If I remember correctly, the episode begins in the Captain's dining room as Archer, Tucker and T'Pol host a trader of unknown origins and attempt to negotiate deals for much needed supplies. The trader is not particularly helpful since he only deals in luxury items, not engine parts and industrial metals, but he finally agrees to give them directions to a crashed cargo ship that might produce salvageable parts and materials that the Enterprise might use.
Why has he not already stripped the doomed ship clean? Because it's haunted (eerie music here) by its former crew.
Admitting that their first months in space have caused more wear and tear to their ship than they had anticipated, Archer orders Enterprise to investigate the crashed ship. The wreck promises to answer most of their needs until... they start seeing things as well. Investigations disclose that a dampening field has been erected around certain areas of the ship to protect the survivors of the crash from attackers. They have cleverly rerouted ship's power to the dampening field and to various other systems (a hydroponics operation that provides food, for example) to permit them to survive.
Archer offers help with various repairs and Tucker, to no one's surprise, gets into a strange flirtation with a young female survivor, Liana. As Tucker flirts and T'Pol works, Reed and Mayweather do some due diligence on board Enterprise and discover that the survivors' story doesn't jive: the cargo ship was not attacked but simply suffered a severe malfunction; the crash occurred more than 20 years before, not two years as the survivors' claim; the food production facility doesn't produce nearly enough food to feed the people apparently living on the crashed ship; and there are life pods from the ship still floating in orbit which contain the long-petrified bodies of crew members that the Enterprise crew have seen alive and well on the planet.
Hmmm....
Then T'Pol discovers something as she works on the cargo ship's computer system and, when she attempts to report it, she is taken prisoner by the survivors. When Archer returns to the surface to track her down, he and his landing party are attacked by the survivors, against whom Star Fleet hand phasers are surprisingly ineffective. Tucker, back at the cargo ship's computer centre with the Liana, realizes (as T'Pol had before him) that the computer is managing a significant number of holographic projections throughout the vessel -- the "survivors" -- and convinces the young woman to disable the programs before the members of the Enterprise landing party are killed.
It turns out that the ship's engineer (played by Rene Auberjonois, Odo from DS9) feels responsible for the accident that brought down the ship and killed its entire crew, except for himself and his young daughter, Liana. Not wishing to face his guilt, Odo decides instead to keep his daughter on the crashed ship and to re-create a holographic crew to keep her company. He has made no effort to try to attract help or to return to his home planet.
The incident with the Enterprise folk, however, convinces him that he needs to deal with his guilt and bring his daughter back to his home planet so that she can live a normal life. Odo then asked Archer for certain supplies and equipment to repair the freighter for its flight home -- he doesn't need any help, of course, because he has a full holographic crew to implement repairs.
The story, written by Braga and Berman, is an homage to (or derivative of) a number of episodes from earlier series, most particularly the TOS show "Requiem for Methuselah", which had a similar lonely dad raising a protected daughter in isolation theme. My memory is telling me that there was another episode of TOS that ran along the same lines (or maybe it was from TNG) but I can't recall it right now.
"Oasis" is mildly entertaining but suffers from a whole host of issues that are common to so many Enterprise episodes. It's nice to see Odo back again but, to be honest, the use of an actor who is so inextricably linked to another major character in the ST canon to play a minor character like this is a bit off-putting. Auberjonois is Odo. There isn't even enough make-up or prosthetics to make him seem like a different person.
The episode also makes a complete hash of everything we have learned about hologram technology in the Star Trek universe. TNG and Voyager especially went to great lengths, in numerous episodes, to establish the rules when it comes to holograms and "Oasis" seems to throw all that out the window:
- where TNG and Voyager made it clear that "holographic emitters" must be installed strategically anywhere you want holograms to go, the holograms in "Oasis" appear and disappear at will -- none of Enterprise's careful scans of the cargo ship reveal the existence of these emitters (which would have had to be add ons later) all over the ship, nor the presence of power systems supporting them;
- where TNG and Voyager made it clear that hologram technology is fairly new even in their century and very complicated, Enterprise's crew doesn't seem phased by its extensive use here and shows no interest in acquiring it for their own use;
- where holographic programs take a lot of energy in later series, here an incredibly complex set of holographic programs (10 or more independent thinking and acting people across the entire ship) seems to run on nothing at all since the Star Fleet folk don't even notice the power usage;
- the holographic people "appear" out of nowhere, often coming through walls, yet they carry real weapons that are actually shown to fall to the floor when the holographic programs are disabled and the "people" disappear -- how is it possible for these weapons to move through walls if they are apparently solid and real?
- etc. etc.
And why are there apparently only two women in the cargo ship's crew -- Odo's holographic wife and daughter?
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