Weekend Trek “Daedalus”

Veteran actor Bill Cobbs pops up in this one as the wheelchair-bound inventor of the transporter.  And let me just say, it’s not the first time that Star Trek has said a black man invented some important piece of Federation technology.  That goes back to when a certain Dr. Daystrom appeared in the original series episode “The Ultimate Computer,” and the “Daystrom” name appears quite a bit in later Trek series.

Cobbs here is one Dr. Emory Erickson, inventor of the transporter and arriving with his daughter Danica, a childhood friend of Archer’s, to conduct an experiment on the transporter that, he says, will allow for instantaneous teleportation across multiple light-years, essentially making space travel obsolete.  Archer isn’t so sure he likes that, but that sort of thing won’t happen until J.J. Abrams comes onboard, and we aren’t there yet.

We’re gettin’ close though!  We’re almost at the halfway point for the final season.

Wow.  That’s kinda depressing now that I think about it.  I’ve been covering this era of Trek for a while, with Jimmy for TNG and by myself on everything else.  It’s been entertaining on many levels.  DS9 was as good as its reputation, but before I go too far down memory lane, let me take a moment to consider how Enterprise is handling serialized television.

I think it might be doing a better job.

Now, that doesn’t mean I think Enterprise is the better show.  It’s not.  I can say that I can see why this show maybe didn’t do as well.  I think even the hardcore Trek fans had had enough of this by the time Archer strode onto his version of the bridge.  Archer still hasn’t had to answer the sort of moral dilemmas that Sisko dealt with on a more routine basis.  To be fair, Enterprise is still better than its reputation.  It’s nice comfort food TV more often than not.  Yeah, the characters are not as well-developed as other Trek casts when you step away from Archer, T’Pol, Trip, and Phlox, though Malcolm has his moments.  I still don’t know much of anything about Travis aside from he’s a good pilot that likes rock-climbing.  There’s potential to the character, but he’s rarely given a chance to shine and use it.  I’m not even sure Phlox would get that much attention if he weren’t an unusual alien race and the ship’s doctor.

Heck, this episode seemed to remember Porthos exists.

However, there was a moment in this one where Trip sits down to talk to T’Pol, noting she’s had her nose buried in what is essentially the Vulcan bible for a while now, since they left Vulcan a couple episodes ago.  It’s a small moment, one with a minor call-back at the end of the episode where T’Pol makes a suggestion for the next movie night, but something struck me:  T’Pol says she is fine, that she doesn’t have these grief-filled feelings following the death of her mother, but T’Pol’s face says otherwise.  Jolene Blalock keeps T’Pol’s voice level, but something about the way she looks says she is not OK.  She looks tired.  I don’t know if this is because of the camera angle, the lighting, the make-up, or just Blalock’s acting choices in the moment, but the scene really worked for me for that one reason.

What does a Vulcan look like when they mourn?  Has any version of Star Trek ever explored that before?  The closest may be when Spock is told by Picard that his father died, but that comes at the tail end of the episode as far as I can recall, and there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the meantime.  Blalock’s T’Pol has been through a bit more, having contracted and since been cured of a telepathic disease, learning her mother was part of a group the Vulcan High Command (incorrectly) labeled a terrorist organization or something, and Trip still doesn’t seem to know T’Pol is divorced.

However, the Trip-T’Pol scene really worked for me, better than the rest of the episode, and I wouldn’t even say there was anything wrong with the rest of the episode.  Erickson and his daughter’s experiment is for a secret purpose, to recover Erickson’s son, lost for years after the previous such experiment, that ultimately brings the young man back just to die in his father’s arms.  There’s talk that Danica needs to go off an explore space, Trip’s hero-worship of Erickson and how that affects what’s happening, and an ongoing discussion about whether or not Archer is tight to keep letting Erickson try to retrieve his son after the real reason for the experiment comes out after a weird anomaly (that turned out to be Erickson’s son) kills a member of the crew.

But really, for me, it was the Trip and T’Pol scene.  It just really worked for me for some reason.