Harcourt ‘Harry’ Fenton Mudd is back to cause trouble for Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise in Jerry Oltion’s Mudd In Your Eye, set during the original five-year mission, the tale ties into the previous Mudd episode, “I, Mudd” and arguably before (?) the animated series episode “Mudd’s Passion”.

The Enterprise is requested to investigate the sudden outbreak of peace on a pair of warring planets. The war that had been going on for over a millennium has ended abruptly, and Kirk and Spock have been asked to check out and determine what happened.

When the landing party beams down, they are shocked to discover that Mudd is also on the planet, having escaped from the androids Kirk had left him with at the end of “I, Mudd.” Claiming to be just around to help out, he’s accompanied by one android only, one based on his wife, Stella, but Kirk, though he can’t prove it, believes Harry is up to something, and almost causes a diplomatic incident intending to prove it.

When one of the opposing forces uses the peace treaty as a cover to sneak troops onto the grounds, Harry’s cowardice shows, while he’s attempting to plunder a storeroom, and the war quickly resumes, claiming victims on both sides.

Among the fallen are Harry, Kirk, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov!

This automatically tells us that there is something more going on, and the story doesn’t make us wait too long to be reunited with the characters because readers know that these characters can’t be killed off so let’s just move the story along until we can discover what’s going on.

It seems there is some sort of resurrection process going on, and this is one of the reasons the war has gone on so long.

In traditional The Original Series fashion, there’s a computer at work at the heart of the story, but it’s not something that has to be confronted as it so often had to be in the series, instead, it’s about attempting to get the war back under control, and stopped, as well as making sure that those Starfleet may have lost in this escapade are returned to life and service.

There is some humour around Harry, but the story itself plays itself very straight, and much like a number of The Original Series novels of late, feels like it could be an episode, or at least exists in that same reality.

It’s fun, entertaining, and it’s an enjoyable Trek adventure, and I am going to continue to boldly go with another Trek tale in the very near future.