Mudd's Women

Did You Know?

• Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode an 'A' rating.
• In 2015, Wired suggested this episode was skippable in their binge-watching guide for the original series.
• In 2016, TVLine ranked Eve finding out Kirk had given her a placebo rather than the beauty pill as number 13 on the top twenty moments of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Plot

The USS Enterprise, under Captain Kirk, pursues an unregistered cargo ship that overloads its engines while fleeing through an asteroid field. Kirk orders the Enterprise's shields extended around the other vessel, which strains the ship's systems and destroys all but one lithium crystal circuit in the warp engines. The three passengers and captain are beamed aboard just before an asteroid destroys their ship. The captain, initially calling himself Leo Walsh, is revealed as Harcourt Fenton Mudd, a criminal with an extensive record.

The three women—Ruth Bonaventure, Eve McHuron, and Magda Kovacs—are stunningly beautiful and distract male crew members, except for Spock. They are intended as wives for settlers on Ophiuchus III. After the final lithium crystal fails, the Enterprise limps to Rigel XII on reserve power. The chief miner, Ben Childress, demands Mudd and the women in exchange for crystals.

Kirk complies, but Childress reneges. During a party, Eve runs into a magnetic dust storm; Kirk and Childress pursue her. Childress finds Eve and brings her to his quarters, where he wakes to find her much plainer.

Production

Among the three stories vying to become the second Star Trek pilot were "The Omega Glory" and the eventual winner, "Where No Man Has Gone Before." "Mudd's Women" was instead filmed as the second episode of the first season, right after "The Corbomite Maneuver." Gene Roddenberry asked Stephen Kandel for a swashbuckling guest star, and Kandel later pitched "Mudd's Women." However, Kandel grew frustrated with Roddenberry's constant script revisions. When credits went to the Writers Guild, Roddenberry claimed the story, having already drafted an outline for it back in July 1964, well before Kandel joined the show.