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How could a race this brain-dead have made it into space in the first place?

The same way they apparently acquired most of their technology, judging by "Samaritan Snare" - theft.

Is that credible, though? If they could steal that much from smarter races, they wouldn't be that dumb in the first place. Plus, they had to maintain and operate their tech themselves, and apparently couldn't comprehend how any of it even worked.

As to how these "idiots" were smart enough to pull one over on the Enterprise crew is another head scratcher...

Trained monkeys could fly a simple space ship, a dog can shoot a gun(usually on accident), and dolphins can preform tricks. These Pakleds must have intelligence on that level, and should be able to come up with the concept of trickory. They may have also had a little luck.

What you described is doing simple missions with simplified technology, with human engineers standing by to maintain the equipment. The Pakleds are meant to run long-range missions while having to maintain the tech themselves. As to trickery, there's the problem that the people they're trying to trick are smarter than themselves. In "Samaritan Snare" they had hand weapons to threaten Geordi and shields to prevent transport. Before they had such tech, how could they trick races that are not only smarter, but have more advanced technology?

Maybe the Ferengi sold the technology. The Pakleds were probably swindled out of numerus valuable metels and artifacts.

The Ferengi would have sold them sub-par merchandise in the first place, if given the chance. Not only that, but they would also have to be smart enough to adapt technology from different species to each other and have them all working in at least partial harmony. That requires at least some skill and intelligence.

whats preposterous is that the pakleds, even have colonies and deposits of ''magnesite''...(TNG :Firstborn), by the way the pakleds behave,it should be magners-site,lol

Another question ENT was probably going to answer but never got around to.

Maybe they have a genetic degenerative disease.

I think you're being a bit optimistic, Monroe. The fact probably never occured to the writers.

We could have a story idea/contest!

Make a plausible outline of how the Pakleds got to where they are in this genre. Was the group in 'Samaritan Snare' a breakaway group? An advanced scouting? Are they really that dumb, or just playing dumb?

The galaxy's the limit!

I just figured it out! The Pakleds wrote the show!

Well, that explains the inconsistancies!

I think comparing a Pakled's writing ability to B&B's is a bit insulting... to the Pakled.

Someone could have visited their planet and they could have taken over his ship and forced him to work it for them. Once they had the basic operations down, ie tell the computer to do things and wait for it to happen, they would be able to get about and kidnap other people. They would be able to threaten people with lesser tech into giving them ships and more tech. Also, there's nothing in the episode that proves that there was more than one ship of them. Although, they where seen elsewhere in trek.

Another option is that they were some form of low level crew on a fleet of ships and, like the Kazon, they finally rebelled against those in control and took over the ships. Even morons could repeat actions when they've seen them a large number of times. They wouldn't be able to cope with things that went wrong, but no claim was ever made that they could. They could survive by kidnapping people or otherwise conning them into doing the repairs for them.