Episode 86: Daedalus

In a remake of TOS' "The Ultimate Computer", with hints of TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before" and with an Enterprise twist, "Daedalus" tells the story of a famous but tortured scientist (Emory Erickson) who lies his way onto the Enterprise in a desperate attempt to rescue his son from a years-old transporter accident.

In the two source episodes, the Captain of the Enterprise and his crew resisted the use of their ship as a test vehicle, especially as the problems and lies start to manifest themselves. The Enterprise twist is that the scientist is an old friend, a second father, to the current Captain and the lost son the Captain's childhood best friend.

This pits Archer against Tucker,  T'Pol and Reid (the rest of the bridge crew, Sato and Mayweather, the members of racialised communities that is, are remarkable for their absence from their episode) as it becomes clear that Dr. Erickson is lying and his mission is not what he says it is. The conflict comes to a head when a crewman is killed by a mysterious entity (that turns out to be the son, Quinn, still trapped in the transport) and T'Pol is injured. Archer puts his personal feelings ahead of the safety of the ship and its crew in deciding to continue to permit Erickson to carry out his plans and, in a fiery exchange with Tucker, threatens an insubordination charge if Tucker continues to challenge his orders.

I'm not sure that the writers, Ken LaZebnik and Michael Bryant, intended this but I came away from the episode feeling a great deal less respect for Archer as a result of his unacceptable willingness to put his ship and crew at risk for personal reasons. The death of a crewman, which had been the source of frankly unreasonable levels of guilt and regret for Archer in the context of the Xindi war, now seems a trivial detail to the Captain. The maiming of T'Pol's hand passes almost without comment.

If Star Fleet functions at all properly, Archer will face charges in the next episode for the decisions he makes in this situation and will likely lose his command. I will be interested to see if there are such consequences in store for him (or any at all).

Dr. Erickson is accompanied on the voyage by his daughter, Danica, who is also a childhood friend of Archer. Unfortunately, as so often happens in Enterprise, the female character is presented as being clearly subordinate to the males (father and lost son), sacrificing her life and interests to care for her father and help him in his search for a way to rescue her brother.

The creative decision to permit the son to die in the end, to cause the father to fail, is interesting and fairly poignant, serving perhaps as the morally required "punishment" for the scientist's various sins. Once again, however, the life of the "other" (in this case a young man of apparently African American background) serves merely as a narrative tool for the series' creative team.

There is no doubt that "Daedalus" is seriously flawed -- how Quinn, trapped in a transporter beam, can possibly take on a form capable of killing, maiming and damaging the ship is never explained, to give an additional example -- but it does have one redeeming feature.

In the ongoing effort to address the many wrongs on Star Trek lore perpetrated by the show runners throughout the first three seasons, this episode features the interesting sub-plot of T'Pol's reconsideration of what it is to be Vulcan as she studies Surak's writings contained in the Kir'Shara. Her study causes her to withdraw from the rest of the crew (including Tucker) and to begin the process of re-packing her emotions deep inside her.

Jolene Blalock gives a nuanced, subtle performance (it must have been quite a challenge for an actor to be told to convey significant emotion in a character who is currently packing away all of her emotions) in a variety of situations, from fending off Tucker's efforts to "check in" with her emotionally, to accepting that she has been cured of the incurable Pa'Nar Syndrome or explaining to Dr. Phlox how she is being required to reconsider her entire life philosophy.

And the final withdrawal of T'Pol from her emotional/sexual relationship with Tucker closes a difficult loop for many Star Trek enthusiasts (and, we hope, puts an end to those inane Vulcan neuro-pressure scenes that the earlier show runners were so fond of).