Star Trek: Discovery. Season One. Episode 7. Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.If the idea was to make us go mad as the episode title suggests, I think it accomplished its goal.
On some level I have to acknowledge that the episode really was trying to make the audience angry, and so a lot of my anger is a point in the writers' favor and not against them. But if you're going to make your audience feel bad then you have to earn it. You can't just make them feel bad for no reason.
With an episode that goes around in circles so much, where do I even start?
The last time we saw Harry Mudd, he was a helpless prisoner. If he had some means of escaping then it's curious why he hadn't done it already. And not only did he escape, but in a few days he managed to become the most powerful man in the galaxy, a supervillain mastermind capable of the impossible by virtue of unknown technology.
Logically, every person aboard the Discovery should have been smarter than Mudd because they had undergone Starfleet training. Mudd was a smart guy in a business sense, but he wasn't exactly doing "business" in this episode. He was doing action hero secret agent hacker stuff, and more for the purpose of hateful vengeance than profit.
The idea was that Mudd was getting more and more competent with each iteration because he was learning more each time and was able to avoid past mistakes. There are a few problems with this. For one thing it doesn't matter if you know how to avoid mistakes if what you're trying to do is impossible. And some guy taking over a Federation starship with the entire crew still on board should be impossible. But near-instantaneous single-handed complete takeovers have practically become a stale sci-fi trope at this point, and with their frequency you'd think these people don't plan any sort of system security at all.
With the odds Mudd was up against there should have been many times more failures than successes with every little thing he was trying to do, but we weren't really shown the failures. The episode gives the impression that he accomplished everything sort of quickly and that just adds to audience frustration. He fails quickly the first time (after killing a half-dozen mysteriously-unarmed crew members), but after that he immediately accelerates all the way to his major blocker: operating the spore drive. And from our perspective, that's the only obstacle he has to get past by looping over and over again. We never even saw an iteration where they didn't take the gormagander on board, despite the time loop conveniently starting before that event. If they just kept Mudd off the ship then that would have significantly slowed the speed at which he could gather information.
Another huge reason Mudd should never have gotten so far is that Stamets had the same advantage Mudd did, so he should have been learning to counteract Mudd at least as quickly as Mudd was learning to advance. But for some reason while Mudd was busy gathering all of Federation knowledge in his unremarkable head, Stamets was throwing himself against a brick wall by futilely trying to get people to believe him over and over again. Mudd's goal should have been impossible regardless of the amount of iterations. The crew even acknowledges at the end that there may be no way to win no matter how many times you do it over, but they said it about themselves and not Mudd.
The writers did a double twist at the end, where they said Mudd really didn't want to reunite with Stella but then oh wait he did! So our heroes conned the con man but then actually got conned with their own con. It's an extra dissatisfaction to see this evil psychopath live happily ever after with the woman of his dreams. Perhaps the show is counting on the audience knowing that in the original series Mudd became unhappy with his marriage.
But the original series Mudd is so very different. He was a comical villain and comical punishments were appropriate. You don't really even hate him, because his foibles gave him a certain charm. Rainn Wilson's Mudd is so much more malicious, and yet the end of the episode treats him like the goofy old villain from the original series, like we're supposed to be okay with someone who happily tortures people to death getting to run away with the love of his life. He had demonstrated both the will and the means to destroy the entire Federation, and the crew seemed perfectly happy to let him slip through their grasp, saying he should be kept "out of their way." Mudd was in their way? That's an odd euphemism for someone who was both trying to and succeeding in torturing and killing everyone.
I think the episode may have landed better if Mudd was written as someone who just wanted to make a profit off of stealing the ship, and the Discovery was selected because of its value to the Klingons while the bad blood from recent events made Mudd more comfortable sealing the crew's fate. Maybe that Mudd could have been reasoned with as someone who didn't really want to see the entire Federation fall. As it was, Mudd's insane quest for revenge seemed to be going a little far.
EDIT: I just remembered something else. In not one of the iterations do we see anyone killing Mudd! Clearly that wouldn't have stopped him because he died in the explosions, but it would have at least slowed him down and it would have made sense to try it from the crew's perspective. Maybe it's because the Federation is so "peaceful" (even though that's been turned on its head in this series), but someone could have at least mentioned the idea!
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