Star Trek: Enterprise Season 2 Homaged An Akira Kurosawa Classic

"Seven Samurai" by master Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa might just be the most remade film ever. The 1954 film is, sure enough, about seven samurai recruited to protect a farming village from bandits. The setting, themes, and characters are Japanese, but the premise is evergreen. "The Magnificent Seven" is just "Seven Samurai" but with cowboys. "A Bug's Life" retold the story with, well, bugs. "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" episode "Bounty Hunters" recruits the seven from Jedi Knights and alien mercenaries. 

"Star Wars" creator George Lucas is a well-known fan of Kurosawa. (Lucas even helped him finance his 1980 epic "Kagemusha.") The galaxy far, far away isn't the only space franchise that can riff on "Seven Samurai" though. "Star Trek: Enterprise" aped the premise for its season 2 episode, "Marauders."

First, though, why are Kurosawa's films so often remade in spirit (besides them being so good)? One reason is ease of translation. Kurosawa often pulled from English-language works; he even got some hometown criticism back in the day for supposedly "pandering" to Western audiences. His film "Throne of Blood" is "Macbeth" but relocated from 11th century Scotland to feudal Japan. "Ran" did a similar relocation for "King Lear," while his noir "The Bad Sleep Well" pulled from both "Hamlet" and Alexandre Dumas' French revenge novel "The Count of Monte Cristo." Kurosawa's kidnapping thriller "High And Low" is based on a 1959 Ed McBain novel, "King's Ransom."

Like his muse, Shakespeare, Kurosawa's stories had universal cores and in turn found their way back to influencing western films. Francis Ford Coppola has called "The Bad Sleep Well" a major influence on "The Godfather." Like "Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo" (where Toshiro Mifune plays a ronin playing two rival gangs against each other) has also been homaged or remade countless times. That brings us back to "Marauders."

"Enterprise" was a prequel series, following the first starship Enterprise exploring the final frontier a century before Kirk and Spock did. In "Marauders" (penned by David Wilcox, in his only "Star Trek" credit), the Enterprise needs to restock on deuterium fuel. They happen on an alien mining colony, but the natives are reluctant to trade despite it being their whole business.

It turns out a band of Klingon pirates has been extorting the colony, taking their deuterium and paying the miners only with their continued lives. So Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) and his bridge crew of seven decide to teach the locals how to defend themselves. Cue a training montage and a third act where the Enterprise crew and villagers drive the Klingons off with some clever tricks and traps.

"Marauders" is a mediocre episode, but it's symptomatic of larger and graver issues that "Enterprise" experienced in season 2. 

"Enterprise" was the first "Star Trek" series since the original to not run for seven seasons. Why? Because it had a rough start and never recovered. Producer Rick Berman insisted on playing it safe, so no changes to the "Trek" formula even though they could've fit organically into a prequel like "Enterprise." Bakula has also said that the demand for 26 "Enterprise" episodes per season was too much. Driven by these dual mandates, the writers started recycling episode premises. 

René Auberjonois, who had been part of the main cast on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," guest-starred in the "Enterprise" episode "Oasis." It was not lost on him that the episode was a remake of the "DS9" episode "Shadowplay." He recalled:

"I was sitting with Scott Bakula at lunch about two or three days into shooting the episode. He said, 'I like this script. I think this is a good one.' I said, 'Yeah, we did this one in season 3.' And he looked at me and said, 'What?" I said, "It was the same sort of story.' That was not really a putdown, but when you've done that many years of writing stories, there will be recurring themes."

By "Enterprise" season 2, around when "Marauders" came around, it felt like the show was running on dilithium fumes. That's why you have an episode using such a simple and familiar idea as a "Seven Samurai" homage, one that doesn't feel at all specific to the show. "Enterprise" struggled to carve out its own identity unique from other "Star Trek" shows. "Marauders" is both a result of that and a small part of its cause.