Catacombs

Trip Tucker holding a torch while passing the catacombs of P'Jem

Catacombs were underground chambers and passageways, often beneath a religious establishment and usually having a religious function, such as the storage of relics or sainted bodies.

In 2151 Trip Tucker used a transmitter in the catacombs hidden beneath the monastery at P'Jem to contact Enterprise NX-01 after the landing party's communicators had been destroyed by Thy'lek Shran. Later, Captain Jonathan Archer defused the stand-off with the Andorians by discovering within a nearby reliquary the entrance to a massive subsurface sensor array. (ENT: "The Andorian Incident")

The blueprints of the set

The underground catacombs beneath P'Jem were built on Paramount Stage 9. (Call sheets) They were an expansion of the cave sets seen in the previous episode, "Terra Nova", and were subsequently used , enlarged and modified, in several further episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. ("The Andorian Incident", text commentary, ENT Season 1 DVD special feature)

The blueprints for this set were later sold off on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay along with a script of the episode. [1]^(X)

Archer explored another set of Vulcan catacombs in 2154. He identified the 1800-yr-old mummified remains of T'Klaas, a student of Surak, in a passage beneath the T'Karath Sanctuary. (ENT: "Awakening")

The Children of the Son cave on planet 892-IV to which Kirk, Spock and McCoy were taken in TOS: "Bread and Circuses", while not technically underground, would seem to be an echo of the catacombs that sheltered Earth's early Christian outlaws.

External link

• Catacombs at Wikipedia