Tough Mudder — Star Trek Discovery’s “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”

I have a hard time believing Harry Mudd could be such a ruthless killer. Technically things worked out so that he didn’t kill anybody (which I suppose is why they let him go at the end, since there was no actual evidence of any crime to charge him with other than being a stowaway), but he didn’t know that would be the case. In the penultimate loop, he killed Tyler quite brutally and intended to return to normal time thereafter, so that Tyler’s death would “stick.” So lack of consequences doesn’t explain why he’s so much more vicious.

Okay, maybe the Klingon prison left him rather badly scarred. And “Mudd’s Women” did say he’d been through psychological treatment of disputed effectiveness, though it never suggested it was for anything of this magnitude. It’s an odd storytelling choice to so completely reinvent Mudd as such a violent character when it’s supposed to be a younger version of the same, much more cuddly rogue we know from TOS and TAS. I also have trouble believing he could be this smart.

I am also really sick of time-loop episodes, and the crew’s casual reaction to temporal phenomena seemed anachronistic, given that Spock in “The Naked Time” seemed to think of time travel as a theoretical phenomenon that the Federation had never discovered how to do. Okay, Archer dealt with time travel, but always instigated by outsiders. It wasn’t something his crew ever did under their own power. So Burnham just rattling off stuff about time crystals and four-dimensional beings as if this were routine knowledge was strange.

The casual reaction to the space whale also seemed incongruous, given that spacegoing life forms were generally treated in TOS and TNG as being rather extraordinary things. That’s an ongoing difference between the two prequel series. Enterprise went back to the past and really played up the sense of wonder and discovery, showing its characters reacting with awed wonder and unfamiliarity to things that are more routine in the other shows. That was one of its most endearing qualities — it captured the spirit of discovery and curiosity better than any other Trek series. But this show, which is literally named for the idea of discovery, has its characters reacting to amazing new things as if they were casual, routine business, or considering them only in terms of whether they’re useful or inconvenient in the context of the war. The writers assume the audience already knows all the tropes, so the characters just go through the motions. Meh, it’s a space whale. Oh, well, it’s another time loop. Who cares, we’ve got a romance to set up between two characters who’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks.

Also, what kind of an insane idea was it to beam a creature evolved for space into a starship’s pressurized atmosphere and artificial gravity field? The poor thing was obviously miserable there on the deck, probably being crushed under its own weight like a beached whale. And there’s no telling what the air pressure was doing to it. Couldn’t they at least turn off the gravity in the shuttlebay?

Mudd’s space helmet was… interesting. Perhaps an Andorian design? Oddly cartoonish, though.

@22/William Wehrs: Come to think of it, Edge of Tomorrow might be the second example I was trying to remember, or at least an example of that approach — instead of a slow buildup, it establishes the first couple of loops and then starts jumping forward rapidly, skipping many iterations of the loop and letting the characters leap forward in experience. And doesn’t it begin with Emily Blunt’s character already in mid-loop?

@23/tobias3: “Now they have a time travel device…”

No, they don’t. We saw it dissolve off Mudd’s wrist when he broke the loop. As Burnham said, the “time crystal” was unstable and couldn’t last indefinitely.

@35/Cheerio: Well, the party source music in TOS episodes like “Mudd’s Women” and “The Conscience of the King” had a very 1940s dance-band quality, and the “space hippie” music in “The Way to Eden” was rather ’60s-sounding. Let’s face it, any attempt to do music that sounds “futuristic” is going to sound dated within a decade or two anyway.

@64/Dante: Mudd didn’t know the timeline would reset when he killed Tyler with that dark matter pellet. He thought that was the last loop. Burnham had to force him to reset it again. That was an extremely brutal murder that he committed with the expectation that it would be permanent.

Continuity is a factor to the same degree it was in TOS, where James Kirk had two middle initials, Spock was either a Vulcanian or a Vulcan, the ship was powered by lithium crystals or dilithium, it operated under UESPA or Starfleet, etc. The nitpicky details of continuity have always been mutable.

@79/AWalt: Garth was not yet a shapeshifter at the time of this series. “Whom Gods Destroy” implies that the events that gave him those abilities and drove him mad took place fairly recently as of the episode, which takes place a dozen years in Discovery‘s future.

And Lethe? You mean the inmate from “Dagger of the Mind?” Don’t tell me someone online is claiming the episode title “Lethe” is a reference to that character. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness/oblivion in the Greek underworld. The “Dagger” character was called that as a mythological allusion because her memory had been wiped by Dr. Adams; the episode was no doubt called that because it involved a memory that Sarek wanted to be lost to oblivion.

@94/Jana: I’d call it a canon addition. It does conflict with a couple of lines of dialogue in “The Infinite Vulcan” and The Wrath of Khan about the Federation being at peace for a century, but there are plenty of other contradictory lines of dialogue in past canon. Indeed, “Whom Gods Destroy” makes the opposite implication, that the era of peace the Federation enjoys is fairly recent. Trek canon has never been a perfectly consistent thing. It’s been undergoing “alterations” for 51 years now.

