"Twilight" is the 60th episode of the television series Star Trek: Enterprise, the eighth of the third season. It was first broadcast on November 5, 2003. Like TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise" and Voyager's "Year of Hell", this episode involves an alternate timeline in which the main characters must try to change history in order to avert a disastrous set of consequences.
While rescuing Sub-commander T'Pol from a spatial anomaly, Captain Archer is infected by subspace parasites in his cerebral cortex, resulting in anterograde amnesia. His condition prevents him from forming new long term memories. This allows Archer to remember everything prior to the accident, but any new memories would fade within a few hours. It becomes clear that Archer is not fit for duty, and he is subsequently relieved of his command. Starfleet Admiral Forrest grants T'Pol a field commission to Captain. Unfortunately, the mission fails. Earth and every human colony is wiped out by the Xindi weapon. The only surviving convoy of humans is led by Enterprise under T'Pol's command to Ceti Alpha V.
Twelve years pass and Dr. Phlox finds a cure. He discovers that when he uses radiation treatments to kill one of the parasite clusters in Archer's brain, the cluster also vanishes from every medical scan Phlox took beforehand – as if the parasite never existed. Phlox and Enterprise crewmen devise a plan in which Archer will be subjected to repeated radiation treatments which will eliminate all of the parasites in his brain; therefore, since Archer will never have been infected, he would have remained captain and possibly prevented Earth's destruction.
Unfortunately, the ship is attacked by Xindi vessels before the treatments can be completed. Phlox noted before that a subspace implosion would also destroy the parasites. Phlox, T'Pol, and Archer set the ship to create a subspace implosion. Their plan works and the ship is destroyed; the subspace parasites (which exist outside the normal space/time realm) are destroyed by the implosion. The next scene shows the time line reset to the point where Archer is in sick bay after being injured from the anomaly. However, since the parasites have been retroactively destroyed, Archer's memory is normal and he remains captain.
[edit] Continuity
Ceti Alpha V, the planet on which the elder Archer and T'Pol live, is the planet that Captain Kirk would deposit Khan Noonien Singh on in The Original Series episode "Space Seed." Reference is also made to the Mutara Nebula, where the climactic battle between Captain Kirk and Khan occurs in the 1982 feature film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Ceti Alpha V would be rendered permanently virtually uninhabitable in the 23rd century by the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI.
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