbuckler and pirate trading in, well, women. Three women, each of whom possesses some sort of God-level feminine charm that turns the Enterprise’s male crew into a group of panting wolves making aooga sounds and unrolling red tongues across the floor while their eyeballs pop out of their heads like gophers. Is this episode sexist? Oh yes, though the tropes it plays on at least have the virtue of making the men look like buffoons.
In fact, watching Bones and Scottie1 drool idiotically at the trio marks a small turning point in the series—the first time the show really pokes fun at itself which, let’s face it, needed to be done. There’s no way that the deadly seriousness of Charlie X and Where No Man Has Gone Before could possibly be maintained within these hallowed plywood walls, and Mudd’s Women is the series’ first smirk, letting us know that everyone involved knows their little show is kind of a joke, but they’re all just having fun here, right?
At the center of it all is Roger Carmel, an inveterate television fixture like all Star Trek guest stars, playing Mudd as the lovable ne'er-do-well—yes, he’s trading in human flesh but can you resist that hangdog look with the hands clasped behind the back while the toe swivels against the floor? It’s a classic from the Bart Simpson repertoire and here it is twenty-one years earlier. No doubt Italians watching commedia dell'arte street plays in 1590 were treated to this exact same performance. It’s broad comedy;2 kinda the physical equivalent of “I just flew in from Cleveland and boy are my arms tired.” But it’s comedy and Carmel does it pretty well, plying a cartoon mustache and a set of eyes that never stop winking and casting sidelong glances.
The story is insane. Mudd advertises himself as a peddler in human flesh, which is ok for some reason, but it gradually comes out that he’s worse than all that—the flesh he’s peddling is fraudulent. The women all look like swimsuit models, see, so long as Mudd is feeding them these little pills that look suspiciously like the gummy melatonins I give my son when he can’t sleep. Take away the gummies and they turn into, well, to be honest it looks like they just took their makeup off is all. The three lonesome miners Mudd aims to sell them to, we are given to understand, are a picky bunch.
This is weird but the weirdest part comes at the end when one of the women takes a placebo and becomes foxy again, and Kirk explains to her that she’s only smoking hot because she believes in herself and oh my God, did this just become an afterschool special? Yes. Yes it did.
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
These two episodes are a lacuna for me. I didn’t know either of them well at all. I think in part this is because of the titles. Mudd’s Women is bad—the Joe Rogan of titles, say—but What Are Little Girls Made Of? is Martin Shkreli. It sounds cutesy at best and offensive or grotesque at worst. I reckon that if I ever ran into this in the wild as a youth, I may well have simply gone outside instead, reasoning that this would not be a story commensurate with my bloodlust or fascination with pointed ears or whatever it was that drove me to watch Star Trek in the first place. As it happens, there are no little girls in the episode, though there is the twenty-four year old Sherry Jackson wearing something much like pants and suspenders and nothing else and so we get a pretty good idea what Sherry is made of.
We get another glimpse of William Shatner’s composition too—more on this in a moment.
Little Girls features a murky story that’s impossible to sum up in a reasonable amount of time but here goes nothing. The Enterprise visits an icy world to catch up with an exobiologist by the name of Korby, who happens to be an old flame of Nurse Chapel’s. That’s two smoldering romances for the medical department if you’re keeping score at home. Korby, it turns out, is making androids in his underground lair using technology created by the planet’s original inhabitants, now long gone. Two red shirts in literal red shirts get iced in the early going by one of Korby’s android servants, Ruk, played by Ted Cassidy—most famous for the role of Lurch in The Addams Family. This makes Kirk slightly irritated but doesn’t really get in the way of meeting Korby’s android aide Dr. Brown or—and these are Chapel’s words, not mine—his android geisha Andrea, played by the aforementioned Sherry Jackson.
