Archer is talking to an alien trader named D'Marr over a meal about possibly buying some engineering supplies. D'Marr says that his specialty is in "exotic" goods, but he gives him the coordinates of a place where they can get what they need. He adds that there is a crashed ship on the planet, but that it's rumoured to be haunted.
Enterprise finds the ship, and there are no power signatures or life signs. They nervously send an away team, consisting of Archer, T'Pol, Trip, and Travis. T'Pol thinks she hears a sound, then she thinks she sees a person's reflection. Trip sees a moving shadow, so they blast through a hatch to find an area with plants and a whole crowd of people in it.
The people, who belong to a species called the Kantare, explain that they were on their way to their home planet when aliens attacked them three years ago and they were forced to crash-land and couldn't fix the ship. They hid behind a dampening field and didn't send any distress calls to avoid detection. Archer and Trip offer to help and the colonists, albeit somewhat skeptically, accept. Trip begins repairs and he and the chief engineer's daughter, Liana, start expressing interest in each other.
T'Pol joins Trip in his repairs and warns him about "fraternizing" with Liana. Liana gives Trip some food and they talk together, but Kuulan interrupts them to warn them that their computer core is broken. Trip and T'Pol go to Enterprise to retrieve some gear, and Liana talks Ezral, her father, into letting her visit the ship.
On Enterprise, Malcolm and Travis tell Archer that the ship shouldn't be able to sustain everyone there and there's no evidence of an attack, so Archer has them look through one of the Kantare's data modules. Trip shows Liana around engineering and asks her questions about the Kantare. She doesn't answer, claiming it's "boring", but is keen to know about where Trip's been. Then, Archer and Malcolm call Trip to the ready room, where they reveal that the Kantare lied— they weren't attacked but rather there was a malfunction, and it was twenty-two years ago, not three. They also left two escape pods, one of which is in orbit, and when they investigate, they find the dead body of Shilat, one of the colonists who appears to still be alive.
While working on the computer, T'Pol apparently discovers something, but then is captured by the colonists, then Trip confronts Liana in the mess hall. She initially plays dumb, but eventually has to quit, yet she still doesn't give any information and demands to be taken home. Archer, Malcolm, and Liana go back to the planet, but the colonists become aggressive, demanding that Trip finish the repairs and everyone else go back to Enterprise. Once this happens, Liana spills the secret to Trip: everyone except her and her dad are holograms. When the rescue team arrives, Malcolm is shot and a blast goes right through one of the crew members. Trip begs Liana to stop them, so she pulls some circuits, causing all the Kantare to disappear except for her and Ezral.
Ezral tells the truth: they were caught in an ion storm and forced to crash-land, but he left his station to save his daughter's life, leading to everyone else's deaths. Then, he made the holograms so that Liana wouldn't grow up lonely. Trip agrees to repair the holographic system, but states that Liana deserves more than to live on the planet with no one but her father. Thus, the repairs are completed and Trip kisses Liana goodbye, with his father talking to Archer and reluctantly allowing her to leave the planet if she wishes.
Tropes in this episode include:
- Ascended Fanboy: Tom Bergeron, a self-professed Trekkie, and who plays D’Marr in the opening seen, has stated he had gotten the role through impressing the crew with his considerable Star Trek knowledge.
- Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Whatever Trip tastes that makes Cajun food seem mild.
- Call-Forward: Trip asks Ezral what he'll do if Liana gets hurt: "Program a holographic doctor?" Now there's an idea...
- Continuity Nod:
- T'Pol reminds Trip of the time he got pregnant.T'Pol: By the way you keep talking about [Liana], you obviously appreciate her technical expertise.
Trip: She's very competent.
T'Pol: So was the female engineer on the Xyrillian ship.
Trip: You're never going to let that go, are you?
T'Pol: I'm simply noting that the last time you found someone this competent, you wound up carrying her child. - Archer refers to Travis' ghost stories.
- T'Pol reminds Trip of the time he got pregnant.
- Cope by Pretending: Ezral made the holographic crew based on the real crew who died, though played with, as it wasn't to kid himself they never died, but rather so that Liana wouldn't grow up alone.
- Cute Mute: Trip wonders if Liana (who he finds cute) is mute, until she warns him about a live plasma feed.
- Due to the Dead: Travis is uncomfortable about scavenging a ship that could be a tomb for a dead crew.
- Fridge Logic: In-Universe — Archer and his crew note how odd it is that the stranded aliens haven't made any attempt to escape or call for help. They also determine that the hydroponics bay isn't enough to feed the entire crew.
- Interspecies Romance: Trip, a human, ends up kissing one of the aliens, Liana.
- It's All My Fault: Ezral blames himself for the death of his crew, as he left his station to care for Liana. Liana likewise blames herself.
- Missing Mom: Liana's mother turns out to actually be a hologram; her real mother died in the crash.
- No-Sell: As usual, phasers don't work against holograms.
- Offscreen Teleportation: The crew members do this constantly when they're disappearing and appearing in impossible locations and surround T'Pol out of nowhere. Justified since they're holograms.
- Oh, Crap!: Ezral, when his holographic crew disappears and he realizes the jig is up.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Trip complains that T'Pol will never let him live down the time he got, for lack of a better word, pregnant.
- Sadistic Choice: Ezral abandoning his post to save the infant Liana amounted to this; based on his words, he at least hoped that the rest of the crew could save themselves without his help, but he knew that his daughter would have died in the crash if he did nothing.
- Scary Flashlight Face: Trip briefly does this while trying to convince T'Pol that there's "nothing like a good scare."
- Title Drop:Ezral: I've never kept secrets from my daughter. She knows there's more to see beyond our little oasis. But she's never talked about leaving. Not once.
- Wham Shot: Our heroes open up an Escape Pod they recovered, and the corpse is someone that Trip just saw alive in the crashed ship.
