Synopsis: The Enterprise rescues Harry Mudd and three unusual women.
What can you say about Harcourt Fenton Mudd, who masquerades as Captain Leo Francis Walsh, transports women aboard an unregistered transport vessel, and in the process drains the Enterprise of almost all her power? So much attention of the male gaze in this episode is on the three beautiful women, Eve, Magda and Ruth, that sometimes we forget about focusing on Harry Mudd. The Trickster, the Coyote, Hermes, the Knight Errant, the mercurial force that will propel a change of plan for the Enterprise and all aboard her. This is an archetypal power that conflicts with the rational Senex control of Starfleet that is embodied by Captain James T. Kirk and his crew. For a long time, characters like Mudd, or Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation were my least favorite; but now I know that they, and the chaos they create in Star Trek and reality, are necessary for change to occur.
I have listed many names to the character above, many ways of referencing an annoying but necessary force of change of perspective. By following Mudd, the Enterprise overheated its engines and is at the verge of losing all power. But Mudd has caused the Enterprise and her crew to change course. Wherever they were headed before they encountered Mudd, it was so routine as to not be mentioned, but now the Enterprise is on a new course, to Rigel XII, to get crystals for the engines. To go someplace they have never been before and would not have gone had it not been for Mudd.
It just so happens that on Rigel XII there are three lonely miners that would make wonderful husbands for the three beautiful women traveling with Mudd. Beauty is the essential nature of Psyche and depth psychology therefore needs to understand beauty (Hillman, 2014). Throughout the episode Mudd gives the women the Venus Drug, so that they may embody Venus, the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Mudd thinks that this is what the women need to do for men to want them. But is this what they want? Eve complains of the way men look at them; and men see the personification of the goddess, not the woman. Eve asks one of the men on Rigel XII what he really wants; a vain, selfish, useless individual trying to impersonate a goddess, or a real woman? At the end of the episode Kirk remarks that there are only two kinds of women, “either you believe in yourself or you don’t.” From another perspective, there are only two types of individuals, those that can see-through the eyes of beauty, and those that cannot.
Reference:
Hillman, J. (2014). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Publications.
Original post created 9 January 2021
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