Synopsis: The creator of the transporter comes aboard Enterprise with a hidden agenda, meanwhile Commander T’Pol starts reading the Kir’Shaka.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of what can happen when an individual’s Logos-driven rational conscious ego integrates bits of material from one’s Eros-driven irrational unconscious into itself.
In “Daedalus” Dr. Emory Erickson, the inventor of the transporter and a close friend of Captain Jonathan Archer, comes aboard Enterprise, accompanied by his daughter, Danica. He is reportedly there to test an improved sub-quantum transporter device, which will allow individuals to be teleported much further. In reality, the reason Erickson has come aboard and directed that Enterprise head into an area of space called the Barrens, is to try to rescue his son, Quinn, who’s transporter signal still appears there, even though he was lost fifteen years earlier. Archer decides to try to help him, Erickson’s son’s signal appears but is too weak to materialize, and he dies when Erickson decides to try to recover him anyway. Meanwhile, Commander T’Pol takes up reading the Kir’Shaka and when she goes to see Dr. Phlox in sick bay, learns that T’Pau cured her of her Pa’nar Syndrome with a mind meld. Phlox tells T’Pol that she is reexamining her core beliefs, something that most people never do. T’Pol comes to talk to Commander Charles (Trip) Tucker III. She tells him she is learning what it truly means to be Vulcan.
In this episode, when T’Pol, who has always only trusted logic starts studying the Vulcan sacred text, the Kir’Shaka, this can be analogized to when the rational conscious ego integrates bits of material from the irrational unconscious into itself. And as Phlox comments, this is something that few individuals are encouraged to do in our society, which values the Logos-driventraits over the Eros-driven ones. But when it does happen, the ego becomes stronger and the psyche more whole.
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