“Daedalus”
Written by Ken LaZebnik & Michael Bryant
Directed by David Straiton
Season 4, Episode 10
Production episode 086
Original air date: January 14, 2005
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is hosting Emory Erickson, the inventor of the transporter, who wants to test a new long-range, sub-quantum transporter in a barren region of space. The Ericksons and Archers are old friends, and this is a nice reunion for the captain as Erickson and his daughter Danica are beamed on board.
Tucker is particularly thrilled, as Erickson is one of his heroes, and the two get to work together on the transporter.
The Ericksons have dinner at the captain’s table where Erickson discusses his new toy, which he jokes will put Archer out of a job, as you’ll be able to transport between solar systems. (Nobody mentions that you’ll need ships to get to the planets in the first place to set up the transporter platforms…) Archer recalls his father and Erickson having many arguments over whether or not the future of space travel would be the warp drive or the transporter pad. Erickson sadly says he misses those arguments.
Enterprise arrives at the Barrens, an empty area of space with nothing around for many many light-years. Tucker works with Erickson to modify the transporter, with Erickson reminiscing about the first time he went through his own invention. It took a minute-and-a-half to cycle through, and he threw up as soon as he materialized—and then he got drunk, adding that he learned the latter trick from Zefram Cochrane.
Archer gives Danica a tour of the ship, and the captain expresses surprise that Danica never joined Starfleet. She says she needs to take care of her father. He’s wheelchair bound and needs regular injections into his malformed spine, and besides which, he’s still devastated by the death of her brother, Quinn, who died during a transporter test fifteen years previous.
Returning to their cabin for Erickson’s injection, Danica expresses concern over lying to Starfleet—especially to Archer, who is a dear friend. Erickson insists it’s necessary. That’s not ominous at all.
Reed and Burrows are working in the armory when a weird anomaly shows up and zaps Burrows, killing him instantly.
Erickson tells Archer he’s never seen anything like the anomaly that killed Burrows. When he and Danica return to their quarters, she berates him for lying to Archer, and now someone is dead. Erickson insists on going forward with the experiment, which is the only way to bring Quinn back.
They beam a probe 40,000 kilometers away. Tucker, however, is growing suspicious. For one thing, Erickson refuses to let Tucker help him observe the telemetry from the probe. For another, all the modifications Tucker made seemed unnecessary—part of the point of the sub-quantum transporter is that it uses less power, yet this test required a ton of power.
Archer is equally suspicious, as there’s a log from one of the research vessels Erickson worked on that includes a sighting of an anomaly very similar to that which killed Burrows, which belies his earlier statement that he’d never seen anything like the anomaly before.
T’Pol then reports another anomaly on C deck. Archer, T’Pol, and two MACOs investigate. It brushes T’Pol and badly injures her hand. However, she was able to take a scan of it, and Archer realizes—after they enhance the image—that the anomaly is Quinn.
Erickson finally comes clean. The sub-quantum transporter is unworkable. Quinn disappeared during the first test of it, and he’s spent the last fifteen years trying to get him back.
The anomaly returns, this time blowing up an EPS junction. Nobody was hurt, though Erickson would’ve been if Archer hadn’t tackled him out of the way. At this point, both T’Pol and Tucker are loudly advising Archer to leave the Barrens and have Erickson arrested. The anomaly came dangerously close to a stash of torpedoes. Archer insists that, once they rescue Quinn, everything will be fine.
When the anomaly reappears, they try to rematerialize Quinn. The process of doing so, however, triggers cellular degeneration. He rematerializes on the platform and dies a few seconds later.
Archer says Erickson will have to answer for his crimes, and he knows his career as a scientist is over. He contemplates the possibility of becoming a teacher, and my first thought is that he’ll be too busy being in prison for manslaughter for that to be an option…
Danica and Archer have their goodbyes, and they beam off to the Sarajevo, with Erickson giving Tucker the specs on how to increase the range of the transporter.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Sub-quantum transporting is supposed to be able to transport over interstellar distances, but is apparently just technobabble. Ahem.
The gazelle speech. Archer and Danica grew up together. Also when Tucker is geebling about how excited he is to meet Erickson, Archer reminds him of the time he met Zefram Cochrane, and therefore knows exactly how Tucker feels.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol has been keeping to herself since they left Vulcan, spending her spare time reading the Kir’Shara. She refuses to talk to Tucker about how she feels about T’Les’ death, and later breaks up with him, even though they really weren’t in a relationship, entirely.
Florida Man. Florida Man Learns That You Should Not Meet Your Heroes.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox gets to tell T’Pol that she’s completely cured of Pa’nar, and also has the sad duty of informing Erickson that rematerializing his son will kill him.
