Star Trek: Mudd's Women

This is perhaps one of the sleaziest episodes of television ever to air, primarily because it was so overt in its content and themes. The Enterprise essentially rescues a pimp fleeing in a smaller vessel with his "cargo"--3 women who are (for all practical purposes) prostitutes. Bio-genetically "enhanced" to be super-attractive through the use of an alien substance, the women drive the men on the ship to distraction before serving as their pimp's means of extorting the Enterprise. The Enterprise's fate, of course, rests in the captain's ability to attempt to convince 3 ecstatic miners to tear themselves away from their new brides long enough to give the ship the crystals it desperately needs to stay in orbit.

Remember that this was 1966, and television had not gone nearly as far in showing overt sexual sin as it does today. This episode may well have been the first to show prostitution in a positive light--a dashing, debonair con artist selling unbelievably beautiful young women to the highest bidder. The women's bio-genetically enhanced beauty, of course, seems to have been one of the easiest special effects for the production staff to put together. The actresses--all of whom must have been models before starring in the show--simply wore the make-up needed to make anyone look good on camera, and this, coupled with some simple cinematography, resulted in the effect of "enhanced" beauty. To simulate the effects of the alien drug wearing off, the producers undoubtedly filmed the actresses without make-up and without the special cinematography. (I'm sure there was more to it than that, but the transition between make-up and no make-up would definitely explain the transition between "beautiful" and "ugly" that occurs when the women's drugs wear off, as heavy make-up is required to make both men AND women look good in front of a camera.)

There are two things very wrong with this episode, in spite of what it seems to be saying at the end (one of the miners choosing to stay with his new bride even after finding out that her beauty has been bio-genetically enhanced). For starters, what happened to all the leggy female crew members in skin-tight "uniforms" who have been serving on the Enterprise for the previous several episodes? They seem to disappear in this one--both in the eyes of their male crewmates and (apparently) in the eyes of the production staff as well. One would think that Lieutenant Uhura or Nurse Chapel or Yeoman Rand would do whatever they could to expose Mudd's scheme simply on the basis of female competitiveness, but it takes one of the bio-genetically enhanced women themselves to finally come clean before the truth is revealed to the ship's captain.

More disturbingly, while no actual sex takes place between crew members and Mudd's women, the suggestion of the POSSIBILITY of sex is very potent throughout the episode, and this is one of the reasons why I consider it to be one of the sleaziest episodes of television ever to air. This was 1966, and while sexuality had been introduced in an overt way in film (although not nearly as overt as it is displayed in modern cinema), it was still a brand new part of small screen television, which mostly featured family shows and Westerns. To show what essentially amounted to prostitution in such a positive way (yes, the women are exploited, but yes, they also seem to be ENJOYING the exploitation) was to make a complete departure from what had been the norm in television's portrayal of sexuality. Roddenberry was, in many ways, a cultural trailblazer, and shows like this one blazed the way for the sexual revolution which took place during the late 1960's. The counterculture was, in a very real sense, "tuning in" to shows like Star Trek, and young men and women were seeing a vision of the future that did not fit inside the walls of the stale portrayal of sexuality and marriage they had seen on the small screen for over a decade.

Television has an immense influence in the family home. It is, in a very real sense, a teacher. Unfortunately, most of the lessons it teaches seem to fall under our radar, including the lesson that sex is conquest and adventure with multiple people (and, presumably, without kids to get in the way of the fun). I'm not saying that sex isn't an adventure or that sex isn't fun--quite the contrary--but I AM saying that sex is not the frolicking romp through multiple partners that the entertainment industry says it is. After all, the whole point of having sex--biologically--is having children, right? The drive to unite with someone of the opposite sex is inexorably bound up with the drive to procreate, so much so that even young men who want to "play the field" before getting married still refuse to wear condoms during their sexual encounters. Why do you think they do that, ladies? It's because deep inside of them, there is a drive to procreate that is part of what ultimately comprises their sex drive, and even though they don't understand it themselves (and certainly, on a conscious level, don't want--at the time--to take up the responsibility of being fathers), they still can't bring themselves to use birth control.

This is why divorce is proliferating in America, why American families are becoming so divided and dysfunctional--because our society, via television, has divorced sexuality from procreation. Sex without procreation is sex without love, however, and most people discover, to their horror, that "playing the field" leaves them far more lonely than they ever felt before they played. I would suggest that part of being a Christian in our day and age is teaching--through example--that sex and procreation are fundamentally intertwined, that indeed one does not have "good" sex WITHOUT first committing to the possibility that one will be a parent and a spouse. Teaching our children to view sex in this way is a very important part of teaching them to approach their culture from a Christian perspective.