“Hey, baby.”

Maybe Harry Mudd just doesn’t work.

I would make the argument that when you reach the third of three appearances of a character and still come up with something that can charitably be descibed as a “non-starter”, this might perhaps be the time to call into question whether the character and his signature plots were ever really a good idea to begin with. Except, of course, for the fact that I’m in the minority here. Harcourt Fenton Mudd is one of the most beloved characters from the original Star Trek era despite never once appearing in a halfway decent episode. If I’m tipping my hand early, it’s just because “Mudd’s Passion” is extremely difficult to work up any enthusiasm for. It’s probably the second-weakest episode of the Animated Series I’ve seen yet, trailing behind “The Lorelei Signal” only because it’s not a grotesque train wreck. It’s simply bad in a ponderously mediocre way and is, ironically enough, utterly dispassionate.

“Mudd’s Passion” begins with a dutiful recitation of Harry Mudd tropes that have already become worn and tired. The Enterprise is once again playing Space Cop and is sent to the Arcadian system to investigate Mudd, who is once again running a scam operation to peddle false promises of romance to horny miners. The script even tries to recycle the “he STOLE a SPACESHIP” joke from “I, Mudd” and to say it didn’t work would be being kind (if for no other reason then it gives the key line to Leonard Nimoy instead of William Shatner: Spock is absolutely the wrong person to be the second half of that kind of double act). This time Mudd is selling a love potion he promises is infallible. He gives himself up to Kirk when the miners start to revolt, but once on the ship he tries to sweet talk Nurse Chapel into releasing him from the brig by bribing her with a sample of the love drug for her to use on Spock. So naturally, like an idiot, she agrees. Mudd then mugs her, steals her ID card and takes her hostage as he hijacks a shuttlecraft to escape to a binary star system the ship just discovered. And this one’s by the same writer as the Original Series Mudd stories, so we can’t lay the blame on someone else not understanding the source material.

At this point, the episode stops being a half-baked rip-off of “Mudd’s Women”…and becomes a half-baked rip-off of “The Naked Time” instead as the love potion somehow manages to get into the Enterprise‘s ventillation system and everyone in the crew starts falling in love with each other. We get a token “we must learn to control our emotions” speech from Kirk after he beams down with Spock to rescue Chapel right in the middle of being chased by Giant Rock Beasts (who are, again, far and away the most interesting things about this episode). This is no more captivating or less problematic than it was last time we saw it, or then it will be in any other of the bafflingly at least three more times Star Trek attempts this story.…

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“Time is an illusion. Lunch!Time doubly so.” “Ho ha ho.”

The three little sisters named Alice, Hedda and Tertia sat in a circle on their island. Alice was considering in her own mind (as best she could) whether the pleasure of tuning the cosmic fugue would be worth the trouble of climbing another tree to harvest more coconuts from the Earth-bones when suddenly a thought rang out.

“Please tell us another story about the spacemen,” said Tertia.

“Very well,” Alice replied. “Gather ’round, sisters, and I shall tell it to you.”

This is a story from the days of our future ancestors.

Captain Kirk was beginning to get very tired of gallivanting around the universe’s sex-birth-death. Time had been acting very peculiarly and, because he was not especially interested in associating with it until it started behaving itself again, Captain Kirk asked the Glittering Skyship to take him and his friends once more to the multiplex planar realms of invocation for a vacation (the multiplex planar realms of invocation being well known, of course as hospitable and generally agreeable places to take a holiday). The Glittering Skyship felt sorry for Captain Kirk and his friends, so she brought them to the World-Stage.

Captain Kirk thought the World-Stage would make a fine place to film a movie, so he got all his friends together and asked if they would play parts in his movie. They all thought this a grand idea, so they gathered at the World Stage and tried not to Break the World again. Now, Doctor McCoy was the first actor onstage (he really ca’n’t resist it, you know, because he is thus invoked and it is his will) and he began to mime his part in earnest.

“This is where we come in, is’n’t’ it?” Tertia asked.

“It is indeed, as you well know” Alice replied. “This is the time Time always knows it’s time for me to show up. But this is not a story about me.”

Now, this particular world-stage was upset because it thought it was the best of all the world-stages and did’n’t take especially kindly to a bunch of spacemen stomping around on it. So it changed the story (which was OK because we all know that story by now anyway: It re-played itself out like a gazillion times more in the reruns).

“I’ve heard this one before,” said Hedda “At least, I think I have.”

“I know,” said Alice. Then she continued.

So basically the actors used the World-Stage’s ambition to fashion themselves into Gods. What constitutes a God, I ask? Well, I’ll tell me: A God is a ruler who perceives the Waking-Dream but not the second Dream. Captain Kirk is pretty good at defeating Gods, but it does tend to be rather a pain in the ass for him. So the first God who showed up was the First Queen (because of course it was the First Queen) who put on a right show of a performance (she thought she was still in the House of False Love, you see).…

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