"Dead Stop" is the thirtieth episode (production #204) of the science fiction television series Star Trek: Enterprise, the fourth of the second season.
As the damage would take months to repair, and returning to Jupiter Station would take years, Archer decides that it is time for someone to help them out for once, and orders Ensign Sato to send a general distress call.
A Tellarite freighter responds, and sends a barely understandable message including co-ordinates directing them to an automated repair facility, three days away at Warp 2.
[3] An actress was hired to play the computer voice but Rick Berman thought it had been done by Dawson and asked her to do it again for the final cut of the episode.
Visual effects producer Dan Curry was filming exterior ship shots for "Minefield" with Dominic Keating.
[11] Writing for StarTrek.com Jordan Hoffman said the episode was innovative, but criticized the villain: "it's hard not to think about the killer repair station as anything other than a haunted conveyor car wash."[12] In his 2022 rewatch ,Keith DeCandido of Tor.com gave it three out of ten.
He "almost liked" the episode, but not the ending; he found it both "incredibly convenient" and that the destruction "showed a depraved indifference to sentient life", which he viewed as conflicting with the very premise of Star Trek.
[13] H&I noted this as an episode of Star Trek featuring scary or eerie content, and said "you don't need a shadowy, dim spaceship to elicit chills.
[18][19][20] The episode won an award from the Visual Effects Society in the category Best Models and Miniatures in a Televised Program, Music Video, or Commercial.
[21] Modelmakers John Teska, Koji Kuramura, Pierre Drolet and Sean Scott were honored for their CGI work on the automated repair station shown in the episode.
[22][23] "Dead Stop" was first released for home media use on DVD as part of the second series box set of Star Trek: Enterprise.