American character actor (1934–2024) who played Dr Emory Erickson, the inventor of the transporter and a father figure to Jonathan Archer, in the Enterprise episode Daedalus.
Bill Cobbs was an American actor who began acting professionally in his thirties and went on to some two hundred screen credits. He is remembered for The Hudsucker Proxy, The Bodyguard, Demolition Man, That Thing You Do! and Night at the Museum.
In Enterprise he appears in the fourth-season episode Daedalus as Emory Erickson, the celebrated creator of the transporter, who comes aboard with his daughter Danica supposedly to test a long-range sub-quantum teleportation system.
Erickson is really trying to retrieve his son Quinn, lost in an early experiment and trapped as a signal in a region called the Barrens. Archer, who grew up close to the family, helps him, but Quinn does not survive rematerialisation.