Episode Report Card Keckler: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Moroners
By Keckler | Season 2 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.29.2002
Enterprise orbits. Ten to one odds I know what Quantum's doing right now: he's got some aliens who are in trouble but have categorically refused his help, so there's only one productive thing he could be doing. T'Pol, still in her clogging clothes, enters his ready room to find him at his Weight Of The World Window. Pay up! They have some minor back-and-forth about the cargo settling into its new home before Quantum confesses the deep, dark secret that has long been weighing heavy on his heart. He wants to help the aliens who don't want their help. Well, you could have knocked me over with a beer bottle. Quantum postulates that their recent interactions with the Klingons mean that they're owed a favor by the targ-chomping Muckety-Mucks. T'Pol agrees with his principles, but points out, "I doubt these marauders answer to the High Council." And we've got title. "Short of killing the Klingons, any action we take will only make the situation worse," T'Pol thinks. "I...just...hatetheideaofturningourbacks," Quantum admits, for those of us who haven't seen EVERY EPISODE.
It's midnight in the desert of good and evil, and Quantum can't sleep, so he decides to take a multi-hour shuttle ride down to the planet to do some interfering. Leader of the Mites can't figure out a thirty-fourth way to say "No!" so he allows Quantum help him repair valves. In outer space, that's street for "Foam Party." Leader of the Mites thought Quantum would be long out of his receded hairline by now, but Quantum concedes, "Sometimes I have a bad habit of overstaying my welcome." The first step is acknowledging that you have a problem. The next step is allowing someone to repeatedly hit you over the head when you aren't looking so they can drag you off to a cave, forget about you, and hire Lt. Hornblower to command the ship. They banter until, gesturing with a large wrench, Leader of the Mites owns up to how inept he is in protecting his people: "You say you and your Tactical Officer want to help us -- even if you do, once you're gone, we'll be alone again, waiting for them to come back." "There's a saying on my world --" Quantum says. "Wait, I know this one: Fool me once..." Mathra chokes on his Jon Stewart adoration. "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime," Quantum finishes. "They don't have fish -- it's a friggin' desert planet!!" Mathra freaks out. And with that dramatic revelation, we go to commercial. Must be nice to visit multitudes of lifeforms to whom one can trot out annoying adages and look wise as a result. Me? I just stick trussing needles down my ear canals until the blood obscures all sound. Between the fish and that gazelle reference Mathra keeps alluding to, but which I don't recognize at all, this is turning into Aesop's Fables For The Spectacularly Inebriated.
Reed examines the Dust Mites' weapons and makes some disparaging remarks. "You must have a well-stocked armory aboard Enterprise," Parma Hamlin comments. And a well-stocked cosmetics case. "But this battle won't be won by firepower [then why did you turn up your nose at their guns, you munitions snob?]. Deception and surprise can be just as potent as brute force," Reed explains. Because they don't have brains to figure that concept out for themselves. T'Pol then talks a little about Klingon fighting techniques, describing them as crude and not adaptable to sudden changes. Leader of the Dust Mites asks enough leading questions to have the E-crew lay out their whole Operation Desert Storm. The gist is that they're going to move the colony slightly to the right and entice the bullies to walk over a dangerous deuterium wellhead. I'm thinking the ace up their sleeve is a sand-dancing Uhura. T'Pol invites them up to their ship for some special ops training and target practice.