“Daedalus” is episode ten of season four of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Captain Archer and Trip are heading to the transporter as Trip’s idol, Dr Emory Erickson, the father of the transporter, is being beamed aboard. Archer grew up with Erickson, but knows how he feels. Erickson, and his daughter, Danica, are beamed aboard. He greets the captain and says by the time the test is over, Enterprise, the entirety of Starfleet, could be obsolete.
Power is reduced all over the ship and Trip finds T’Pol alone in the mess hall. He says they haven’t talked much since the events of the previous episode, “Kir’Shara”; T’Pol is currently reading the Kir’Shara. Trip asks how it is. Interesting. Extremely interesting. Trip talks about T’Pol losing her mother and that he’s there if she needs to talk. She claims to be fine.
Erickson, Danica, Captain Archer, Trip are dining together. Erickson is explaining that the subquantum transporter could beam a person directly to Vulcan. There’s no theoretical limit on the distance, but even a successful test will require decades to work out the bugs T’Pol says the Vulcan Science Academy has been working on the subquantum transporter for years with little results. Erickson talks about the protests when the transporter was approved for biomatter. He says there were costs in developing the transporter, but he won.
Enterprise is in an area known as the Barrens; there’s no star system within 100 lightyears, making it perfect for the tests. Trip is working on the transporter with Erickson there; he says they need more power than he expected. He wants a look at the power converter. Erickson says he will install it. Trip prefers to modify Enterprise‘s systems himself. Erickson says he’s been granted complete access by Starfleet. He really doesn’t seem to want Trip to get a look to the power converter.
Danica and Captain Archer are in the engine room, talking about the ship and the loss of her brother, Quinn, which Erickson still hasn’t dealt with. She hopes this test being successful will get him to look forward again. Later, Danica is preparing an injector for her father – whose back has some rather nasty deformities; perhaps one of the sacrifices made in developing the transporter. Danica doesn’t like that they are lying. She wants her father to talk to Archer. Erickson says they can’t; Archer’s first duty is to his ship. He may not be their enemy, but he isn’t on their side either.
In the armoury, power fluctuates. Reed and another crewman investigate and T’Pol reports a possible spatial distortion on the bridge. Whatever it is envelops the crewman; when Reed turns him over, his face is horribly distorted.
Archer and T’Pol are at the transporter with Danica and Erickson. The dead crewman suffered massive cellular disruption as if subjected to intense delta radiation. T’Pol asks if Erickson had even seen anything like this as he’s spent a great deal of time in the Barrens. He has not.
In their quarters, Danica is angry with her father; he never said anything like this would happen. He didn’t know it would. Danica wants to tell the truth. Her father says they would be condemning him to death. She’s worried more will die; Erickson says that they are nearly ready for the first test. Danica wonders what Quinn would say. Erickson says that after they are done, they can ask him. It sounds like the whole thing is being done to find her brother, who supposedly died years ago.
The first test goes well, but Erickson rejects Trip’s offer of a celebration in the mess hall. He wants to be on his own with the telemetry. Trip heads to see the captain and says most of the work he did wasn’t necessary for the test. The energy was going in a feedback loop, not to the transporter beam. In fact, the transporter should use less energy than normal. Trip wouldn’t have noticed if the captain hadn’t told him to take a look. Which Archer did because Erickson’s research ship did have an encounter with a similar phenomenon five years ago. And the crewman who saw it said it seemed to be alive.
Erickson is clearly using the transporter tests for his own ends. And the feeling is that those ends are recovering his lost, supposedly dead, son.