Carbon Creek

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Star Trek: Enterprise episode
"Carbon Creek"
T'Mir in 1957 America
Episode no.	27
Prod. code	201
Airdate	September 25, 2002
Writer(s)	Rick Berman Brannon Braga Dan O'Shannon Teleplay by: Chris Black
Director	James A. Contner
Guest star(s)	J. Paul Boehmer Ann Cusack Hank Harris Michael Krawic David Selburg Clay Wilcox Ron Marasco Paul Hayes
Year	2152; 1957
Stardate	unknown
Episode chronology
Previous	"Shockwave, Part II"
Next	"Minefield"

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.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

"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, the first contact between humans and Vulcans did not occur in the mid-2060s after Zephram 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 soon afterwards 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 settlement (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 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 states 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.

[edit] Trivia

There is much fan debate over the identity of Jack, who clearly is intended to become a scientist of some note. It has been suggested that he might have been a young version of Dr. Jackson Roykirk, a character who would make an impact on Star Trek: The Original Series, however there is nothing in the episode itself to support this. Jack's last name, and that of his mother, is never mentioned.
Although the so-called invention of velcro depicted in this episode does not match real world events in which the product was invented in 1941, the name of the Vulcan scientist, Mestral, is a clear reference to the real-life inventor of velcro, Georges de Mestral.
T'Mir is physically identical to T'Pol, except for the fact she has red hair and a somewhat different demeanor. It is a matter of speculation as to whether she actually is T'Pol's doppelgänger, or if it was simply a storytelling device to use the same actress as T'Pol in the role. There is precedent in Star Trek for the use of "lookalike ancestors". Worf's grandfather, Colonel Worf, seen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was played by the same actor who played Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, and Brent Spiner played two different members of the Soong family in TNG and a later Enterprise story arc. (Lookalike ancestors and descendants were also featured prominently in the Back to the Future movie series.)
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 some fans thought the reference clever, others criticized the writers for plugging the new series, although it is not out of character for 20th century film-loving Trip to make such a remark.
T'Pol, Trip and Archer are the only members of the regular cast to appear in this episode.
The fate of Mestral has yet to be chronicled. T'Pol says he could have lived another 150 years or longer, suggesting that he might have been alive at the time of the official Vulcan-human first contact, if he didn't perish during the Third World War of the mid-21st century.
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). If the chronology of the Star Trek franchise is taken into account, T'Pol is actually incorrect in her assertion that first contact occurred in 1957, since "City on the Edge of Forever" places a Vulcan on Earth in 1930; however this time travel incident could not have been known to the Vulcans in the mid-22nd century.
The reference to I Love Lucy is a nod to Lucille Ball whose production company Desilu Studios produced the first seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series in the 1960s. Ball is also credited with championing the series in the early days.
T'Mir is the first member of T'Pol's family to appear in an episode. The fourth season episode "Home" would introduce her mother (and T'Mir's granddaughter), T'Les.
The statement that T'Pol visited Carbon Creek and several other locations during her assignment on Earth seems to contradict the premiere episode "Broken Bow" in which T'Pol claims she did not travel.
This was the first 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.
This storyline shares some events with the (non-canonical) novel Strangers from the Sky, specifically, the crash-landing of a Vulcan crew and subsequent accidental first contact. That novel, however, had the contact take place in the early twenty-first century.
There is no such town as "Carbon Creek" in Pennsylvania.
According to the Memory Alpha web site <http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Doylestown>, the town in this episode is near Doylestown, Pennsylvania.