I guess it was Saturday night we did two episodes in a row? Wasn't Sunday, because Sunday I spent making the podcast. So yeah, Saturday.
Wow, glad I got that worked out. Off to a tremendous start here.
Coming soon: who farted.
Anyway, in s02e07: "I, Mudd," we're reintroduced to Harcourt Fenton Mudd, aka Harry. He was in one of the early episodes of season one, running a scam with mail-order space-wives on some remote miners, which I think was only a scam because he was selling space-hotties under false pretenses. Kind of a scummer, is the point. Now he's got his own planet.
He's got a whole league of androids -- and they call them ANDROIDS; how did George Lucas get the trademark on this shit again? -- some are space-hottie clones and one's the wife he left who he keeps around to tell to shut up, but he's tired of being on the planet and so wants to trap someone else there so he can leave. Just so happened the leader of his cyborgs infiltrated the Enterprise and brought the ship to Mudd's planet. Quite a coincidence.
Some good Chekov lechery here, and some astoundingly sexist shit you'd never get away with these days between Mudd and his robo-wife. The whole plot's pretty thin, but Mudd's fun anyway, and in the end he gets trapped on the planet as punishment with an army of 500 of his robo-wives to nag him and basically the whole bridge cast -- Uhura got to come along on this one too -- has a good laugh, and then the episode's over. Silly but enjoyable.
s02e08: "Metamorphosis" was more complex, structurally. Kirk and Spock and Bones are out on an escort mission in a shuttle that gets pulled onto a mysterious planet by an ion energy field thing, only to meet Zefram Cochrane, a human from earth and the inventor of the warp drive, presumed dead for 150 years but who's apparently been living on this planet the whole time, kept alive and young by something called the Companion, shown as basically a cloud of color, which he joins with in kind of psychedelic union:
The ambassador that the trio were escorting (it was not, contrary to what you might think a mission to find escorts) was trying to stop a war between two civilizations and has some kind of fever and will die if they can't get her back to the ship, but the Companion is keeping them there and it's not until Spock rigs up the universal translator to speak Electricity Cloud that they can communicate with it. Turns out it's a lady and it's in love with Zefram Cochrane.
Cochrane isn't cool with it though, I guess because in the 2200s they still weren't cool with dudes marrying collections of ion particles. No one else seems bothered. Meanwhile, ambassador lady is dying and then dies, shortly beforehand saying that she never knew love and Cochrane should be happy with his ion cloud because at least that's something. She'd been kind of bitchy -- or, you know, professional -- earlier, so it's supposed to be a tender moment.
Next thing you know, the ion cloud has taken over her body -- zombie ambassador! -- and is a mortal woman. They're all set to leave the planet, everyone, but she's like, "By the way, I'll die if I leave," and Cochrane decides to stay behind too, even though he'll grow old and die now, because she's a proper lady with proper ladyparts.
But the really fucked up aspect of it is that ambassador is dead, and at the end, they're like, "Yeah, whatever." Kirk literally says, "I think they'll find another woman to stop that war." Their mission was a total failure and they were like, "Fuck it, let's get this dude who invented the warp drive some ass." Kind of a weird feeling when the episode was over.
I guess it's an important one in the Star Trek lore though, since I remember from like the 20 minutes of the First Contact movie that I saw on HBO that they meet the guy who invented warp travel, and at least according to Google Images, it's the same character, so good to know he comes up again:
A good episode, but a bit of kitchen-sinkery going on and the whole thing with the ambassador dying was weird.
Still, onward.
Also notable: on Saturday I watched the Next Generation episode "Darmok," and it was cool, but I don't think I have 178 episodes of that show in me. "Watching every episode of every Star Trek ever" wasn't exactly in the five-year plan.
I... I don't have a five year plan.
Just 41 episodes to go. By my count, I'm 39 in, so next one is the halfway point.