You don’t want wives, you want this. This is what you want, Mister Childress. I hope you remember it and dream about it, because you can’t have it. It’s not real! — Eve
It’s a good thing I started paying attention near the end of this episode, because I nearly wrote Mudd’s Women an unfairly scathing review.
Yes, that’s right — I don’t like intergalactic con artist Harry Mudd, or at least the episode that introduces him. So sue me, but it instinctively grinds my gears that shows up with three bought women whose entire narrative purpose seems to revolve around seducing the male cast.
Only in the episode’s final minutes does the message reveal itself: women are more than their appearances, and the men who’ve brought these mail-order brides halfway across the galaxy are wrong to treat them like sex objects.
Unfortunately, this ethos is undercut by the assumption that women, while worth more than their bodies, naturally exercise that worth through their labor as men’s wives.
As Eve says, the head miner, Ben Childress, isn’t looking for “someone to help you, not a wife to cook and sew and cry and need.” Hot take, but I think women can do more than cook and sew and cry and need anyway, and they don’t need a man to do any of it.
The death knell to this story’s integrity is its nonsensical conclusion. Obviously, we the audience can see that the only difference between this supposedly-ugly broad and her beautified self is a little stage makeup, but Eve doesn’t even have that when Kirk claims she takes a placebo pill! While I agree with Kirk — you either believe in yourself or don’t — I don’t believe a placebo pill can jumpstart a magical girl transformation.
Also, just look to Bones’ high hairline and you can really tell Mudd’s Women was filmed third, after the second pilot and The Corbomite Maneuver. Spock has never looked less attractive. Eugh. Bold of him to be throwing shade at Bones for, as far as I can tell, correctly identifying the location of the Vulcan heart.
(And before you say Bones started it, he was gently teasing at most, and directing it at himself too!)
Good Doctor: II
Bad Doctor: II
No Doctor: I
Finally another Good Doctor Bones episode, deemed thus for the scene where his medical instincts pulls him out of Ruth’s mystical allure. Vindication for The Man Trap!
Other viewers might object to his lecherous grin, but the only thing I object to is him not looking at me like that.
Yeah.
…Yeah.
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