Star Trek Reviews

Return to season list

Star Trek Ent - Season 3 - Episode 14

Star Trek Ent - 3x14 - Stratagem

Originally Aired: 2004-2-4

Synopsis:
Archer finds himself face-to-face with Degra, the designer of the Xindi superweapon, and tries to trick him into revealing its location. [DVD]

My Rating - 6

Fan Rating Average - 6.22

Rate episode?

Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 14 3 2 4 4 6 16 30 19 15 12

Problems
None

Factoids
- This is the first episode in which we see the often mentioned Regulan Bloodworms.

Remarkable Scenes
- The teaser. One of those "what the hell?" moments. :)
- The revelation that the whole devastated future story was just a ruse to gain intelligence from Degra... wow!
- Archer referring to the Xindi insectoids as "overgrown grasshoppers."
- Archer faking out Degra one last time.

My Review
Like Ent: Anomaly, Ent: Stratagem provides sufficient entertainment and nicely advances the Xindi arc. Once again the crew is shown to be clever, using well their limited resources and taking advantage of the circumstances. I'm quite fond of the continuity with the previous episode, Ent: Proving Ground regarding Degra's ship being damaged by the malfunctioning prototype and the fake shuttle rouse was absolutely incredible; and an ingenuous way to rehash the "lets fake out some aliens using the holodeck" idea without actually introducing a holodeck. Indeed, the whole plot was a wonderful way to gain intelligence information from Degra. I was surprised by the originality and I was pleased that the episode didn't turn into another Ent: Twilight, even if it seemed to have shades of Voy: Counterpoint. In short, Ent: Stratagem is another above average episode and a nice contributor to the current arc.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Zorak on 2016-10-10 at 2:51am:
    A good episode, definitely. Enterprise seems to have found its feet again. It would have been a great episode if not for the last 5 minutes. Did Archer really need to gloat? He should have left Degra uninformed in case he needed to trick him further. Also, why would they let the HEAD of the weapons project for the very thing he's trying to stop go on his merry way? Ridiculous.

    Also a thought for your Problems section if you think it's significant: The viewscreen TV that was showing the star field outside of the shuttlepod window was about 3 feet away from the window itself. There's no way that would have even covered the whole view when looking strait on, let alone looking out of the window at an angle. A silly mistake, really.
  • From President Obummer on 2020-01-28 at 9:52am:
    Zorak, they obviously wiped his memory again after the gloating ^^
    And they had to let him go as to not tip their hand.

Prove to me that you are a real person and not a spam robot by typing in the text of this image:

Return to season list