Star Trek Discovery: Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad excerpt

[Orrex]

1. I kind of wish that he had been anything at all like Harry Mudd, though.

My suspicion is that the writers took the original character, a vile, predatory opportunist, (human trafficking, drug peddling, kidnapping, theft, fraud, the list goes on) and distilled him down to the most simplistically obvious permutation, a generic space pirate with no connection to the original criminal beyond a shared name.