How Commander Riker Saved The Day By Copying Captain Kirk
When Star Trek: The Next Generation first came out, many fans were curious if the new characters would feel mostly like updated versions of the old ones. They quickly discovered that Captain Picard was nothing like Captain Kirk, but it was tempting to compare Shatner’s iconic character to another new kid on the block: Commander Riker. While Riker wasn’t nearly as much like Kirk as some fans think, he pretty much copied that earlier officer’s playbook for a fun bluff in the episode “Samaritan Snare.”
Conned By Pakleds
If it’s been a minute since you saw the episode, this is the one where the Enterprise crew gets conned by Pakleds, primitive aliens who use their apparent helplessness as a way of stealing or outright extorting advanced technology from other races and cultures. They end up kidnapping Geordi La Forge and trying to force him to give them dangerous weaponry, but the chief engineer ends up quietly disabling their weapons instead. They think this is the work of Riker deploying a “crimson force field,” a fun bluff that echoes Kirk’s similarly bold bluffing in The Original Series episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
To really appreciate how much Riker and La Forge channeled Captain Kirk in “Samaritan Snare,” you need to understand more about their crazy plan. It all starts when Riker hails the Pakled ship, knowing that his engineer can hear the entire conversation. Understanding his commanding officer’s coded communication, La Forge ends up disabling the Pakled’s weapons.
Bluffing With Nothing
Normally, this would put the engineer’s life in danger…after all, who else could the Pakleds possibly blame for their weapons suddenly failing? However, part of Riker’s plan (one that we think Kirk would appreciate) was to create a harmless outer space light show by blowing hydrogen exhaust through the Enterprise’s Bussard collectors. La Forge convinces the conniving aliens that his commanding officer deployed a “crimson force field” that managed to disable their systems.
In reality, Riker was just distracting the Pakleds and buying La Forge time to covertly disable their weapons. The aliens, believing the Enterprise to be much stronger than themselves, stand down and return the chief engineer. Meanwhile, longtime fans of earlier Star Trek adventures realized that Riker’s bluff in “Samaritan Snare” is very similar to something Kirk did in “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
The Corbomite Maneuver
In that old-school episode, the Enterprise faces a powerful alien threat, Balok, an intergalactic creep played by an impossibly young Clint Howard. When the alien turns dangerous, Kirk famously decides to bluff him by saying that the Enterprise is full of “corbomite,” a powerful substance that can destroy both his own ship and any who attacks him. In reality, there’s no such thing as corbomite, but the bluff worked long enough for Kirk to realize Balok is a Star Trek staple: a powerful alien who wanted to test our Starfleet heroes.
It’s something of a misconception that Riker was inspired by Kirk…in reality, the TNG commander was inspired by Will Decker, the character from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Still, Riker picked up some Kirk-like qualities over the years, including becoming a ladies’ man that nobody can resist. And when it comes to outsmarting weird new aliens, Riker proved that he, like the famous Enterprise captain before him, can bluff with the best of them.
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