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]
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.
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.)
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.