Acquisition

Trip is worried when Dr. Phlox fails to answer his requests to exit the decontamination chamber after returning from his latest mission. Trip manages to hotwire the door mechanism and escapes, discovering that the rest of the crew has been rendered unconscious and the ship has been boarded by a band of alien marauders. The large-headed, big-eared aliens are ransacking everything on the ship, from technology to food to female crewmembers. Trip manages to stay out of sight and watches as the aliens revive and interrogate Captain Archer. Trip manages to awaken T’Pol, and the three make preparations to take the Enterprise back. Archer tries to win the confidence of Krem, one of the aliens, while T’Pol and Trip sabotage the raiders’ efforts to steal anything else. Their resourcefulness will not only have to exceed the invaders’ greed, but play on it as well.

teleplay by Maria Jacquemetton & Andre Jacquemetton
story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
directed by James Whitmore, Jr.
music by Velton Ray Bunch

Cast: Scott Bakula (Captain Jonathan Archer), Jolene Blalock (Subcommander T’Pol), John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox), Dominic Keating (Lt. Malcolm Reed), Anthony Montgomery (Ensign Travis Mayweather), Linda Park (Ensign Hoshi Sato), Connor Trinneer (Commander Charles “Trip” Tucker III), Ethan Phillips (Ulis), Jeffrey Combs (Krem), Clint Howard (Muk), Matt Malloy (Grish) and Porthos

Notes: Several perennial Trek guest stars appear here, including Jeffrey Combs (once again playing more than one species in the same Trek spinoff), Ethan Phillips (who played Neelix for seven years on Star Trek: Voyager, but made his first Trek appearance as a Ferengi in 1990’s Next Generation episode Menage a Troi, and Clint Howard, younger brother of Oscar-winning director Ron Howard, who had a cameo in a Deep Space Nine episode but was also the childlike alien Balok in the third Classic Trek episode ever filmed, The Corbomite Maneuver. For the record, chronologically speaking, this is the Star Trek universe’s first sight of the Ferengi, but nowhere in the episode was the aliens’ race revealed, preserving The Last Outpost‘s assertion that first contact with the Ferengi didn’t occur until that first-season Next Generation episode; remember, Picard said that when The Battle of Maxia occurred several years before Next Generation’s first season, the Stargazer crew had no idea who their attackers were.