86 – Daedalus

Grade: F

Summary

The Enterprise welcomes Dr. Emory Erickson, inventor of the transporter. The Dr. has come aboard to test some improvements to the transporter that will eventually allow Star Fleet to transport people even light years away.

Commentary

Talk about ho-hum. This was one of the most boring and useless filler episodes I’ve ever seen. The acting was extremely sub-par and the directing was listless, at best. The characters were barely credible, and Captain Archer is really getting on my nerves. There’s no reason for him to go around on the ship, bossing people around and being a jerk.

But on to the guest stars. Before this episode aired, the name of the inventor of the transporter was never known. Right there, that should have been a clue that there was something wrong, but the obvious clue was Trip’s “uber reverence” for him at the beginning of the episode. Any time in Star Trek that they bring someone up you’ve never heard of before, and one of the characters worships the coffee cups they throw away, that person ends up being the villain or gets torn down by circumstances. It happens all the time. It’s the same storyline with “Fallen Hero” in the 1st season.

The storyline seemed like a cheap ripoff of other Star Trek episodes, like the one where Jake works for the rest of his life to get his dad back from the warp reactor accident on Deep Space 9. I couldn’t help but think of this episode as a microcosm of the entire Enterprise series. Like the Dr. in the show, Berman and Braga are desperately doing all they can to hold onto a show that hasn’t added anything to the franchise. At least they didn’t sugar-coat the ending and have Phlox find some way in 4 seconds to save the day. That would have been far too much.

Finally, what happened to Linda Park? Why isn’t she on this series longer than 2 seconds per episode? What a waste of a potentially great character.