All this 50th anniversary stuff has inspired me to do a re-watch. When I was about 12 or 13, I heard the other kids talking about this new show called Star Trek, so I gave it a try and was immediately hooked. I think I’m about to be hooked again.
“Where No Man Has Gone Before”
Jerk gets zapped, becomes a demigod.
Well, Mitchell’s kind of an asshole from the beginning, isn’t he? When Dehner repulses his advances, he calls her a “walking freezer unit”. Then we learn he manipulated Kirk’s life by sending an attractive female his way during their academy days. No wonder people are worried about his sudden powers. Too bad Dehner got caught up in the whole mess.
I’m sure glad they didn’t keep those turtlenecks as uniforms.
“Mudd’s Women”
Beauties and the Beast
Or maybe the beauties are beasts, considering their willingness to deceive. And Mudd is not the brightest con artist around. Notice that he discusses his nefarious plans with guards right in the room?
It’s curious that, while every other male goes a little silly with lust (except Spock, of course), Mudd seems completely unaffected. He just wants the money.
“The Enemy Within”
Jekyll and Hyde and Kirk
Good and evil halves of the same person may not be a new concept, but the idea that these are both necessary to make a functioning human being was rather novel, especially for TV of the time.
This is one of my favorites, even if Shatner goes a little overboard with his evil Kirk.
(Thought he did a great job with “good but weak” Kirk)
I always like to think the “blonde lab technician” Mitchell tried to hook Kirk up with was (not yet Dr.) Carol Marcus. (They should have made the taciturn Ruth from Shore Leave Marcus as well. That would have been good continuity.)
Mudd’s Women really seems like it should be an episode of Here Come the Brides. The 60s attitudes towards woman really rankles. First, they’re basically selling themselves to guys sight-unseen. You don’t know what you’re getting (either way!). If you get past that, you still have the fact that these women get no respect. They’re not people - they’re cargo. Even Kirk & co seem to treat them that way.
But I still like the episode. And I think the music is great. A perfect example of “60s future”.
You don’t spend much time on the Internet, do you? There are thousands of websites where women basically “sell themselves to guys sight-unseen.” It’s hardly a '60s thing.
To be fair, Kirk is in “level-headed lecturer” mode at the end, once he (a) has seen what she’s like without the stuff, and once he (b) knows it’s just a placebo – and Mudd knew that already, right? So that’s maybe all there is to it.
Was it really just a placebo, though? Pound for pound, the women weren’t THAT hot. All the guy’s lusting in the briefing room wasn’t normal behavior for being in the presence of attractive women, otherwise they’d never get anything done.
I think the drug did something, though. They need to do scientific studies - would males still exhibit “high respiration patterns, perspiration rate up, heartbeat rapid, blood pressure higher than normal” with the women just taking the placebos? I doubt it.
On the other hand, you can tell this is a real early episode because he actually kicks Eve out of his quarters after finding her in his bed. The Jim Kirk of later episodes would have nailed her right there and then!
Considering that these were more than ten years before the movie, I’d hardly call it a continuity problem. And Carol Marcus was a bit more than a lab tech.
The real continuity issue for TOS was Kirk going from “I’m married to the Enterprise” to bonking everything that moved. I think this was from each writer wanting to make the love interest in his or her script the love of Kirk’s life.
Yeah, a lot of TOS is like that. From what I remember of Here Come the Brides, they actually treated the women better on that show than “Mudd’s Women”. Part of “Mudd” actually rings true, though. One of my grandmothers was a mail-order bride; like the women in the show, she was in a very unhappy home situation, and was desperate to get away.
So she answered an ad in a newspaper, and ended up crossing the ocean and taking a long rail journey to meet a man she knew nothing about.(Not to mention that she didn’t speak a word of English) She was praying all the way that the man would be kind-hearted. Her prayers weren’t answered – he was an abuser. She eventually ditched him and married my grandfather.
Makes me wonder about the ultimate fate of those three ladies on the show. And, why, with all the supposed opportunities in the 23rd century, did those women opt to be marriageable “cargo”? Yup, a product of the '60’s, alright.
Well, let me rephrase: whatever the drug did to make her more attractive, seems to have been indistinguishable from the effects of the placebo she got switcherooed into taking at the end of the episode.
That’s what I’m getting at. At some time, she was just a lowly grad student, not yet Doctor Marcus. Mitchell (who puts women in two categories, “women I will sleep with”, and “freezer units”) probably doesn’t distinguish between lab techs and PhD candidates either.
If David was in his twenties at the time of the events of TWoK, Kirk and Marcus could have had their “I almost married her!” relationship before she got her PhD, before Kirk got the Enterprise. He just didn’t correct Mitchell’s categorization of her as a “lab tech” because he doesn’t agree with Mitchell’s attitudes towards women and was tired of correcting him.
Since Marcus actually had Kirk’s kid, (with his knowledge) she probably really WAS his one true love. She wasn’t some fling. He respected her wishes about raising The Boy.
That’s why Kirk eventually became the womanizing hounddog we all know. Just like Bond and Vesper, early in his life Kirk tried the standard path of meeting a nice girl and settling down, but it went sour, so they both let the pendulum swing too far the other way, and now both Jameses consider women just “disposable pleasures, rather than meaningful pursuits.”
I think this is exactly what happened. Love stories are easy, standard things to write, so I imagine that various writers would put a romantic subplot for Kirk into their stories. In one episode, that seems like “This is the girl that will finally get through Kirk’s emotional armor.” Do it in half the episodes of a season, and pretty soon it becomes a “Girl in every port” scenario, instead.
It seems clear that the original conception of Kirk was the Married-to-the-Ship idea. Note that this is true in the original pilot, “The Cage,” as well. The contrast between an idyllic married life back on Earth vs. the stressful life of a starship captain is one of the things the Talosians hit Pike with. This conception of the Captain as unable to indulge in emotional relationships does seem to have been part of the original concept.
The change, I think, resulted not from a deliberate decision, but just from the way different writers began to incorporate love stories into their scripts. As the lead, Kirk got the bulk of such stories. You actually have to go fairly far into the list of episodes before you see Kirk having a significant romantic encounter with a female guest star. Based on my hasty glance at a list of titles, it first happens in “Dagger of the Mind”–the ninth episode aired, the eleventh produced. And even then, Kirk’s romantic feelings and actions were forced on him by brainwashing rather than being something he willingly consented to. After that, not counting old girlfriends, you have to get all the way to “City on the Edge of Forever” to find another instance of Kirk having any sort of serious romantic entanglement.
It’s not until season 2 that the idea of Kirk “bonking everything that moved” really started to take off. And even then, it was never quite as commonplace as people seem to remember.
Yeah, I forgot about that one. Kirk did get involved with Lenore largely as a way of getting to Karidian/Kodos. But if I’m remembering right, even in that episode he said something like, “At first it was like that. But then, I wanted it to be more.” There’s a suggestion that Kirk was really falling for her to some extent. McCoy even asks him about it at the end of the episode, and Kirk pointedly refuses to answer.
