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Star Trek Ent - Season 2 - Episode 06

Star Trek Ent - 2x06 - Marauders

Originally Aired: 2002-10-30

Synopsis:
In need of fuel, Enterprise discovers a mining colony that is being controlled by Klingons who are bullying the inhabitants and hoarding their supplies. [DVD]

My Rating - 3

Fan Rating Average - 3.33

Rate episode?

Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 27 14 17 10 10 8 7 5 3 3 9

Problems
- Like Voy: Demon, the writers apparently don't know what deuterium is. It's a type of hydrogen. It can be extracted from anything, including from water! It's hardly a valuable commodity. There's no need to "mine" it. Again, the writers are confusing deuterium with dilithium.

Factoids
None

Remarkable Scenes
- Archer: "There's a saying on my world. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."
- Hoshi demonstrating how to hit a target. Oh the irony! ;)
- T'Pol: "Try to strike me." Travis hesitates. T'Pol: "You won't hurt me." Travis: "It's not you I'm worried about."
- Archer recalling the events of Broken Bow to encourage confidence in Tessic.
- The victory against the Klingons.

My Review
This is a decent episode, but it drowns under the weight of that rather nasty technical problem regarding how the authors don't have the slightest clue what deuterium is and some mildly poor writing. The technical problem is documented in the problems section, so I won't get into that. The Klingons are shown rather out of character here. They put up an amazingly weak fight. They fall for simple tricks and when told to leave and never come back, that's exactly what they do. This logical problem could have been solved if the Enterprise crewmembers taught the colonists more sophisticated ways to defend themselves, but it seems the writers have just as much a taste for guerrilla warfare as they do for misusing the term deuterium. ;) On the other hand, this episode contributes positively to continuity. Repeated incidents like this one could very easily get the Klingons pissed off enough at Earth to start a war. So it's a mixed bag. Not all that great, but not all that bad either.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Tallifer on 2011-05-13 at 7:14pm:
    The climactic fight was horrible. These were fully armed Klingons and yet no one died: not much of a lesson for the Klingons. (Perhaps T'pol wisely advised them that killing any Klingons would only instigate a bloood fued, but I never saw that mentioned.)
  • From belvedere_hedon on 2012-08-17 at 4:51pm:
    Deuterium is a form of hydrogen, but it cannot be separated chemically and (at least on earth) it is found in very low concentrations in naturally occurring hydrogen sources (i.e. water). Purifying deuterium is energy intensive with modern technology, and it is not unreasonable to assume that refining it would be a self-sustaining service as it would provide a fuel for fusion reactors in a remote part of the galaxy. Indeed, much of our justification for establishing permanent presence on the moon is that it would provide a valuable source of deuterium to fuel space exploration since the natural concentrations are higher there, and the lower gravity makes sending it into orbit cheaper.
  • From Roger on 2015-05-22 at 8:13am:
    Was this the first episode that established that Klingons have transporter technology? The Klingons were mischaracterized as utter wimps. And why didn't they just beam back down behind Archer and Company at the end and open fire? Or just drop a photon torpedo on the camp before they departed! Instead of just leaving with their tails between their legs.

    This episode was like "Magnificent 7" in outer space. Not that that in itself was bad, but the writing was really poor, in that they couldn't find a better way to defeat the Klingons that didn't make the Klingons look like utter wimps.

    And as already noted, the fight scene was not credible. Very bad shooting, even after practicing - I thought I was watching an old "A-Team" episode! And T'Pol as Rambo wasn't idiotic - why fight hand to hand when you have phase pistols, presumably with a stun setting? I find politically correct Trek to be very annoying...

    One of the hallmarks of good Trek is believeability. There is not much to be found in this episode, including the deuterium mining issue. The premise was good, but bad writing killed it. I'll be generous and give it a 2.
  • From Dstyle on 2015-09-09 at 11:00am:
    As I've been reading the comments on these second generation Star Trek reviews, I regularly see someone (or a few someones) complain about "politically correct" Trek, and I'm always left wondering what the hell they're talking about. The original 1960s Star Trek, with their pluralistic, multi-cultural crew (including a real live woman! On the bridge! With her lady parts and everything!) was pretty damn "politically correct" for it's time. In this instance, Roger is upset because a lady is doing martial arts, I guess because ladies doing anything besides being quiet, demure, and obedient is some sort of betrayal of Star Trek core principles. Let me reiterate this point, because it really boggles my mind: commenters like Roger consider T'Pol (T'POL!) to be "politically correct" and problematic. Well, don't worry, Roger, the show still objectifies the hell out of her! She's basically T and A that sometimes talks! The fragile masculinity of your like-minded male Star Trek fans is in no danger of being threatened, trust me!

    It was particularly interesting to me to see that comment by Roger on this episode, because as I watched the episode I was thinking about how Star Trek consistently casts almost exclusively white actors in supporting roles. Any time they encounter an alien species, they're almost always white people with some sort of forehead prosthetics. The implication is that "white" is a default race and that any other race, alien or human, is just a variation of whiteness. Even the Klingon captain in this episode--the only Klingon with any significant lines, mind you--is played by white actor Roberson Dean! As with any science fiction series (or any show, for that matter, but it especially holds true for science fiction), you can learn a lot about the contemporary culture and climate by paying attention to things like this, and as such the various second generation Star Trek series reflect the racial milieu of 90s and 00s America. It's interesting to see, and, in my opinion, Star Trek is getting increasingly less progressive as the series of shows run their course, largely because they're being less intentional about their representations of these kinds of issues.
  • From Zorak on 2016-09-28 at 8:16pm:
    This was by far and away my least favorite episode of Enterprise so far. I don't even want to get into the specifics. This is the writers telling us, the audience, that they have no respect for our intelligence. Utterly predictable down to no one getting hurt (including Klingons), the "Home Alone" style tactics, and the Klingons deciding they would never be back. So completely cliché and predictable that I knew exactly how the rest of the episode would play out within the first 10 minutes. They should be ashamed to have made this.
  • From Hugo on 2017-09-14 at 1:15am:
    Reasonably entertaining, but what stops the Klingons from a) just shooting at the camp from space, or b) come back with reinforcements?
  • From President Obummer on 2020-01-21 at 5:58am:
    Terrible episode, two big problems aside from all the deuterium science:
    1. The miners would not have just let these murderers go, 5 (plus 3 in battle) of their friends and family were massacred, nobody seems to care?
    2. Klingons live for battle, the miners putting up a fight would give them more incentive to come back.
    Just terrible...

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