@97/roxana: And don’t you pretend that Trek continuity has been perfectly consistent up to now. It’s always been a self-contradictory mess — that’s the point. And I’m sick of the dishonesty of Trek purists who scream about the inconsistencies in the newest show as if it were something Star Trek had never done before. It happened with Enterprise and with the Kelvin movies, it happened before then with the original movies and TNG, and it’s become a hollow cliche by this point.

@109/LordVorless: I’m not saying they didn’t change their approach with the Ferengi. Obviously they did. But that’s a real-world change. My point is that it doesn’t create an in-story contradiction the way the retconned Cardassian war did. We were told that Starfleet was a peacetime service in TNG’s first couple of seasons, and then we were told that the Federation had been at war that entire time. That doesn’t make any damn sense, unless it was a cold war, and even then it’s a stretch. The change in the Ferengi was merely a shift in emphasis and doesn’t create anywhere near as massive a continuity snarl.

And any aesthetic change is going to rub some folks the wrong way. And making no aesthetic change would rub other folks the wrong way. One thing you have to learn if you’re going to be a creator — everything you can possibly do will offend somebody. So you can’t worry about who you might offend. You just have to do what feels right to you.

Personally, I don’t much care for how radically DSC’s look departs from previous Trek. But my personal opinion doesn’t dictate other people’s choices. They’re the ones creating the show, not me, so they have a right to make choices I don’t agree with.

@113/LordVorless: I don’t understand why you think the shift in emphasis in the Ferengi represents a continuity alteration. Like I said, obviously any society is going to have both military people and civilian businesspeople at the same time, and it makes perfect sense that the Federation’s earliest contacts with the Ferengi would be with their military, with more civilian contacts happening as the two civilizations get to know each other better. It actually fits together pretty smoothly, aside from cosmetic changes like dropping the crouched posture of the “Last Outpost” Ferengi. There was no contradiction, just a decision that the Ferengi would work better as comic foils than serious military antagonists.

The Cardassian war retcon is a more massive change because it alters the whole nature of the Federation and Starfleet in the first two seasons of TNG. Roddenberry very much wanted to show a peaceful version of Starfleet, a service that had outgrown militarism and become dedicated to science and diplomacy above all. Suddenly revealing that they were at war that whole time is a huge, huge realignment of the entire premise of the series. It makes a lot of aspects of early TNG retroactively nonsensical. Like in “Peak Performance” where Picard objected to the idea of war games because Starfleet’s purpose was exploration. But according to “The Wounded,” implicitly, Picard was saying that while his own government was in the tail end of a war with another major power. It just doesn’t fit. It’s a far more massive retcon than most people realize.

@115/Jana: That’s just it — it’s not just one episode. “The Wounded”‘s revelation that the Federation was at war up until a year before — and all the subsequent episodes that built on that backstory of conflict with the Cardassians — contradicts the entire first two seasons’ portrayal of a peacetime Starfleet and a Federation that considered itself to have grown beyond war. Yes, it is easy to overlook — I missed it myself at first — but once I realized the contradiction and thought through the ramifications, I recognized what a massive reinterpretation of the universe it was.

The way I reconciled it in my books — notably The Buried Age — was to draw on an idea from Poul Anderson’s Terran Empire series and take recourse in the fact that the Federation is huge. In a nation with hundreds of entire planets belonging to it, a war could be massive enough to affect multiple worlds along one border, yet still be seen as a minor, remote problem from the perspective of people elsewhere in that vast, sprawling metacivilization. Like a tree so vast that a blight that’s killing one part of it can have no impact on the rest.

And to get back to the analogy with the war in Discovery, the idea that the Federation was at peace for a century before TOS comes from only one episode (“The Infinite Vulcan”) and one movie (TWOK). And the revelation of a war a decade before TOS doesn’t change anything about what was going on during TOS, and actually fits well with certain things like Kirk’s soldier mentality and the general portrayal of heated UFP-Klingon tensions. So this retcon is a lot easier to reconcile than the Cardassian War retcon.

@117/Jana: The idea was always that humanity had outgrown warfare within itself — nation against nation, race against race. TOS never claimed that humans were immune to attack by other species. That idea actually came up a lot in TOS right from the start:

“Balance of Terror”: Established an Earth-Romulan war a century earlier, shows a new war barely averted.

“Arena”: Shows war with the Gorn being barely averted.

“A Taste of Armageddon”: Shows the Enterprise becoming a target in an alien war.

“Errand of Mercy”: Shows war actually breaking out with the Klingons and only being stopped by alien intervention.

With the exception of “The Corbomite Maneuver,” every first-season episode depicting an interaction between humanity and a currently active, spacegoing nonhuman state (as opposed to a moribund or dead race or a godlike superrace) is about a potential or actual state of war. After that, we mainly got ongoing cold-war situations with the Klingons and Romulans, but note that “Journey to Babel” implied that interplanetary war between Federation members could break out if the Coridan talks broke down.

So TOS hardly shied away from war as a story theme. Yes, their episodes focused more on the wars being avoided, but I think that has a lot to do with the fact that TV back then was strictly episodic and so any potential war had to be averted or resolved by the end of the hour, unless it was a cold war with a recurring baddie.

