As happy as I was to see Harry Mudd (Roger Carmel) back in the Star Trek universe, I have to groan a bit with the reworking of the same themes that the series had already done a number of times before. There's the oft repeated topic of Man potentially giving up his freedom and responsibility in exchange for harmony and having his needs completely taken care of. Not only that, but we've seen the resolution in action before as well, as Captain Kirk uses reason and logic to trip up the programming of his android captors. I guess one needs to focus on the fun elements of the episode and go along for the ride, especially when the Enterprise crew gets into their non-sensical horseplay to trip up Norman and the rest.
I had to do a quick rewind in the early going in that scene when Norman (Richard Tatro) first came on board the Enterprise and started to take over the Engineering section. There's a red-shirt crew member who's presumably about to dive from the upper platform area onto Norman, but he's going in a direction AWAY from the android. Yet in the split second jump cut, he lands directly on top of Norman. Check it out.
I have to say, Captain Kirk was pretty tolerant of old Harry when you come right down to it. You didn't come up with too many lovable rogues like Harry who could get away with calling Kirk names like laddie-buck. That's why I was a bit mystified with the ending, rather shocked actually that Kirk decided to leave Harry behind as a captive of the androids. It was all done quite amusingly with the sentence of dealing with five hundred Stella's, but somehow I didn't think it very sporting of old Jamie Boy.
I had to do a quick rewind in the early going in that scene when Norman (Richard Tatro) first came on board the Enterprise and started to take over the Engineering section. There's a red-shirt crew member who's presumably about to dive from the upper platform area onto Norman, but he's going in a direction AWAY from the android. Yet in the split second jump cut, he lands directly on top of Norman. Check it out.
I have to say, Captain Kirk was pretty tolerant of old Harry when you come right down to it. You didn't come up with too many lovable rogues like Harry who could get away with calling Kirk names like laddie-buck. That's why I was a bit mystified with the ending, rather shocked actually that Kirk decided to leave Harry behind as a captive of the androids. It was all done quite amusingly with the sentence of dealing with five hundred Stella's, but somehow I didn't think it very sporting of old Jamie Boy.