The reputation arrives before the episode does. Search “Mudd’s Women” in any Trek forum and you’ll find the same verdict repeated until it looks like consensus: rampant sexism, a story about space hookers, early TOS at its embarrassing worst. I read enough of it that the sheer volume eventually had the opposite effect. I sat down specifically to watch it and have my say.
A disembodied head descends from the ceiling on a mechanical spine, lowers itself onto a waiting body, and Alice Krige looks up at Patrick Stewart with a smile that is simultaneously welcoming and predatory. “I am the Borg,” she says. From that moment on, nothing about the Borg is quite what it was.
That is precisely the problem, depending on who you ask.
Star Trek has always been willing to try horror. The follow-through is another matter. “Catspaw” dressed up a base-under-siege story in Halloween trappings and lost the tone somewhere in the second act. “Wolf in the Fold” gave us a serial killer mystery and a villain genuinely disturbing enough to stick around, if anyone ever thought to bring him back. IDW thought to bring him back.
There’s a moment early in Star Trek: Red Shirts where the security team is loaded into torpedo casings and fired at a planet. The team inside stare out in terror, crammed into modified casings with little more than life support and a prayer, while the U.S.S. Warren follows up with two live torpedoes to knock the target antenna offline. It’s a brisk, vicious image, and it tells you exactly what kind of book you’re holding before the first casualty lands. These people are already equipment. The comic knows it, and it wants you to know it too.
The joke of the Ferengi was never that they were aliens. The joke was that they weren’t. Strip away the oversized ears and the obsession with latinum and what you’re left with is a society built around competition, acquisition, branding, exploitation, and the belief that success excuses almost anything. The Ferengi were funny because they exaggerated attitudes that already existed in the real world. The uncomfortable part is how much less exaggerated they feel now than they did in 1987.
There’s a version of Star Trek that exists slightly to the left of the one you know.
The phasers are called lasers. The shirt colours are wrong. Spock occasionally behaves in ways that would make the television Spock raise an eyebrow. Kirk is a straightforward space hero rather than the complicated, contradictory, occasionally reckless man William Shatner was building on screen. Yet despite all that, the stories are recognisably Trek-shaped. Strange worlds. Impossible problems. Civilisations in crisis. The Enterprise arriving somewhere unusual and trying to think its way through a situation that shouldn’t have a solution.
There is a Wikipedia page that attempts to define Star Trek canon. It is, in the way of most Wikipedia pages on contested topics, thorough, carefully footnoted, and ultimately incapable of settling the argument it was written to resolve. The page lists what counts, what doesn’t count, what Gene Roddenberry said, what he later contradicted, and the various positions Paramount has taken over the decades. It will not tell you whether the DS9 relaunch novels matter. It will not tell you whether Destiny counts. These are questions canon cannot answer, because they are not really canon questions.
There’s a moment roughly halfway through “The Enemy Within” where good Kirk, gentle, compassionate, and increasingly useless, tries to give an order and physically can’t hold the sentence together. He knows what he wants to say. The words just won’t come with any weight behind them. It’s a small moment, easy to lose in an episode full of bigger ones, but it’s the most honest thing the episode does. The argument isn’t really about good and evil. It’s about what actually holds a command together, and whether the things we’d rather not own about ourselves are, inconveniently, structural.
I came to TOS backwards, the way most people my age did. TNG was the Trek I grew up with, the one that was actually on when I was old enough to care. TOS arrived later, in the way things did before streaming made chronology optional, in chunks, on whatever channel was running it that week, in an order that made no particular sense. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was probably not the first TOS episode I watched, but it might as well have been. It’s the one that made me understand what the show actually was, as distinct from the show I already knew. The two things are related but they are not the same thing, and this episode is where you feel the difference most clearly.
