“Mudd’s Passion”
Written by Stephen Kandel
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Season 1, Episode 10
Production episode: 22008
Original air date: November 10, 1973
Star date: 4978.5
Mission summary
Enterprise makes a special trip to Motherlode in the Arcadian star system in search of one Harcourt Fenton Mudd, wanted on several counts of being annoying. They find the infamous swindler hawking a love potion to the human and ursine miners on the planet, claiming that all it takes is a drop of a magic liquid to compell any woman to love them with a single touch. “It matters not whether you are young, old, fat, ugly or repugnant,” he assures the crowd–and what better way to prove three out of four than by a personal demonstration? He brings up a young blonde who implores, “Please, darling, come back to the ship with me.” Yecch!
Kirk and Spock arrive just in time to witness this disgusting display. Spock exposes Mudd as a fraud by firing his phaser at the woman, revealing her to be a “Rigelian hypnoid,” a lizard that cleans up nice. (Possibly a distant relative of the Hypnotoad.) Apparently Kirk can’t arrest Mudd because Motherlode is a lawless den of iniquity, but he can save the conman from being stoned to death by angry miners. The opportunist recognizes this as an offer he can’t refuse and soon finds himself safely in Enterprise‘s brig.
Spock requests that Nurse Chapel examine the slightly injured prisoner, which gives her a convenient excuse to stick around the brig with a phaser.
CHAPEL: Of course, Mister Spock. I think you deserve congratulations for trapping him so cleverly.
SPOCK: You exaggerate, Nurse. Kindly see that your medical summary is more precise.
Mudd sees Chapel get shutdown by the unfeeling Vulcan and tries to give her a love crystal to solve her problems. She doesn’t trust him because hey, it’s Harry Mudd, but he goes into informercial mode: “One touch evokes friendship between men or women. But between woman and man, love.”
Just “friendship,” huh? What incredibly discerning love crystals!
Chapel decides that maybe she could take one after all, just to “analyze” it, of course. She lets Mudd out, and he convinces her to use herself and Spock as test subjects. She breaks the capsule and rubs the liquid on her skin, which causes her to swoon–allowing Mudd to steal her medical pouch, along with her credibility. He locks himself back in the forcefield and she heads off to touch Spock.
Mudd uses Chapel’s phaser to overload the forcefield and escape, then uses the Enterprise computers to change the picture on Chapel’s ID to his own. Meanwhile, Chapel delivers her medical report to Spock’s quarters and “accidentally” falls into his lap.
SPOCK: Was there something else, Miss Chapel?
CHAPEL: Wouldn’t you like me to, well, stay? Help you?
SPOCK: That would be illogical, Miss Chapel.
Chapel’s pissed that the love potion didn’t work and returns to the brig to file a complaint with the home office, only Mudd is gone. She realizes that her phaser and pouch are gone too. Oops! She tracks him down to the shuttlebay, where she beats the crap out of him and reclaims her stolen property, but not her pride. Mudd cajoles her and she shoots at him, but misses. He drops some love crystals, which get sucked up as vapor into an air vent. She hits a panic button that initiates a Red Alert, but Mudd somehow recovers and takes her hostage.
Unbeknownst to them both, Spock is starting to feel amorous toward the nurse and goes to the Bridge to confide in his best friends, and the rest of the eavesdropping Bridge crew.
SPOCK: Captain. Doctor. I wish to report a, er, a number of very strange, um, emotions.
He’s alarmed to find out that Mudd has kidnapped Chapel and escaped in a shuttlecraft, and insists on immediately going to fetch his “love.” Kirk decides there’s no way to deter his lovestruck first officer and accompanies him to the planet Mudd is heading for. Just before they beam out, they’re exposed to fumes from the air vents, along with everyone on the Bridge. M’ress and Scotty cozy up to each other, while Kirk and Spock get friendlier on the planet.
SPOCK: It’s good to have a friend like you.
