Choose Your Pain

This Story: Season 1 Episode 5 (production code 105)
DSC Overall: Episode 5
Trek Overall: Story 688, Episode 731
Airdate: 15 Oct 2017
Story by Gretchen J. Berg, Aaron Harberts, & Kemp Powers
Teleplay by Kemp Powers
Directed by Lee Rose

Notes

• The first on screen appearance of the character Harcourt Fenton (Harry) Mudd since the TAS episode “Mudd’s Passion“.
• To that, it’s the first time Mudd was played by someone other than Roger C. Carmel.  Here he’s played by Rainn Wilson, who is very well known for playing Dwight Schrute in “The Office” (US).  He was also a minor character in “Galaxy Quest“.  Wilson would play Mudd in one other Discovery episode (“Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad“) as well as one of the Short Trek shorts (“The Escape Artist”).
• Mudd’s friend in the Klingon cell is a bug named “Stuart”.  This is apparently a reference to Stuart Bloom from “The Big Bang Theory“.
• The show references several past Star Trek characters (but they are not shown).  they are: Robert April, Jonathan Archer, Matthew Decker, Phillipa Georgiou, and Christopher Pike.  That is the first live action reference to Robert April (the original captain of the Enterprise NCC-1701), although the character did appear in an animated series episode – “The Counter-Clock Incident“).
• The first appearance of twenty appearances by Shazad Latif of the character Ash Tyler.
• The first time the word fuck is spoken in a live action Star Trek episode.

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