Stardate: 1329.8
Quick Summary: The Enterprise is unable to save a small ship before it's destroyed, but does manage to save, not its crew, but a man named Harry Mudd and three gorgeous women. Turns out that Mudd sells women to settlers on the outer edges of the galaxy, but has to make them take Venus pills to enhance their beauty. When the Enterprise needs to buy some Lithium crystals from a mining colony on Rijel 12 in order to avoid disaster, the miners don't want money but insist on trading only for the women - leaving Kirk with a moral dilemma. He does, ultimately, trade away the women, but only after getting their consent.
Review: What a portrayal of women! Not only are they described as "cargo", they come across as evil-hypnotic seductresses with the temperament, at times, of insane hormonal teenage girls. When they don't take their pill, they become ugly, old-looking, and mean-spirited - and you can draw whatever analogies you want to PMS there. But perhaps the worst part is the central moral lesson the episode tries to convey: that if given the choice between a "sexy but useless" wife versus a wife "for cooking and sewing", the latter is a better decision. This is supposed to be the moral lesson?!!
Some feminists, or at least some even remotely rational people living in the modern world, ought to take issue with the premise of the question.
That said, the episode has a good tempo and the storyline moves along nicely. It's funny how the oddities keep drawing my attention though. For instance, Mudd is charged with not having a predetermined galaxy flight plan or a ship identification beam. Someone call a civil liberties attorney, please. Also, I'm curious as to what the Republican presidential candidates might think of the idea of "Subspace Radio Marriages". Seems like a family values issue to me. And the faux-tech is just a bit more ridiculous than usual here: a medical scanner is literally two blinking dots and a computer at Mudd's trial displays a basic wave pattern and voices only a robotic "INCORRECT" over and over. To be clear, it's campy; not annoying.
My lingering question... why is Kirk seemingly the only one who is so impervious to the women's magnetism? Is it that they're not actually beautiful but only "act beautiful"; that, as suggested, women's true beauty is determined by whether they believe in themselves or not?
I don't know. But it's almost two o'clock in the morning and I'm starting to feel like Doogie Howser typing this.
Review: 2 stars
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