KIRK: Strange, that’s the way I feel about you, too. My dear friend, Spock. Come, let’s go get Mudd and Christine.
They find Nurse Chapel and Mudd, and Chapel is delighted to learn that Spock is in love with her, but less pleased by the two giant rock monsters that crush the shuttle and attack them.
SPOCK: Don’t worry. You’ll be safe, darling.
CHAPEL: Yes, Spock. How wonderful.
MUDD: They’re coming closer.
KIRK: Emergency beam up. Enterprise, come in. No response. Spock, can’t you take your hands off her?
SPOCK: That’s my affair.
CHAPEL: Captain, please.
Spock and Kirk have a moment of clarity, realizing that they’re feeling the effects of the love potion, which Mudd didn’t even think really worked. Unfortunately everyone on the ship is so busy trying to score, they aren’t paying much attention to the plight of the people on the planet. Not only is Kirk and Co. about to be squished, but they’re starting to get on each other’s nerves. The love crystal-induced honeymoon is over; the Enterprise crew is hungover and surly, but they’re finally coming to their senses enough to check on the captain.
Mudd reluctantly volunteers his love crystals, which Kirk uses to dose one of the rock creatures. The rock creature suddenly becomes affectionate and protective of the humans and turns against the other rock creature, which buys them enough time to be rescued by an emergency beam out.
Now that everything’s sorted, Chapel records Mudd’s confession for his many crimes.
SPOCK: May I help you record his confession, Nurse?
CHAPEL: You? You’d be the last person I’d choose.
SPOCK: A few moments of love, paid for with several hours of hatred. Your potion is scarcely a bargain, Harry.
MUDD: Ah, well, Spock. So few things in this universe are perfect. Think I’ll get rehabilitation therapy again?
SPOCK: I can guarantee it.
MUDD: Well, that’s all right. I just hate to leave you all. All my loved ones.
Analysis
If I had to take a guess, I’d say Harry Mudd wasn’t the only one who was stoned in this episode.
The more I thought about “Mudd’s Passion,” the more disgusted I became with it. This episode is written like bad fanfiction from start to finish, forcing the actors to demean themselves and behave wildly out of character. The only saving grace is that we don’t have to see them embarrass themselves onscreen, as we did in “Plato’s Stepchildren,” but their animated counterparts still made me plenty uncomfortable.
Plotwise, this adventure unfortunately is more along the lines of “Mudd’s Women” than “I, Mudd,” most notably in how offensive and inappropriate it manages to be, though also by revisiting the idea of the swindler preying on lonely miners. But the worst sin committed here is the awful depiction of Nurse Chapel, which singlehandedly reduces her to an unsympathetic parody of her former self.
Ignoring her orchestrated “fall” into Spock’s lap–one of the worst moments I’ve ever witnessed in Star Trek–I was most disappointed by Chapel’s half-hearted rejection of Mudd’s love crystal. She is rather easily swayed, never even considering the moral implications of forcing the Vulcan to love her; instead, she was only concerned with whether or not the crystals were genuine. And as far as I can tell, there were no lasting consequences to her dangerous lapse in judgment and the resulting chaos caused by her inept handling of a prisoner. Though Mudd compliments Chapel (“You’re not simply a beautiful woman, you are a scientist.”) it’s evident that he’s just buttering her up and, perhaps, speaking facetiously–he doesn’t respect her as a person at all, and I’m not sure the writer does either.
As for the love crystals (Or are they capsules? Liquids?), I was stunned by the explanation that they merely initiate “friendship” in people of the same sex and love in those of the opposite sex. I know it’s a cartoon, I know it was 1973, but still–wouldn’t it have been better to avoid that question entirely, if they were simply going to write it off so simplistically? Do Kirk and Spock really need a dose of the love potion to admit they’re good friends? I mean, that scene of them embracing each other seemed tailored for all the K/S writers out there.
