In the tenth episode of the fourth season of Enterprise, a childhood friend arrives on Enterprise to conduct an important experiment. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For grief/deathÂ
In the abstract, or perhaps from a distance, I like this episode and its bold attempt to talk about the intersection of technology and grief. Y’all know I love a good story about grief! But somewhere along the way – and I’m having trouble pinpointing it – “Daedalus†stumbles and never really recovers. It’s an interesting premise, but the closer we get to the tragic ending, the stranger it feels.
Which is a shame, since the idea behind this is so cool. We actually get to meet the man responsible for transporter technology, who once paid a very physical price to help advance his theories. (I think? I was a little uncertain on that point.) So much of Enterprise is about bridging the gap between the series, and so I was excited to see how the show would introduce subquantum transportation, despite that we knew it wasn’t a reality in future timelines. What happened? Why wasn’t it a viable form of transportion?
So, yes, I assumed something negative was going to happen here that would prevent it from being a viable alternative. Even so, and even though the episode revealed very early on that Danica and her father, Emory, were lying about their reason for being on Enterprise, I didn’t expect the downward spiral to come. This is an increasingly sad and bleak episode about how Emory has refused to accept his son’s death for FIFTEEN YEARS. He spent that time devising a method to save his son, who was the victim of a transporter accident, and still exists in a weird spatial node where time doesn’t pass??? All of this is fucked up, undeniably so! And it’s not that I experienced this story and thought, “Everything will end up fine, there will be no consequences!†Y’all, a crewmember died when Quinn, Emory’s son and Danica’s brother, touched someone. It was clear there’d be consequences!
Except not really, and it’s one of the major problems I see with this. Emory does end this struggle accepting that his son is gone and that he’ll have to be held accountable for what he did on board Enterprise. It’s left ambiguous as to what that actually looks like, and the same goes for Danica. She speaks of being free to live a life that isn’t centered on her father’s inability to accept that Quinn was gone. But do we know what that is? No. Instead, the first half of this episode establishes that the Ericksons were close with Archer and his father, which undermines the story. Why? Because a very obvious solution was left unaddressed: Why didn’t Emory just ask Archer to use his newfound fame as the savior of Earth and help him with his experiment? It didn’t necessarily have to be an official Starfleet mission, but at least the crew could have known what they were getting into!
Perhaps the attempt here was to say that Emory was so full of his irrational refusal to accept Quinn’s death that he just made bad decisions. I could maybe buy that if it was explored more. But there’s still another problem: ARCHER IS A TOTAL JERK IN THIS EPISODE. And he doesn’t apologize, despite that this is a bad idea, despite that there’s little science to back up Emory’s assertions that he can save Quinn, despite that this whole experiment puts everyone at risk of death, even though they don’t want to AND it’s not a Starfleet mission. Does he ever apologize? Nope. Was he 100% wrong when he told Tucker this wasn’t personal? YES. Ugh, it’s just… it’s not that Archer can’t be stubborn and make mistakes. WELCOME TO SEASON 3. But you can’t have that happen and then just ignore the ramifications of it.
And look, I don’t know how else to explain why I greatly disliked that ending. Please, don’t give me perfectly-wrapped presents as resolutions; fuck me up; ruin my day. I live for dark shit sometimes. But what the fuck was the point of having Quinn pop into this world just to die in his father’s arm seconds later? It was already tragic enough, and that just felt like salt in the wound.
The video for “Daedalus†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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