Media Library: - The crew takes on the marauders - Klingon marauders - Trip and T'Pol consider their options

How would you rate the Enterprise episode 'Marauders'? 5 Stars 4 Stars 3 Stars ugh. Why Bother?

Synopsis:

When Enterprise is in need of fuel, Archer discovers a desolate mining colony that is being controlled by Klingon marauders who are bullying the colonists and hoarding their fuel. After Archer discovers the problem, the crew trains the colonists to defend themselves and prepare for a final showdown against their Klingon oppressors.

C.A. Voigts' "A View From The Shuttlecraft" Enterprise Episode Review:

Marauders - Spoilers Involved

Laurie's No-Nonsense Review

I'm sorry, this one was boring. And next week's doesn't look any better.

Badly in need of deuterium, the Enterprise stopped off at a little mining colony only to find a group of very jittery traders, who offered them some of what they needed if they helped with repairs and promised to be gone within two days. Why so jittery? It turns out that a group of badass Klingons stop by periodically to torment the colony and demand large amounts of free deuterium. The Enterprise crew couldn't let that pass so they showed the colonists how to fight back, and they lured the Klingons into a trap, laughed at them, and sent them on their way. Yawn.

They didn't even build up any suspense or tension, which would have helped this episode a bit. The Klingons fell right into the trap, and responded just as predicted. All right, so they headed off in the wrong direction and the crew had to lure them about 50 feet to their left, but that was it! They didn't really threaten anyone, it never really looked like the trap was going to fail, nobody was in real peril, and the menacing Klingons just weren't that scary. While the colony itself looked just great -- this show is definitely the best-looking of all the Treks as far as FX, locations, and outer space shots -- the Klingons themselves could have used a little more time in make-up.

And what's up with T'Pol? Even when they're not wearing their regular flight uniforms, she still has to wear a catsuit. Is every outfit she owns skin-tight? "Look at her butt," I said to my husband as she slinked off. "That's all I've BEEN looking at," he said. I suppose that's the point. She's just silly. She taught self-defense to some of the colonists, which consisted entirely of ducking. It's a good strategy, but it seems odd that they never thought of it until she showed up to demonstrate.

The only highlight was seeing Hoshi's way with a phaser...she's a good marksman! She wowed Reed, which was nice.

You know what would have been better? A NEW ALIEN! They just keep relying on the same old ones, and that's getting boring. A brand new alien would have spiced things up quite a bit, along with a little tension here and there. Enough with the Klingons and the Suliban and the Vulcans, all right? Time to move on and meet someone new!

Land of Laurie
http://www.twogirlsandatv.com/lauriereviewscifi.htm#enterprise

Timothy Lynch's Enterprise Episode Review

WARNING:  Marauding gangs of spoilers for ENT's "Marauders"
are hiding behind the next spoiler warning.  (They're right behind the
vicious gangs of "Keep Left" signs.)
 
In brief:  Pretty generic.
 
======
"Marauders"
Enterprise Season 2, Episode 6
Teleplay by David Wilcox
Story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Mike Vejar
Brief summary:  The Enterprise helps teach a mining colony to
protect itself from the repeated depredations of a Klingon raiding
party.
======

Up until now, this season has been one of extremes.  There's been
"Shockwave II," "Minefield," and "Dead Stop," all of which I liked
quite a bit ... and "Carbon Creek" and "A Night in Sickbay," both of
which I disliked rather strongly.

"Marauders" stands in contrast to both of the above groups.  It
provoked little reaction in me other than the occasional bout of
laughter that I suspect was unintended by the episode.  It stands as
almost a textbook case of how to do generic television.

It's not even generic Trek, plentiful though that's been at times as well.
It's just generic television.

Consider the plot:  the Enterprise crew stops at a mining colony for
supplies, finds out that they've been victims of a group of Klingon
marauders for four seasons, and convinces them to stand up for
themselves, driving the marauders off presumably for good.

Apart from the words "Enterprise" and "Klingon," that could apply to
an awful lot of shows.  "Visitor teaches town to stand up to the local
bullies" is the plot of an awful lot of Westerns, of some large fraction
of "Kung Fu" episodes, of a good percentage of episodes of "The
Incredible Hulk" or "The Fugitive" ... hell, with all the traveling they
did, there's probably an episode of "The Partridge Family" built
around the same thing, albeit with stranger outfits and musical
interludes.

