Or a man who makes bad plans. He can transparently lie, and has a gift of gab, but I wouldn’t exactly call him a master schemer. What is this strange affection for Mudd’s alleged competence? Your hyperbole in attempting to defend his “prowess” is positively Mudd-like in it’s preposterous nature, and use of creative rationales and excuses (“Circumstance”).
“Hyperbole”? Methinks you might protest a bit much in excess of what would probably be considered the norm. He almost pulls one over on Kirk, who I think all would agree is pretty on the ball. He was working from a bad situation, essentially under house arrest in an unfamiliar, if not hostile, territory. He was working against the clock with his charges needing periodic doses to maintain their physical charms, those being somewhat, you know, critical to closing the deal. I’d say if one of his girls hadn’t made a run for it out into the storm, it might have all gone his way.
Based on Rainn Wilson’s portrayal of Mudd in two episodes of Discovery, I’m with divedivedive on this one. The man is quite clever, and his schemes almost work. He’s much smarter than most Star Trek villains.
After all, they’re all foiled in the end. All we can judge them by is how close they were to getting there.
Does not compute. Let’s discuss the one Mudd now, not the one retconned 50 years later shall we?
Now, regarding the TOS Mudd, He almost succeeds , kind of, in Mudd’s Women, but almost blew up his own ship beforehand. In S2…he isn’t exactly a genius, as we’ll see.
It’s hard to keep the retconned part straight in my head, since that technically is a prequel and happened before Mudd’s Women, so I keep thinking of it as something that happened prior to this episode.
Then the argument you’re looking for is that Mudd is a poor pilot or navigator or both. So stipulated.
And I haven’t seen any of Discovery beyond the pilot, so I can’t comment on their Mudd. I do like Rainn Wilson though.
(shortened form of RETroactive CONtinuity; first made popular in the comic book world)
- (original meaning) Adding information to the back story of a fictional character or world, without invalidating that which had gone before.
I’d say its a “Textbook” Retcon. :) Up there with Smoking Aces III. Though not as damaging and heinous.
Actually, Aces created a pocket universe. Thank God, so it can be ignored.
What Smoking Aces?
You need to see a good therapist about the whole reboot business. This just isn’t healthy.
What reboot?
Indeed. Too bad they only made 4 Star Trek movies with the original cast. I really liked 4, silly as it was.
I’m considering moving on to the first four movies after wrapping up the original series, though I guess I don’t know what else there really is to say about them. I do love them though. And obviously I’d have to do the Kelvin movies after that.
Just nod and go along with it, everything will be just fine.
Kelvin is a unit of measurement, so I’m presuming they pulled a ‘Lucas’ and edited all units into Metric notation using Kelvin as the temperature scale.
Which is a bit silly, but as someone who appreciates the beauty of metric, it never bothered me.
Miri
S1E08
Written by: Adrian Spies
They Almost Lost Me, for Starters
{Bridge]
KIRK: Earth-style distress signal. SOS.
FARRELL: I’ve answered it on all frequencies, sir. They don’t reply.
SPOCK: Not a vessel, a ground source. The third planet in this solar system, according to my instruments.
FARRELL: Directly ahead. Definitely an Earth-style signal.
KIRK: We’re hundreds of light years from Earth, Mister Spock. No colonies or vessels out this far.
SPOCK: Measuring the planet now, Captain. It’s spheroid-shaped, circumference twenty four thousand eight hundred seventy four miles. Mass six times ten to the twenty first power tons. Mean density five point five one seven. Atmosphere oxygen, nitrogen.
RAND: Earth!
KIRK: Not the Earth, another Earth. Another Earth?
Captain’s Log, stardate 2713.5. In the distant reaches of our galaxy, we have made an astonishing discovery. Earth type radio signals coming from a planet which apparently is an exact duplicate of the Earth. It seems impossible, but there it is.
