By 
Title: Mudd’s Passion
Airdate: 11/10/1973
Plot Summary
The Enterprise are sent to check out a conman, their old friend Harry Mudd. He is trying to sell a fake love potion to miners. Kirk reveals the scheme and “”rescues”” Harry into protective custody.
Mudd tricks Nurse Chapel into trying the love potion on Spock as a distraction to take her hostage and escape by shuttlecraft. Spock and Kirk pursue him to an abandoned planet but not before the potion is distributed into the air system.
The potion has a delayed effect and Spock soon becomes enamored of Christine. Complicating matters, a giant rock creature on the planet attacks and the Enterprise crew are too romantically distracted to rescue them.
Kirk manages to use the love potion on the Godzilla-sized creature and it spares them long enough to be rescued. The potion’s effects totally reverse and the love-smitten duos hate each other for an equal period of time. Realizing he had the real thing on his hands all along and didn’t market it correctly, Harry confesses to his misdeeds.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk and Spock declare their everlasting friendship to each other, inspiring more insipid slashfic.
Not sure how he got affected as he was off-ship when the potion started going through the air vents. Maybe he got a little whiff.
Logical
Spock gets completely infatuated with Chapel and will do anything to rescue and love her. Funnily enough he doesn’t have the reverse reaction to her, though she hates on him pretty badly. He does however snap at Kirk a couple of times when it wears off.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones starts to hit on a pretty red-skirt regaling her with all the times he saved pretty much every crewmember on the ship medically at one point or another. Well, he’s not wrong.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu really doesn’t do much this episode which seems like a missed opportunity for me to make all kinds of gay jokes.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is absent.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty is just all kinds of happy and warm to everyone. At some point he has sex with M’Ress. I didn’t know he was into cats but there you go. Overall I’d say that this relationship went a lot better than his previous ones. At least no one was butchered this time.
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, ya Fuzzy Face
Arex is just happy to be at his post. M’Ress however is just all over Scotty. Maybe Scotch is like catnip to her species.
Getting Animated
The planet they end up on has huge rock monsters. This is another example of something they could do in animation.
Mudd’s return is explained somewhat, he snuck aboard a ship. Given how well the androids were able to keep the entire crew of the Enterprise hostage, I find it a little odd Mudd was able to get away so easily.
We also have Mudd back on a mining colony to get the miner’s women or something. It’s a variation on a theme first seen in Mudd’s Women. At least this colony seems to have more than three dudes on it.
I Know That Guy
Roger Carmel makes his return as Mudd. He slips back into the role pretty well, even though it was just a voiceover.
Technobabble
Apparently the tiny pills can gas the entire ship as the ventilation system is connected without any filters or dampers or anything. Ok.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Oh Harry. Still doing your thing with love crystals. This time instead of making women hot, it just makes everyone hot for each other. It was pretty hilarious to see M’ress make the moves on Scotty but alas this was 70’s Saturday morning cartoons so we didn’t get anything weird.
What this episode does badly is murder the character of Christine Chapel. Yes, we know she’s always had a thing for Spock but she basically mickey’d him. And when Spock falls under the spell, she’s all in.
Maybe she was affected as well but there should’ve been something about not being real and some sort of realization in her mind that she did something truly wrong. At the end she’s downright an asshole to Spock, which admittedly is a side effect of the crystals, and that doesn’t do her any favors.
It’s supposed to be a lighthearted episode and all in good fun but if you dig in at all, you realize how much this would’ve really messed up the relationships between the crew of the Enterprise.
You just know there was a whole of sex that happened and a ton of walks of shame after. Add to that the effects inverted as they got off the stuff, the damage would’ve been pretty bad.
But no, it’s all back to normal and will never be spoken of again.
It was nice to see Mudd again and quite frankly, this episode is still better than Mudd’s Women. At least it all makes sense within the confines of the plot. I just wish there would’ve been an apology to Spock from Chapel or something.
As it was, she gets off scott free and it almost seems like it’s Spock that’s the jerk at the end and that just didn’t sit well with me. So because of the terrible wrap-up, I have to knock it down a peg.
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