The crystals also don’t even function consistently! Kirk never touches the rock creature after feeding it the crystals (which never seemed to match the number mentioned in dialogue), but the alien develops strong feelings for him anyway. M’ress doesn’t touch Scott, but finds him attractive anyway. And I still can’t quite figure out how they were sucked into the air vents in the first place.
This episode shocked me at every turn, from M’ress blatantly cozying up to Scott on the Bridge to Dr. McCoy bragging to a woman just to impress her. Why do love potions always make people change their behavior so drastically? Why must love always be shown as obsessive, instead of dealing with a shift in attitude and feeling more realistically and thoughtfully? Why does Arex start playing a banjo at his station? I was also constantly creeped out by Spock’s smarmy facial expressions when he’s thinking about Nurse Chapel. That’s just wrong.
Though I enjoyed Roger C. Carmel’s performance as Mudd, reprising his role from the original series, I don’t particularly like his character. His particular acting style is conveyed very well in his voice acting and translates well enough to animation, but his usually entertaining interactions with Kirk simply feel copied from previous episodes.
The plot also drags considerably, despite too much going on for me to follow much of the time. Once again, I have the impression they tried to cram a forty-minute script into a twenty-minute runtime, or put more accurately: ten pounds of crap in a five-pound bag. And when the episode was finally over, I felt like I had a hangover and hated everyone involved with it.
Eugene’s Rating: Impulse (on a scale of 1-6)
Torie Atkinson: While he irked me on his first appearance (“Mudd’s Women”), Harcourt Fenton Mudd warmed on me a lot the second time (“I, Mudd”) and so I was pretty excited about this episode. That was unfortunate. Compared to laserbeam-shooting Lucifer and jolly green giant Vulcan clones, it’s all right. “Mudd’s Passion” actually manages a coherent plot and keeps things moving quickly. It takes advantage of the format to pack a punch into each little scene. If only that were enough… The weaknesses (most significantly, a strong creep factor) were nontrivial, and I have to give negative credit to an episode that had me making noises for a full twenty minutes–cringing in horror and squealing in empathetic embarrassment.
Carmel remains a brilliant comic actor, but I felt that only hurt him here. His (fun!) line delivery is undercut by lifeless animation and some of the creepiest, least human expressions I’ve ever seen. Most of the joy of watching him as a performer are the little physicalities missed in this kind of show: the way he narrows his eyes, moves his hands around, carries himself. Even so, he blows the rest of the actors out of the water in every scene. (Nimoy is especially awful, delivering some of the best lines with wooden indifference.)
The rigid animation’s chilling effect on comedy sabotaged everything from the starting line. Reaction shots became painted backdrops of creepy faces, and any time a character was supposed to respond to a joke or something funny, it looked like he or she had just seen a deer. There isn’t enough vitality or expression in those drawings to convey real humor. Some of the lines are just phenomenal, though. My favorite is Scotty’s bit about how this hangover compares to the (obviously numerous) others in his memory. A light that shines in dark places…
I really liked the idea that Mudd’s crystals wound up being genuine (even if I loathed the actual repercussions), and his reaction when he learns it is priceless. It’s fun to see a conman get conned with something legitimate. Unfortunately, the plot elements that weren’t Mudd-specific are muddled and embarrassing. I found a good thirty percent of the screentime frankly kind of disturbing. Spock’s lines about wanting to hold and protect “his” Christine, in addition to Mudd’s weird speech on Chapel’s “feminine” profession of being a healer (what is this, a D&D campaign?), felt twenty years out of date even for the 70s. It seemed especially odd given the extraordinarily slashy little scene between Kirk and Spock. That’ll be imbued in my memory forever, yep. Do they need to be wasted to communicate their friendship? And oh god, M’Ress, phone sex operator from the stars. Scotty, what’s going on! At least in the most surreal Krofftian nightmares there was some hint of Star Trek, and the characters we know so well. Not here. Who are these people?
