Three mail-order brides are made beautiful beyond words for about 24 hours by an illegal substance known as the Venus drug, during which time they need to get to their prospective husbands and get married.
Mail-order brides are an interesting phenomenon. Not as property being bought and sold among men, but as people seeking a new life with new opportunities. I’m interested because I can see myself considering marrying someone I’ve never met in order to have a completely new life. I did — a couple of times — consider it while I was still living with my parents (too chicken to pull the trigger, or too stubborn to give up on choosing me, who knows).
This episode really centers around Eve who doesn’t want to have to trick someone into marrying her for looks she doesn’t have and runs off (after being left on a mining planet with three miners and the two other women who are perfectly happy using deception to get away from their home worlds).
She throws a couple of tantrums, reveals her true nature, and gets her man. It’s all to prove that confidence is what makes a woman beautiful, that knowing who you are and owning it is all you need. But she remains on the planet because she still needs that marriage certificate in order to avoid going back to her home world which is apparently worse than the planet she and her husband will now have to share with two miserable pairs of newlyweds and no one else.