After watching the episode, and eagerly looking for some reason why, I still cannot understand why Spies/Fontana/Gene made the decision to have this planet be an exact duplicate of Earth. It almost completely kills the suspension of disbelief right there. It adds nothing to the plot. The planet could have been “A world very much like 20th Century Earth” and have created the exact same effect. This is a real weak spot in what, after re-viewing, I found to be an episode I had seriously underrated in my perception of The Original Series.
Lost Innocence
The beginning of the episode establishes the theme that will unwind in three strands throughout the episode. The loss of childhood and innocence. This happens in three spheres. Specifically Miri loses her eternal childhood and innocence. The child survivors do so as well by the end. The planet, Another Earth, lost its innocence through the knowledge (science) that allowed it to attempt to change the fundamentals of existence; end aging and death, with apocalyptic consequences. Mankind cannot “play God” (interesting coming from Gene, a dedicated Atheist). The disease itself kills the minute innocence is lost, at puberty. This shot was quite the foreshadowing metaphor.
Good Science
The Science in this episode was quite well done; it was fairly cutting edge that the research to end human aging was the result of a chain of specific mutations brought on by the infection of test subjects by a specific sequence of viruses, making it extremely hard to detect. That is pretty good for 1966. It’d be pretty good today.
Interiors and Exteriors
The sets were effectively used; Desilu’s Forty Acres Backlot and interiors were all used as Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show. These were successfully dressed to eerily give the effect of a desolate urban area, hundreds of years after an Apocalypse. Fallout Boy ™ would have approved.
Sense of Menace
The sets, combine with some unique shooting of the landing party exploring really established a sense of invisible peril that really permeated the whole episode.
Two Threats
The First threat is the unseen children, who after we meet Miri, we discover are out avoiding the “Grups”. That threat is present, but not the immediate problem.
The second threat is the discovery of the disease, and the one week clock the landing party has to develop an antidote. These two plotlines combine to create tension and keep the story moving.
Kim Darby, Michael J. Pollard
I really think that without these two talented guest stars, the episode doesn’t work. Miri has to be able to express the complicated emotions of a young girl becoming a woman, who betrays the crew, but is still sympathetic and lovable. Pollard has to be a menacing foil who incites violence, but is simple and essentially guileless. A tough act. They both pull it off. Not surprising since Darby played the female lead in True Grit two years later, and Pollard received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work in Bonnie and Clyde the following year.
GeekMystery-Resolved!
AHA! This photo proves it! Undershirts! Never noticed this before! Uniform mystery-solved!!!
Kindness and Compassion Misread
A Crux of the plot essentially centered around Miri’s realization of her womanhood and her misreading Kirk’s gentle kindness as the seeds of a romantic love. As well, Miri also confuses Kirk’s compassion for Rand, who is near her breaking point, for a betrayal of sorts. She is confused by her emotions. She betrays the crew to the Lord of the Flies youngsters, inducing them to kidnap Rand (after the kids had already stolen the communicators). Miri wanted to eliminate a rival, but is quickly convinced by Kirk that her survival, and that of all the children, depends on getting the communicators back to finalize an antidote McCoy and Spock have been working on.
This leads to an interesting climax. Kirk is essentially beaten by the children at one point, off screen while one little one watches creepily. It is a frightening shot.
After being beaten, Kirk shows…compassion.
And McCoy, no communicators available, tests the antidote on himself.
All in all this episode surprised me. Shatner was, once again, fantastic and the stellar actor of the regulars, and Grace Lee Whitney really gave a standout performance as well. Memory told me that I wouldn’t like the episode. The Introduction almost lost me. But it was well told, well shot, and well cast. It used good literate science, and the premise was excellent science fiction. The violence, when used was more misguided, and used by immature children. And it wasn’t used to resolve anything. in the end compassion won. Very Star Trek. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad, which is what i thought I’d be getting.
Navaronegun’s Running Re-View Rankings ™
1.) The Man Trap
2.) Where No Man Has Gone Before
3.) The Naked Time
4.) Charlie X
5.) Miri
6.) The Enemy Within
7.) What Are Little Girls Made Of?