And so many things are nagging at me. Why doesn’t Mudd fall in love with Chapel, seeing as she touches him almost immediately after rubbing the crystal on herself? And why does Mudd bother changing the ID picture when it still says “Christine”?
I can see why Carmel has fans, but Mudd? No more, thanks.
Torie’s Rating: Warp 2
Best Line: McCoy: “I’ve saved just about everybody on this here ship. If the Enterprise had a heart, I’d save her too.”
Trivia: This episode is a direct sequel to “Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd,” which were also written by Stephen Kandel.
The illusion-making reptile Mudd uses to fool the miners is from the Rigel star system. Enterprise first encountered Mudd at the lithium mining station on Rigel XII, back in “Mudd’s Women.”
Producers considered bringing back Roger C. Carmel as Harry Mudd in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This is the last time we see Chapel’s feelings for Spock. That’s probably for the best, all things considered.
Other notes: Mudd returned in the tie-in books Mudd’s Angels in a novella titled “The Business, As Usual, During Altercations” by J.A. Lawrence and Mudd in Your Eye by Jerry Oltion.
Previous episode: Season 1, Episode 9 – “Once Upon a Planet.”
Next episode: Season 1, Episode 11 – “The Terratin Incident.” US residents can watch it for free at the CBS website.
I love how Mudd’s crystals are high school romance in a tin — a brief period of obsessive infatuation followed by awkwardness and resentment through at least finals.
Yeah, the weakness of the drawings really hampered this show. Although I’m not as completely horrified as our reviewers here by love-potion plots in general, this was pretty darn horrifying. The episode suffers from plot-arbitrariness, general silliness, and poor execution. The one thing I did like — strangely enough — were the drawings of M’Ress and Arex. Their emotions were the only ones really clearly conveyed with the line work — though maybe I’m just holding them to a different standard because, as aliens, they don’t have to compete with my knowledge of what a human face can actually do when it isn’t just turning on an axis with no other visible change . . .
To answer Eugene’s musings, I think it’s pretty consistent in the depiction of love potions across stories/media generally. Love is too complex to be strictly pharmacological — it’s one possible result of close friendship and high esteem, though by no means the only possible result. A potion that makes you feel close to someone really might just induce close friendship/bro’ship/slash-bait; a potion that makes you an obsessed, leg-humping creep troll is a lot less ambiguous — but also a lot more blunt and obviously manipulative, with characters clearly being compelled by the potion, rather than just influenced by a potion that gives good feelings.
For a love potion to produce love, it would have to produce a subtle enough change, and with sufficient variance in its effects, that you wouldn’t even be sure it worked at all. So the only love potion that you know works is the love potion you know doesn’t work (at least not to produce actual love).
I’m going to agree more with Torie here, mostly because, hey, Harry Mudd/Roger Carmel. I’m also going to cut them some slack for Arex’s “banjo”. Early in the first season we also had Uhura singing at her station with accompaniment from Spock on a zither. But other than that, this is pretty bad.
I can’t see how Harry could have been included in ST:IV. Would they pick him up on the way and have to take him to the past with them? In TNG he was scheduled to be in the season finale, where the Enterprise picks up a sleeper ship. He would have fit in well there, but Roger Carmel died. Alas, he might have been the only thing that could have saved that episode.
To clarify what Deep Thought was saying in #1, as used in fiction, most ‘Love Potions’ should really be called ‘Lust Potions’ because they are shown triggering or amplifying physical and/or sexual desires. (I’d include Cupid’s arrows in this.) Real love (not “love on first sight”) is too complex to be something triggered on command or drugging. Love on first sight is probably lust that mellows into love.
This episode probably ruined any chance for love to come to Spock and Christine. Otherwise, given time, something could had slowly developed between them. Hey, if it could happen between Goodie-Too-Shoes and The Filthy Beast (See Father Goose with Carry Grant and Leslie Caron.) then it can happen between anyone in fiction.
