Vanishing Point (Star Trek: Enterprise)
| "Vanishing Point" | |
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| Star Trek: Enterprise episode | |
Hoshi questions the nature of her existence after using the transporter.
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| Episode no. | Season 2 Episode 10 |
| Directed by | David Straiton |
| Written by |
Rick Berman Brannon Braga |
| Featured music | Jay Chattaway |
| Production code | 210 |
| Original air date | November 27, 2002 |
| Guest appearance(s) | |
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"Vanishing Point" is the 36th episode (production #210) of the television series Star Trek: Enterprise, the tenth of the second season, and it aired in November 2002. Hoshi is on an away mission which requires teleportation for evacuation.
The episode explores one the classic staples of the Star Trek universe, a transporter gone-wrong theme.Vanishing Point raises the question of if the transporters are simply killing people each time someone transports, creating a facsimile with that person's memories. In other words, does the person simply think they are themselves, but in fact a duplicate as explored by the duplicated Rikers of one transporter accident in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Alternatively, being transported may be like falling asleep and what happened to Hoshi akin to dream-like state during the several seconds her body was stored in the transporter buffer. Another transporter explanation, is more along the lines of moving a person through a quantum doorway, their unique matter and energy moving from one "place" to another.
Ensign Hoshi Sato passes through the transporter and finds that she is slowly disappearing. At the same time, she is the only person who can see aliens planting explosives in key ship systems, with no way to warn the crew.
Transporter accidents have been a staple of the Trek universe since the 1960s TV shows (see Mirror, Mirror (1967)) and some famous examples are the transporter accident in Star Trek:The Motion Picture (1979) or for example the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode which makes a clone of Riker. This episode explores what happens to consciousness during a period in which the person does not have a body. Some have compared transporters to general anesthesia in modern society.
This also may have been an earlier visit by the somewhat mischievous Aliens that visit Deep Space Nine in If Wishes Were Horses; in both cases a character played by actor Keone Young interacts with the crew posing as something they are not to better understand humanity, which itself may been a Q appearance. Q explores humanities afterlife concepts in Tapestry (Star Trek: The Next Generation) and there are a number Trek episodes that bare a similarity to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, in which possibly supernatural exploration of life in a way the character does not typically experience but then are returned to their normal experience with an altered perspective, and in this case since She is shown her own death, Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. In terms of the trek Universe, it may be a sort of "Q-ophany" pre-Encounter at Farpoint. Other interpretations include that the concept of the dream and Dream interpretation.
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