The basic story is not, to put it mildly, groundbreaking.  That doesn't
make it bad per se, but it means that there's not a lot there to make the
viewer sit up and go "oh, neat!"  (If the viewer is one who slavers at
all things Klingon, of course, you've already assured yourself of their
attention ... but most are not in that category.)

An oft-repeated truism, however, is that it's not just the story so much
as how it's told.  I tend to agree:  you can do a lot with a shopworn
plot if there's some good character study or something that adds to
our understanding of a person, a situation, or a past story.  (As an
example, B5's "Infection" had a plot that was very by-the-numbers,
but the Sinclair/Garibaldi scene where Garibaldi notes Sinclair's
apparent death wish and calls him on it is worth at least half of the
monster-of-the-week boredom.)  Thus, one might expect
"Marauders" to have some big character moment to help the story
along.

The big character revelation?  Well, I'll let Archer say it:  "I've never
liked bullies, Trip.  Not back on Earth, and not out here."

Wow.  Meaty stuff there.  Er ... okay, maybe not.

Every character, whether one of the colonists or one of the regular
cast, came off as awfully generic.  We had the engineers who bond
over their repairs, the token Plucky Kid [TM] who lost his father to
Klingons and wants to fight, the leader who wants to scorn help but is
unsure of his own leadership, etc.  Okay, so maybe a *few* cliches
were left untouched -- there was no romance between Archer and the
desperate-but-attractive doctor, for instance, and the unsure leader
wasn't *actually* killed off the way I'd expected him to be -- but that
doesn't change the fact that a lot of the dialogue could be (and was)
called in advance.

Even that might be okay if the show showed any sign of self-
awareness.  Lots of shows do just fine by taking a lot of the standard
tropes and then somehow twisting them -- "Buffy" did it on a regular
basis and still does on occasion, just to use one genre example.

"Marauders," on the other hand, invited laughter because it was just ...
well, just so gosh-darned earnest about itself.  When Archer gives us
his big "I don't like bullies" speech or trots out the old "give a man a
fish, he'll eat for a day; teach him to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime"
chestnut, it's like watching the adventures of Captain Dudley Do-
Right.  I give the actors credit for not breaking out into hysterical
laughter (well, on the take we got, anyway), but that's about it.  All of
this felt about as interesting as watching the Bush administration
claim Yet Again that "no decision has been made about military
action" in Iraq.  (More believable, though.)

In fairness, most of the plot hangs together reasonably well.  (That's
easier to do, I suppose, when you're just changing character and place
names from stories that have been done so often.)  Having Archer
find a way to help without revealing the Enterprise's presence to the
Klingons is a decent enough premise, and the deception he used to do
so, while not without a serious flaw or two, is okay enough from a
"fine, let's see where it goes" standpoint.  (More on those flaws later.)

Scripter David Wilcox must have been at least somewhat aware of
how generic all the dialogue sounded, because the show's got a lot
less dialogue than usual.  Alas, what takes its place is scene after
scene after scene of "the colony breaks down to move, the colonists
get combat training, the colony rebuilds itself a little ways away."
Instead of generic dialogue, we get only slightly less generic
montages.

So what's left to appeal to the viewer?  Well, the answer in the
production offices appears to be "when in doubt, change T'Pol's
costume."  Apart from a few minutes where T'Pol is dressed like a
colonist in order to masquerade as one, she's in a catsuit that is, if
such a thing is possible, even tighter than the usual gray affair, and
bone-white.  Apparently we as viewers cannot be trusted to pay
proper attention to said character's ... assets ... unless there are neon
signs alerting us to the presence of the Resident Babe's Body Parts.

From *my* point of view, the main appeal the show had was all the
times it managed to hilariously remind me of other situations or invite
good rebuttal.  For example:

-- As Archer et al. initially leave the planet, there's the standard "come
back, Shane" moment where Trip sees the kid's still looking at him.
All well and good ... except that the way Mike Vejar set up the shot,
Lisa's and my immediate response was "don't flatter yourself, Trip:
he's not looking at you.  He's watching T'Pol wiggle as she walks!"
(I have enough respect for Mike Vejar that I have to assume he did
that intentionally; directors need their moments of fun, too.)

