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Star Trek Ent - Season 2 - Episode 21

Star Trek Ent - 2x21 - The Breach

Originally Aired: 2003-4-23

Synopsis:
Enterprise is asked to evacuate a group of Denobulan geologists from a world that has been taken over by a militant faction. [DVD]

My Rating - 7

Fan Rating Average - 5.2

Rate episode?

Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 13 2 3 2 6 17 10 8 8 7 6

Problems
None

Factoids
- The Denobulans and the Antareans fought a series of wars, which ended 300 years ago.

Remarkable Scenes
- Phlox feeding a tribble to one of his pets...
- Phlox finally breaking after his patient's constant insults.
- Trip and Reed encountering the Denobulan scientists.
- Phlox confronting the Antarean, answering his questions, making the case for anti racism.
- Trip: "If you don't start moving in the next five seconds, I'm gonna take my phase pistol and shoot you in the ass!"
- The Denobulans climbing the slope with ease, using some kind of natural sticky hands or some such.

My Review
Dr. Phlox steals the show in this episode. The backstory we get on the Denobulans and the Antareans is fascinating and the moral dilemma Phlox' character faces regarding his patient's racism is captivating. This obviously is not the first episode to tackle racism in Star Trek, but it does it in an interesting way. The war between the two species was long over. Three centuries had passed, but the hate was still prevalent. You shake your head during the scene when Phlox loses his patients with his patient, but I much enjoyed when Phlox revealed to T'Pol that his shame wasn't due to his outburst but due to the racism his people still feel. After Phlox' bad ethics displayed in Ent: Dear Doctor, I was sure Phlox would end up being racist, just like the rest of his people. But I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only did he not share those beliefs, but he'd worked to spread the message of anti racism to his children. I was also pleased to see Phlox' message got through to his patient by the end. The racism is beginning to die. The secondary (?) plot with Trip, Reed, and Travis was less successful. Once again, Travis contributes the least, being put out of commission early. It's as if the writers just personally hate the guy. There were a few funny moments with the Denobulans, but ultimately, and I think Captain Archer would agree with me, the climb took way too long. Instead of all the climbing, a better episode would have focused more on showing us a little about this alien culture whose planet was the setting. They weren't sufficiently elaborated upon. As a result, a fairly profound episode is reduced to above average. Still a great ep, but not as good as it could have been.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Tallifer on 2011-05-14 at 3:03pm:
    Mountain and cave climbing are two of the easiest and most boring ways for producers to pad any episode or movie. (And car chases, fortunately only Star Trek: Nemesis subjected us to that one)
  • From Dstyle on 2015-10-05 at 4:19pm:
    Centuries ago, before this episode occurred, humans discovered that the best way to explore caves was to do so while wearing a helmet, preferably with a light source attached, so that your head would be protected and the direction you are looking would always be illuminated. Shame that hard-learned lesson didn't get passed down to the twenty-second century.
  • From Zorak on 2016-10-04 at 5:43pm:
    I'm just going to have to respectfully disagree with this review. I think this was one of the worst episodes they've done. Cheesy, utterly predictable from the start, cliché and the stalest and most overused of all social messages. Star Trek is at it's best when it goes outside the box and shows us something new or at least has it's own spin on something. This was a tired old rehash that could have been (and has been) done on any/every other show.
  • From Subcommander T'Obummer on 2023-02-23 at 11:27am:
    I gotta say, 28m dead sounds like a lot, but for an interstellar conflict between who knows how many planets? And then 300 years later the guy wants to refuse treatment and die for it? I don't think so. I mean we had wars on earth where single nations had that many dead.
    Voyager did this story much better.

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