Good boy, Porthos! Danica meets Porthos for the first time and is, of course, completely charmed by the pooch.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… With the release of the Kir’Shara, stigmas against mind-melding has been greatly reduced on Vulcan, and sufferers of Pa’nar Syndrome are coming forward to be cured.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Tucker keeps trying to reach out to T’Pol, who shuts him down, and eventually she makes it clear that a relationship isn’t really on, right now, as she’s reexamining everything about her life and what it means to be Vulcan. Tucker says that, hey, at least the warp engines still need him…
More on this later… Erickson admits that long-distance transporting isn’t possible, and probably never will be for a thousand years, by way of explaining why the Federation doesn’t have anything resembling such transporters in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century in the mainline timeline.
In addition, Erickson’s modifications allow a probe to be beamed 40,000 kilometers away, which has never been done before, but that was established as a safe transporting distance two hundred years hence in TNG’s “A Matter of Honor.”
I’ve got faith…
“I’ve waited so long for this moment—planned for it. What if something goes wrong? What if I fail?”
“On the day before I entered flight training, I asked my father pretty much the same thing.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Don’t fail’.”
“Henry never was a poet.”
“He didn’t need to be.”
–Erickson and Archer.
Welcome aboard. The great Bill Cobbs plays Erickson, while Leslie Silva plays Danica, Donovan C. Knowles plays Quinn, and Noel Manzano plays the poor doomed Burrows.
Trivial matters: This episode establishes who invented the transporter. It supersedes a 2001 TNG graphic novel Forgiveness by David Brin & Scott Hampton. That had the inventor be Colin Blakeney, who developed the tech in the twenty-first, rather than the twenty-second, century.
This episode also establishes that Surak’s writings have had quite the impact on Vulcan society after its being unearthed and made public in “Kir’Shara.”
The Rise of the Federation novels by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett establishes that Erickson was imprisoned and died in jail. Danica is a recurring character in those novels, and she and Archer become a couple.
Erickson mentions that one of the (many) objections to the transporter made while he was inventing it were concerns that the transporter killed you and created a duplicate. That philosophical argument was a major underpinning of the first adult Star Trek novel, James Blish’s Spock Must Die!
While the Federation is not seen to have developed long-range transporters in the mainline timeline, we do see them in the alternate timeline of the Bad Robot movies in the 2009 Star Trek and in Star Trek Into Darkness, and also employed by Gary Seven’s supervisors in the original series’ “Assignment: Earth,” by the Triskelions in the original series’ “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” by the Dominion in DS9’s “The Jem’Hadar” and “Covenant,” by the Sikarians in Voyager’s “Prime Factors,” and by a Ferengi in TNG’s “Bloodlines.”
Zefram Cochrane was established in the movie First Contact as someone who appreciated his liquor, so to speak…
It’s been a long road… “All breakthroughs are hard to imagine before they happen.” I desperately wanted to like this episode, as I’m a huge fan of Bill Cobbs, and I like the fact that they established that the transporter was created by a person of color. Indeed, Trek did this once before, in “The Ultimate Computer,” an original-series episode that established Richard Daystrom—a person of color, played by the great William Marshall—as the person who revolutionized twenty-third-century computer technology.
And that’s part of the problem. This episode is trying really hard to be as strong an episode as “The Ultimate Computer,” and hoo-hah, is it not. They even go so far as to have Erickson having the same lament as Daystrom, about how when you achieve greatness as a young man, you spend the rest of your adulthood trying to live up to that accomplishment.
On the one hand, I like the friendship that this establishes between the Archer and Erickson families. On the other hand, the fact that Erickson is Archer’s friend warps his entire personality, as the fact that Quinn is someone he grew up with means he decides to barrel on ahead and risk the ship and more deaths to rescue him. It’s bringing us back to first- and second-season Archer, who appeared to have gotten the job because of who his Daddy is, not due to any innate captaining skill. His behavior is irresponsible as hell here, as T’Pol and Tucker are absolutely right to advise him to end the mission.
I do appreciate the fact that Burrows isn’t just redshirted. His death changes the entire tone of the episode, and it’s never forgotten throughout. That, plus the very presence of the regal Bill Cobbs, who is always excellent, raises the quality of this episode up a bit, but only a bit…
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest work is “Prezzo,” a new story that appears in Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird, an anthology celebrating the centennial of Weird Tales magazine, edited by Jonathan Maberry. The anthology, which will be out this month, includes new stories by Scott Sigler, Laurell K. Hamilton, R.L. Stine, James Aquilone, Hailey Piper, Usman Malik, Blake Northcott, and Dana Fredsti; new poetry by Linda D. Addison, Owl Goingback, Marge Simon, Jessica McHugh, Anne Walsh Miller, and Michael A. Arnzen; new essays by Lisa Morton, Lisa Diane Kastner, James A. Moore, Henry Herz, and Jacopo della Quercia & Christopher Neumann; and reprints of classic stories, essays, and poems by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov & Frederik Pohl, Victor LaValle, Charles R. Rutledge, Karin Tidbeck, Allison V. Harding, and Tennessee Williams.