Andrea makes me think of nothing so much as Oscar Isaac’s mechanical playmate Kyoko from Ex Machina. And like Kyoko, or any love-bot worth its sci-fi pedigree, Andrea is a whirling storm of knives and broken glass. She immediately starts falling in love with everyone within lipshot, starting with Kirk. Korby, hoping to trick Spock into ferrying him someplace more suitable for android-building, makes a Kirkbot, a process which requires Kirk to be bound naked atop what appears to be a giant record player. As previously mentioned, this is Shatner’s sixth shirtless episode, but in a way it’s a two-fer since he also plays the Kirkbot. So we’ll call it six for seven with a double-play. Anyway, Kirk cleverly plants a thought into his double by concentrating on nasty remarks about his first officer while he’s spinning around in the machine, causing the doppelgänger to later address Spock as a half-breed. This is apparently sufficient to make Spock realize he’s an imposter and not just an asshole.
None of this means anything because in the end Andrea destroys the fake Kirk when he won’t kiss her, which to my mind is a much greater signal of his falsity than his vocabulary—Kirk would make out with a mollusk if someone told him it was female. Kirk convinces Ruk that Korby is responsible for the destruction of the planet’s original civilization, which leads to a conflict in which Korby destroys Ruk. In the process Korby sustains an injury that reveals he too is an android. Andrea goes bananas realizing that she loves Korby—God knows why—and Korby destroys her and himself. It’s like the end of a Shakespeare drama, but with awkward and clumsy fight blocking.
Much like Mudd’s Women it’s not entirely clear to me what the crime was. Admittedly, Korby makes a hash of everything trying to keep Kirk and Chapel captive until he can explain the whole android thing, and killing the red shirts—probably an actual crime—is a part of that dimwitted stratagem. But I have no idea why he didn’t just tell Kirk as soon as he arrived: “We’re making androids here.” Instead we’re left with a sort of vague moral residue that might be a warning against playing God, though since Korby is himself an android it’s hard to see how he can be construed as a monster anymore than Feodor Vassilyev.
Watching Lurch creeping around the particolored caverns is mildly fun for a while but this is definitely an episode that doesn’t need to exist. I’m somewhat disappointed honestly—at this point I’d hoped that I might be able to start drawing out some larger themes and perhaps finding some cultural touch points other than those familiar ones that have already been flogged to death in books with titles like The Philosophy of Star Trek and The Star Trek Cookbook. But seven episodes in I can honestly say that even the best of the first two months of Star Trek leaves the viewer with very little to think about once the last theremin note fades away and the Desilu logo twirls across the screen. Is the meaty stuff still out there on the delivery truck? Well, if I learned anything from Mudd’s Women and Little Girls, it’s that as much as I wallowed in this show as a kid, there are still pages in its canon I have not read. Is that hope? Well, let’s just say it’s not quite despair.
A quick note on our Gambian friend Patrick: I ordered his laptop just after Thanksgiving—a Samsung Chromebook 4. It arrived the day I ordered it, which is yet another reminder of the fact that we live not only in separate countries but separate worlds. It took two days of flailing to figure out how to ship it to Africa, and DHL charged me $338, more than half again as much as the computer cost, to do so. Criminals. Anyway, it’s been fun watching it move from Atlanta to Cincinnati to Leipzig to Brussels to Dakar, where it is now, only 350 miles from its destination. It’s scheduled to arrive next Monday; let’s all cross our fingers: it took a measure of faith to send $200 worth of fine Chinese electronics to a kid with no address other than “Penyem Village.”
We had a long conversation this past weekend about the Gambian election, which took place Saturday. The Gambia has long been ruled by kleptocratic dictators, and it was a moment of hope when the last one, Yahya Jammeh, finally conceded his electoral defeat in 2017 and gave way to a democratic president, Adama Barrow. Barrow defended his presidency this weekend and won resoundingly. Jammeh’s party cried foul and took to the streets in a Trumpian-style denial of reality, but it appears to have been short lived. It’s very odd to talk to Patrick about all of this—to him the U.S. is a paragon of democracy and stability, while I can’t help but look at the two of us and feel that while we are far apart we’re heading toward each other—Patrick, listening in a lightless house to returns on his radio as his country takes baby steps toward political sense, me reading The Atlantic on my 4K monitor as my country staggers drunkenly toward dark and foreboding shores. May God help us both.
Watching Sulu pretend to be girl crazy is almost too much.
I would be remiss if I didn’t at least glance in the direction of the remark that it’s also a comedy about three broads.