@1 DeepThought
The one thing I did like — strangely enough — were the drawings of M’Ress and Arex.
Yes, M’Ress’s swishing tail certainly conveyed that she was feeling frisky.
@2 DemetriosX
I read that in STIV, Mudd would have been a character witness for Captain Kirk, calling back to Kirk’s offer to be a witness at Mudd’s trial in “Mudd’s Women.” Having Mudd in “The Neutral Zone” would have been something to make that otherwise poor episode at least mildly entertaining.
@3 Ludon
The problem is that most network shows can’t show the lust aspect very well, so it just ends up being a ridiculous obsession–an exaggerated high school romance, as DeepThought put it. It’s also a problem that to portray love subtly and realistically, you’d probably need a season’s worth of episodes, not one 20-minute episode.
Still, I do wonder how many shipboard pregnancies might result from behavior-modifying events like this.
@4 Eugene
So Harry would have wound up on the cutting room floor, just like Majel Roddenberry. It would have been a terrible waste. In “The Neutral Zone” they could have replaced the rich dude with Harry and had a lot of fun with him trying to figure out how to run a scam in a post-scarcity economy. Roger Carmel may have really only had one schtick, but he did it so beautifully.
Y’know, it’s funny, I used to have the whole series on VHS (bootleg!), and I own all the JAF novelizations (which are generally better than the episodes, by a long chalk)…but I seem to be able to completely forget the true stinkers, like this one.
Maybe that’s why I always think of the series as running about 15 episodes, rather than a season’s worth. I just block out the horrors.
Some excellent comments here about love potions…makes me want to include one in a story, just to see if something more like love can be potioned-up, rather than the usual frottage and French kissing result.
This one was simply painful to watch. There simply isn;t time in 22 min for subtle maniptulation of established characters like Chapel and blunt manipulation like this is horrid.
Was anyone else chanting “garignack” when the rock monsters showed up?
Oh something else that really bugged me about this episode.. the phasers. I had no idea the phasers had a setter ‘dispel illusion.’ And that weapons capable of reducing matter to its components were powerless against rock-monsters. (or maybe monster of Rock, we should try that out too.)
Best ‘love potion/spell’ thing I have seen on TV, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, 2nd season.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0533401/
You’ve all got me thinking about love potions, and I agree–there hasn’t been a single love potion story I liked. They’re all lust potions, and any comedy/humor comes from people humiliating themselves in front of those they most want respect from. What a horrendous genre.
Either that or the person who falls in love with you turns out to be a heartless shrew. Wasn’t that a Twilight Zone episode?
Love potion or lust potion, it doesn’t matter — they’re all basically date rape drugs. In the long run, the simple lust version is less squicky — it’s not raping your mind forever, too. That’s why I can’t stand “love potion” plots.
I was even more appalled by the way this episode blithely portrayed Nurse Chapel as unprofessional, incompetent, easily-manipulated, transparent, and pretty much every other girls-can’t-really-be-grown-ups cliché you’ve ever seen. Feh. Maybe when they stretched her neck(*) they damaged something. It’s one thing for the crew to be irresponsible and incompetent when drugged; Nurse Chapel apparently doesn’t need the drug for that.
Warp Rating: abandoned in dry-dock during construction
(*) Seriously, what’s with the necks? The female crew in this show all look like Padaung/Kayan refugees, minus the metal rings.
@Torie #9
Yeah, that’s part of why I’m really not in favor of love potions in humorous plots. Great as a source of high tragedy, e.g. Tristan und Isolde; or as a “they fell in love and must struggle against it!” sort of thing — I’m much more tolerant of love-potion plots in the circumstance where 1) they’re drugged by accident; and 2a) either they know they’re drugged and are trying to compensate, or 2b) everyone around them knows they’re drugged and are trying to compensate or at least refuse to hold them at all responsible for the resulting behavior.
But even a lust potion shouldn’t be a “do completely stupid things for no reason” potion.