-- Everything involving the town moving a little distance away and
then rebuilding itself called up so many "Blazing Saddles" images
that we couldn't keep straight faces for the rest of the show.  We kept
expecting to see Trip saying, "People!  There's no people!" or Korok
complaining that "someone's gotta go back and get a shitload of
dimes!"  Man, what I'd have given for guest appearances by Cleavon
Little, Slim Pickens and Gene Wilder in this show.  They'd have
shown us all a good time.  :-)  (If you've never seen the film and have
no idea what I'm referencing, go find a copy immediately.)

Apart from its sheer "been there, done that" air, the only real flaw
"Marauders" has is with its ending.  The "town drives off the local
bully" works well in your typical Western, but in your typical
Western the local bully doesn't have weapons that can turn your
whole town into kindling in less than two minutes.  Admittedly,
Archer's not exactly an expert on Klingon psychology, but if I were
Korok and had just been humiliated, I'd come back with the ship a
week later and turn the whole colony into a big ol' fireworks display.
It'd stop other people from getting the deuterium, and it'd get revenge
on the people who made him lose face.  Archer's tactic works fine
when the firepower is even, but in this case I think it's entirely likely
that it'd risk putting the colonists in a much, much worse place.  In
some ways, I'd love to see Archer find out later on that that's exactly
what occurred.

There's really not much left to say other than a few specific
observations:  the show was, for all intents and purposes, about as
deep as the commercials it filled space between.

So, some other quick notes:

-- I like the fact that the Klingons' technological superiority to Earth
isn't across the board.  Their transporters are better (or at least the
crews are more willing to use them), but their sensors clearly are not.

-- When Archer and company first head back to Enterprise, Reed
says something about sending a pod for them.  Why?  The trio
*came down* in a pod, and there's never any indication that it's out of
commission.

-- Science nit of the week:  the colony doctor's line about "deuterium
can burn almost as hot as plasma when it's ignited" is meaningless.
Plasma is a state of matter, not a specific thing.  When gaseous
deuterium ignites, it for all intents and purposes *becomes* a plasma.
Not a big deal by any means, but just thought I'd note it.

-- Jolene Blalock, for all that I gripe about the outfit, did an okay job
in her one quiet scene shipboard with Archer (where she agrees with
him about wanting to help).

That's really about it.  This is a substantially shorter review than usual,
but there's not much to comment on.  Since "Marauders" was pretty
generic, I can use two oft-quoted lines myself to sum up the show:

Gertrude Stein's "There's no *there* there,"
and Abe Lincoln's "If you like that sort of thing, it's the sort of thing
you'll like."

Time to wrap up:

Writing:  Not much bad other than the ending, but nothing especially
good either.
Direction:  Apart from the one time Mike Vejar got to have fun at
Trip's expense, nothing stands out.
Acting:  Nothing horrid, but nothing that rises beyond a stock
performance either.

OVERALL:  4.  It filled an hour.

NEXT WEEK:
 
A classified mission reveals T'Pol's dark secret.

Tim Lynch (Castilleja School, Science Department)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu <*>
"No, no.  Don't shoot him.  If you shoot him, you'll just make him
mad."
-- Gene Wilder, "Blazing Saddles"
--
Copyright 2002, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any off-net
compilation without due attribution and *express written consent of the
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Related Links:

Where to Watch - Local channels and airtimes.
VHS, Laserdisc and DVD availability.

Cast:

Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer
Connor Trinneer as Chief Engineer Charles Tucker III
Jolene Blalock as Sub-commander T'Pol
Dominic Keating as Lt. Malcolm Reed
Anthony Montgomery as Ensign Travis Mayweather
Linda Park as Ensign Hoshi Sato
John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox

Guest Cast:  

Larry Cedar as Tessic
Jesse James Rutherford as Q'Ell
Robertson Dean as Korok
Bari Hochwald as E'lis
Steven Flynn as Maklii
Wayne King, Jr. as Klingon #1
Peewee Piemonte as Klingon #2

Creative staff:

Directed by: Mike Vejar  
Teleplay by: David Wilcox
Written By: Mike Vejar
Story by: Rick Berman & Brannon Braga