@130/LordVorless: It’s a myth that Kirk violated the Prime Directive. As a captain in the field in an era when consulting Starfleet Command was not always easy and captains were expected to be the ones making policy decisions for themselves, Kirk acted on his responsibility to interpret the Prime Directive and how it should apply in each situation. And he rarely, if ever, chose to initiate an unprovoked act of interference; rather, he acted to counteract existing sources of interference or artificial constraint upon societies’ natural development. That may seem like a violation by the absurdly strict 24th-century take on the Prime Directive, but it’s entirely in keeping with how TOS defined it. The idea that Kirk went around blithely violating Starfleet’s highest law is one of the most erroneous modern misinterpretations of TOS.

There are only a couple of borderline cases. “A Taste of Armageddon” is one, but arguably the Directive didn’t apply there because the Eminians had declared the intention to destroy the Enterprise, which would’ve constituted an act of war and justified Kirk in taking whatever defensive action was necessary to protect his crew and neutralize the enemy’s ability to do harm. The other is “Friday’s Child,” where he saved Eleen against her own wishes and her people’s customs. Perhaps he saw that as countering Klingon interference, but Maab’s coup might have happened even without Kras’s support, so it’s hard to say.

As for the “Temporal Prime Directive,” that concept did not exist in TOS. It was first mentioned in TNG. Remember, “The Naked Time” treated time travel as something no Starfleet vessel had ever achieved (which is exactly my problem with the characters’ casual attitude toward Mudd’s “time crystal” in the DSC episode this thread is nominally about). So Kirk and his crew were pioneering the practice. There wouldn’t have been any temporal laws in place to violate yet.

As for Starfleet Academy, TWOK may have created the impression of Kirk as a renegade cadet, but that conflicts with “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Shore Leave,” which painted Kirk as a very serious, studious, by-the-book cadet, “a stack of books with legs” and “positively grim.”

@131/John C. Bunnell: “And I don’t think they’ve done anything so outrageous to overall continuity that we can’t play the Sherlockian-inspired game of working out how the seeming errors in aired continuity actually can be worked out by the application of sufficient creative thinking.”

Very well said. That kind of creative exercise has been a large part of Trek fandom and fan/tie-in fiction from the beginning. TOS had plenty of continuity errors and holes which kept the fans busy trying to rationalize and reconcile them, and so has everything since. That’s helped increase fans’ investment in the franchise, because they’re actually applying their own creativity and effort to it and that lets them feel more like a part of it.

I suspect that a perfectly consistent fictional universe with no holes to patch or questions to theorize about would have a relatively tepid fan following, despite many fans’ belief that that’s what they want. It would be a far more passive experience for the audience.

@133/LordVorless: My point is, Kirk wasn’t committing “violations.” That’s a profound misunderstanding of TOS by people mistakenly applying TNG-era rules and assumptions. Kirk’s whole job, his rightful duty as the sole representative of the Federation in the distant reaches of space, was to interpret the laws and policies of the Federation according to his best judgment. Like British naval captains in the Age of Sail, he was the one entitled to make those calls because there was no one else present who could. He had the power to enforce the law, to negotiate a treaty, to make a first contact, to start a war, whatever he deemed justified according to his understanding of regulations and his awareness of the uniqueness of each situation. He would’ve been a terrible captain if he hadn’t used his intelligence and judgment to finesse the rules for each situation. Doing so was not a violation of his responsibility, it was the application of his responsibility. Just as we have judges to decide how the laws should be enforced in a given instance, rather than just having a machine give absolute, inflexible verdicts according to some rigid formula. You need a person on the scene to temper the letter of the law with informed judgment, and that’s a key part of what a starship captain’s job was on the frontier.

James T. Kirk has somehow become the most profoundly misunderstood character in the entire Trek franchise. This myth has somehow set in that he was some hotheaded wild man who didn’t care about the rules. But as Keith repeatedly pointed out in his TOS reviews, the character was actually written in exactly the opposite way — as a committed, dutiful career officer who always did his best to obey the letter of his orders and enforce the laws and principles of the Federation in a fair and responsible way. He was written as the man who upheld the Prime Directive, the policeman who stopped other people (and computers) from breaking it, which fit into the activist, Peace Corps mentality of the 1960s. It’s only by the post-colonial TNG approach, which saw any attempt at intervention to be bad no matter how benevolent, that Kirk’s interventions appear like “violations.” By the standards of the time — both the 1960s and the 2260s — Kirk was protecting or restoring other cultures’ sovereignty, not violating it.

And Cracked is a comedy site. It deliberately exaggerates and distorts things for the sake of a joke. You can’t take its assessments as literal fact. Hell, these days it’s barely even funny anymore.

On the Kobayashi Maru, the 2009 movie and the Julia Ecklar novel of that name show him programming it to guarantee his victory, but Kevin Lauderdale’s Strange New Worlds anthology story “A Test of Character” just has him reprogram it to be fair, then win it honestly.