WARNING: This article contains spoilers for this week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery, "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," which premiered Sunday on CBS All Access.
A beloved figure from Star Trek: The Original Series, con artist Harry Mudd was a bit of a trickster, complicating the lives of the Enterprise crew with his schemes -- transporting women to be the wives of miners, establishing himself as ruler of a planet of androids -- but never rising above the level of lovable rogue to become a true villain. However, Star Trek: Discovery has changed that, transforming Harcourt Fenton Mudd into a genuine threat without sacrificing the flamboyance and character flaws that made him so appealing in the first place.
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Set a decade before the five-year mission of James T. Kirk and his crew, Discovery introduced Rainn Wilson (The Office) as Mudd in its fifth episode, "Choose Your Pain," where he was a prisoner aboard a Klingon vessel, unashamed to betray his cellmates to their captors to ease his own treatment. "Don't judge," he tells Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who's incredulous that Mudd would out other prisoners for beatings rather than suffer them himself. "You're gonna wanna stick with me: I'm a survivor, just like you."
He's right, too; he is a survivor. Left behind when Lorca and Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) mounted an escape, Mudd miraculously returned in this week's episode, with one eye on vengeance and the other on the USS Discovery.
Unlike the Harry Mudd played on TOS by Roger C. Carmel, with his handlebar mustache and jaunty hat, Wilson's version has a sinister edge. He's still a liar and a cheat, on the run from creditors and his not-so-beloved Stella, and, sure, he's still on the lookout for a quick buck. But this younger, bearded mug is willing to go far greater lengths to get what he wants -- including committing mass murder, again and again.
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With "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," the show fell back on the franchise-favorite trope of time travel as Mudd sneaks aboard Discovery by hiding his ship within a gormagander -- an endangered "space whale," not a Pokemon -- that the Starfleet vessel is required by law to transfer to a xenologic facility. Once the creature is beamed into one of the cargo bays, Mudd marches out of its mouth, opens fire and begins to learn all he can about the Federation's secret weapon, so he can take control of it and then sell it to the Klingons.
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How exactly the slippery Mudd orchestrated his escape from custody isn't clear, and there's little time to sort out those details. Well, technically, there's nothing but time, as Mudd's plot involves a 30-minute temporal loop created using a "time crystal" he'd previously employed to break into a high-security Betazoid bank: Events play out over and over again, with Mudd learning a little more about Discovery and its spore drive each time before the window closes with the destruction of the vessel.
"Did you really think you could leave me to rot on a Klingon prison and not suffer any repercussions?" he tells Lorca in his first visit. "As soon as I find out what's so special about your ship, I'm gonna sell it to the Klingons, do you hear me, captain? I'm going to sell your ship to your mortal enemy, and in doing so I'm going to destroy any chance your Federation has of winning this war! When you left me behind with the Klingons, you robbed me of my dear, sweet Stella, the only woman I have ever loved. And I will have my revenge. Also, I'm going to kill you as many times as possible."
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While Mudd may fudge the facts when it comes dear, sweet Stella, he isn't exaggerating about repeatedly murdering Lorca -- 53 times and counting, by Mudd's reckoning, "and it never gets old!" -- to say nothing of Discovery's crew. It could be argued that because of the temporal loop, none of those people actually die; they're restored each time the clock resets. However, Mudd's third for blood is certainly genuine. He relishes finding creative, and painful, new ways to kill Lorca, Tyler and the others. He's not a lovable rogue who's more a danger to himself than anyone else -- he's a murderer who, if he gets his way, will hand the entire crew over to the Klingons to be imprisoned and tortured.
This take on Harcourt Fenton Mudd is admittedly shocking, yet it doesn't entirely abandon the character we met in 1966's "Mudd's Women" and again in 1967's "I, Mudd." He's governed by greed and hubris, and it's those flaws that prove his undoing: Despite finally having all of the information he requires to operate Discovery, he triggers one more time loop when Michael Burnham kills herself, so that he can sell the killer of the Klingon messiah T'Kuvma along with the ship. In the process, he also fails to secure Discovery's noncritical systems, allowing the con artist to be conned and placed on a collision course with Stella, and her wealthy arms-dealer father, whose money he stole.
It's somehow fitting, at least for the sake of franchise continuity, that Mudd should be "sentenced" to be wed to Stella, who on Discovery is still far removed from her screeching android counterpart depicted in "I, Mudd."
Still, Harry Mudd did murder Captain Lorca and the Discovery crew in the neighborhood of 70 times, even if those deaths never actually stuck. But while that punishment hardly fits the crimes, maybe there's some justice to be found in how he ends up a decade later, stranded on a planet, surrounded by hundreds of uncontrollable android duplicates of dear, sweet Stella.
Airing Sundays at 8:30 p.m. ET on CBS All Access, Star Trek: Discovery stars Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Jason Isaacs, Anthony Rapp, Shazad Latif, Mary Wiseman, Wilson Cruz, Mary Chieffo and James Frain.