Carbon Creek (Star Trek: Enterprise)

"Carbon Creek" was the second episode of the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise. First broadcast on September 25, 2002, "Carbon Creek" was actually the first episode produced for the second season. An atypical Enterprise episode, it does not focus on any of the central characters.

Plot

"Carbon Creek" begins with Captain Jonathan Archer, Commander Trip Tucker and Sub-Commander T'Pol having a small dinner party in honor of the first anniversary of T'Pol's assignment aboard Enterprise (and, by extension, the first anniversary of Enterprise's mission).

During pre-dinner conversation, Archer, out of curiosity, asks why T'Pol travelled from San Francisco to Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania prior to joining Enterprise. T'Pol reveals that, contrary to human belief that the first contact between humans and Vulcans did not occur in the mid-2060s after Zefram Cochrane made his first warp speed flight (see Star Trek: First Contact), but in fact the contact occurred a century earlier, in Carbon Creek. Trip and Archer react incredulously to this claim, so T'Pol offers to tell the story of this contact since her great-grandmother T'Mir was part of those events.

Most of the episode is told in flashback. T'Mir (played by Jolene Blalock, who also plays T'Pol) is a member of a four-Vulcan crew studying Earth from orbit in 1957, where they witness the launch of Sputnik, the planet's first artificial satellite. A mishap with their impulse manifold soon forces the Vulcan craft to make a crash landing in Pennsylvania. The captain is killed and T'Mir, as second-in-command, takes charge. A distress signal is sent, but after more than two weeks no reply is received and the crew's rations run out. With his shipmates slowly starving to death, one of the Vulcans, Mestral, chooses to visit a nearby human town. T'Mir reluctantly accompanies him.

Over the next few months the three Vulcans integrate themselves with the townsfolk, successfully hiding their Vulcan nature. T'Mir, despite her desire to avoid contact with the humans, strikes up a friendship with a young scientist-in-the-making named Jack, while Mestral, who is enthralled by the humans, finds himself becoming involved with Jack's mother while enjoying the finer pleasures of human life such as baseball games and watching I Love Lucy on TV– purely for research purposes. The third Vulcan, Stron, has to endure being compared endlessly to Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.

During their months on Earth, the three Vulcans obtain menial jobs– T'Mir helps at the local pub, Stron becomes a handyman, while Mestral works in the mine, at one point utilizing advanced Vulcan technology in the form of a particle weapon to save the lives of a dozen trapped miners.

Eventually, a Vulcan vessel signals that they are about to arrive to retrieve them. Before leaving, however, T'Mir learns a human lesson in compassion when she discovers that Jack's dreams of attending university have been dashed due to lack of money. Surreptitiously taking a small item from the downed Vulcan craft, she travels by train to an unidentified city where she visits a patent attorney and sells the incredulous man the rights to a product known today as velcro. The money she receives for this "invention that will change the world" is more than enough to ensure Jack's future education.

A few days later, as the Vulcan ship is about to arrive, Mestral announces his intention to stay on Earth and observe the great advances he knows lie ahead. T'Mir reluctantly agrees to let him stay and tells the Vulcan rescuers that Mestral died in the crash.

The episode ends with Archer and Trip not sure whether to believe T'Pol's story, and Trip ultimately declaring that she was pulling their leg, a theory apparently supported when T'Pol suggests that she visited Carbon Creek to do a geological survey. However, the last image of the episode is of T'Pol taking a small parcel out of a private storage container in her quarters– the 1950s-era handbag that was used by T'Mir.

Production

• An alternate take of one of the captain's mess scenes was filmed, with the actors (including Jolene Blalock) acting as though they were intoxicated. The scene was played straight in the broadcast version, while the "drunk take" was included on the Season 2 DVD release as part of the season's blooper reel.

Continuity

• This episode contains a number of visual homages to the Original Series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", including a Vulcan shown working on an electronics project in a kitchen, Mestral wearing a wool cap to cover his ears (as Mr. Spock did in the TOS episode), Mestral and T'Mir raiding a clothesline for proper period apparel, and the Vulcans getting menial jobs much as James T. Kirk and Spock got jobs as laborers during their adventure (Mestral and T'Mir are both seen sweeping floors as Spock did).
• This was one of several episodes to feature a minor running joke involving T'Pol's age. Her age would finally be revealed at the end of the third season.

Outside references

• Early in the episode, Trip remarks that T'Pol's story is like "an old episode of The Twilight Zone." The night this episode originally aired, a new version of Twilight Zone debuted on UPN.
• Although the town of Carbon Creek is fictional, it is likely a pseudonym for Carbondale, Pennsylvania, a small city in northern Lackawanna county, near Scranton. Carbondale was the site of a fictitious UFO landing in the 1970s. The UFO ended up being a lantern at the bottom of a coal mining pit that was filled with runoff water. Still, Carbondale has retained its reputation as a second rate Roswell since that time. Mestral is invited to a ballgame in a real-life community, Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The city T'Mir travels to is unidentified.
• In real life, there was the "Carbon Creek Coal Company" located in Bradford County in northeast Pennsylvania. This fits well with this episode both in name, and in industry type (mining coal). Any 'company town', consisting of homes for the employees and their families, would have been referred to simply as "Carbon Creek".

External links

• Carbon Creek at Memory Alpha

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