8.) Mudd’s Women
Ooh, professional looking! Well, I haven’t watched yet so I’m not going to read - wouldn’t want to prejudice my opinion. I’ll post my impressions tomorrow.
On the topic of Dilithium Crystals
I don’t think TOS has yet explained the rolf of Dilithium (or Lithium) crystals. What’s great is you see them in glass cabinets and things, which makes the later stated role of them being where the matter/antimatter reaction takes place quite hard to believe!
Miri
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All the lists said to skip this, but I didn’t. I kinda wish I had?
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Another dying civilisation!
- This time it’s an exact duplicate of Earth and her people… yet this MIND BLOWING CONCEPT is not touched upon in the slightest.
- Why isn’t anyone on board curious about this? They just ignore it, like that temporal anomaly a few episodes ago? Surely THIS is the exact thing Starfleet trying to find as part of their exploration?
- They didn’t even have Spock raise an eyebrow of curiosity.
- Not only is it Earth but it’s Earth in the 1960s! How coincidental! (Just like how Voyager always went to the 1990s…)
- (I also like how they imply that all of the officers, including Yoman Rand, know the exact dimensions and measurements of Earth off the top of their heads.)
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The way Kirk flirts with the young girl is really, really creepy. Especially as it’s mostly just ordering her around. She seems to like it, though.
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After 300 years, why are the kids such roving “bonk-bonk” dumb-asses?
- Even if someone’s brain is locked at the maturity of a 10 year old for 300 years, I imagine they have the capacity to learn enough about the world to not just scrabble about in the dirt chanting taunts.
- And why do they conveniently have 6 months of food left? That the Enterprise happens upon this duplicate world with exactly 6 months of food left after 300 years of survival are some incredible odds. (I imagine there was a canned goods warehouse nearby the kids slowly ate their way through it?)
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I like how at the end of the episode the Enterprise just blasts off to warp, leaving the last surviving members of an alien duplicate of Earth, and all they had to say was “We left a medic and some teachers are on the way”… wtf?!
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Why would they just leave their communicators? I’ve never seen them be so forgetful in other episodes.
These are all much more important questions than “will Kirk survive?”, which was the focus of the episode, when what I wanted was “WHY IS THERE A DUPLICATE EARTH WITH PRECISELY 6 MONTHS OF FOOD LEFT?”. Surely that’s a significant point that needs to be explored? Who made this planet? How? Parallel/Convergent evolution is one thing, but THAT’S CLEARLY THE AMERICAS. (I even went and looked at the old effects, to make sure the CLEAR OUTLINE OF THE USA wasn’t just something they did in the new FX, and nope, it’s quite literally Earth).
IMPORTANT LORE POINT:
Bones has an undershirt but Kirk doesn’t. It looks like Kirk (and therefore Spock/Scotty’s) is just a bit of black cloth on the edge of their neck. Is it because of Bone’s medical “smock”?
Production
I really like the way they film this and position the actors and things in the scene. I was watching it on a TV, so I’m not bothering to take screenshots, but in practically every frame I saw, everyone is “set out” in their own area of the screen and in the depth. And when the actors move they try to preserve their own “space” on screen. And the show rarely cares to preserve positional continuity between one shot on the next.
It gives it a really nice “fictional” and cartoony kind of feel that I think works well with the sci-fi nature of the show.
It’s a shame the story is
a) awful and lazy with barely any thought put into it other than “hey wouldn’t it be great to have a civilisation full of kids?” or " Lord Of The Flies: In Space!"
b) a crime against sci-fi
c) completely undermining of what we know Starfleet will become
Current Ranking
Great
N/A
Good:
- S1E4: The Naked Time
- S1E5: The Enemy Within
Mediocre:
- S1E7: What Are Little Girls Made of?
Awful:
- S1E3: Where No Man Has Gone Before
- S1E6: Mudd’s Women
- S1E8: Miri
Skipped:
- S1E0: The Cage
- S1E1: The Man Trap
- S1E2: Charlie X