There's already one hell of a lot cringeworthy about the episode I, Mudd - Harry Mudd himself, for one thing, who's only a few steps up from Neelix on the annoyance scale. There's also the sheer bat-poop craziness of watching the Enterprise crew outwit the logic of the androids who have taken them prisoner - apparently they're so used to being captured by androids by this point that they prefer to treat it as a light-hearted game rather than as a real threat. But then there's Mudd's android replica of his wife Stella, the sort of stereotypical shrewish wife that had a lot of traction on television programmes in the '60s and '70s. It's meant to be funny, of course, but it's only funny in the same way that Foster Brooks playing a drunk is funny, or that Dane Cook is funny. They were probably rolling in front of their television sets back in 1967 when Harry finds out at the end of the episode he is stranded on the planet with 500 replicas of Stella (provided they were still watching, of course), but it's got the feel of a Scooby Doo laugh these days. Not that Star Trek was ever averse to having characters laugh at a dumb jokes at the end of an episode, but this wasn't the most egregious instance, nor the most cruel. That honour, such as it is, is reserved for the next entry on our list...
Tony Whitt has previously written TV, DVD, and comic reviews for CINESCAPE, NOW PLAYING, and iF MAGAZINE. His weekly COMICSCAPE columns from the early 2000s can still be found archived on Mania.com. He has also written a book of gay-themed short stories titled CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONS, available on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle format. Whitt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
