Stratagem (Star Trek: Enterprise)

"Stratagem" is the sixty-sixth episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, the fourteenth episode from the third season.

Plot

This episode begins three years in the future with Captain Archer and Degra (the scientist behind the Xindi weapon project) aboard a shuttle escaping from a Insectoid prison camp. Degra, however, cannot remember his time as Archer's cell-mate and friend, and remains suspicious despite having a prison tattoo and long greying hair. Archer convinces him that this is due to the blood worms in his system (used because they excrete a truth drug), and removes a worm from Degra's arm.

It soon unfolds that they are in fact inside a simulator aboard Enterprise (and still in December, 2153) and the whole set up is a ploy to learn where the weapon is being constructed. Degra and his crew, for example, had been captured near the test site of the weapon, the worm was inserted by Doctor Phlox, and the fake ship was constructed by the crew. The ruse is partially successful, and Degra reveals information about his family, and inputs coordinates into the navigation system. He later becomes suspicious after a malfunction in which one of the windows of the simulator briefly glitches due to ship-wide power fluctuations, and attacks Archer.

This leaves Archer with a dilemma; travelling to the red giant star, Azati Prime, would take them three weeks, time they do not have to waste on a wild goose chase. Instead they again deceive Degra into thinking that they have utilized Xindi warp technology to open subspace vortices, and trick him into thinking that they have already arrived at the coordinates. Degra shouts that they will never be able to breach the base's defenses, thus proving that the coordinates do in fact relate to the weapon. The episode ends with a third deception, with the mind-wiped Degra and his crew being placed back on their ship.

External links

• Stratagem at the Internet Movie Database
• "Stratagem" at TV.com

• Stratagem at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)

• Stratagem at StarTrek.com