“Doctor’s Orders”
Written by Chris Black
Directed by Roxann Dawson
Season 3, Episode 16
Production episode 068
Original air date: February 18, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We open to Enterprise moving through what appears to be Yet Another Delphic Expanse Anomaly, its warp nacelles inactive, the ship seemingly empty—except for Porthos, being chased by Phlox. The puppy arrives at the door he wants, and Phlox lets him in to Archer’s cabin, where the captain lays comatose with a silver disc on his head.
Phlox writes a letter to Dr. Lucas, apologizing for being dilatory in staying in touch with him lately, but things have been busy.
We flash back to two days earlier, as Phlox explains to Lucas what happened: Enterprise was coming across an anomaly that would likely kill the humans on board. Denobulan brain chemistry won’t be affected by it. (Neither will any of the animals on board.) Vulcan brain chemistry isn’t mentioned one way or the other, an omission that will probably be important later…
Phlox’s solution is to put everyone in a coma except Phlox himself and go through on autopilot. Tucker isn’t thrilled with the warp engines being exposed to this anomaly—and is less thrilled with being in a coma and leaving Phlox in charge of the engines—but even going on impulse will be faster than going around it, and they need to haul ass to Azati Prime, so….
Phlox gets a crash course in piloting from Mayweather and in engineering basics from Tucker, and then puts everyone to sleep.
We see Phlox going for runs with Porthos and wandering naked through sickbay and watching The Court Jester for movie night, even though he and Porthos are all alone (with popcorn, no less, which he does feed a bit of to the puppy). He hears something, and goes to investigate, bringing a very reluctant Porthos along, only to discovery a minor gas leak in engineering that is rattling a chain.
T’Pol also shows up in engineering, saying she was running a diagnostic. Phlox invites her to share a meal, which she does with a lack of enthusiasm. Phlox prepares a Denobulan dish that Chef has never gotten right. T’Pol never touches the bowl put in front of her. This will also probably be important later…
Later, Phlox is doing a maintenance run through engineering, and he sees a figure lurking in the shadows. He contacts T’Pol to ask her why she’s lurking around engineering, but she says she’s on the bridge. Later he sees something on the hull of the ship, but sensors detect nothing. T’Pol thinks he just needs some sleep.
When he’s checking on Sato, he sees a Xindi-Insectoid menacing her; it leaps to attack him, and he runs away. The Xindi chases him into an airlock, and then moves off when Phlox locks himself in there.
After arming himself, Phlox conducts a search of the ship for the Xindi, though T’Pol—who doesn’t take the weapon Phlox offers her—thinks it’s a waste of time and that Phlox is hallucinating. Phlox refuses to accept that, even as he searches the ship with no sign of the Xindi.
Then he’s contacted by Sato, which comes as a shock, as she should be in a coma. He goes to her cabin to see that’s she’s in the shower—and she steps out of it horribly disfigured. Then Phlox sees Sato laying peacefully on her bed.
He really is hallucinating, reinforced by hallucinating Archer in a turbolift minutes later. He abashedly summons T’Pol to sickbay, and examines himself to find that, contrary to his initial diagnosis, Denobulan physiology is also affected by the anomaly, if less aggressively. Phlox says he needs to put himself in a coma and leave T’Pol in charge, but she demurs, saying she is barely holding her emotional control in, and she could snap at any moment. Besides, they’re almost out of the anomaly—
—except they’re not. The anomaly has expanded, and they’re now ten weeks from the outer edge. And that may get worse as it continues to expand.
T’Pol urges him to start the warp drive, which makes Phlox very apprehensive. (He also hallucinates Tucker tearing him a new one for starting the warp drive up.) T’Pol, claiming she can’t focus because of her trying to maintain her emotional control, is of no help in starting up the engines, and Phlox is reduced to reading the manual.
He manages to get the warp engines started, but then the ship starts to shake and sparks fly and T’Pol suggests reviving Tucker. Phlox refuses, as that will kill Tucker, and T’Pol points out that the ship blowing up will do that too, and also kill everyone else.
However, Phlox manages to stabilize things, and they hit warp two and get out of the anomaly.
Phlox revives Archer first, and then Tucker. He walks T’Pol to her quarters so she can rest, and when he gets there, he sees T’Pol laying comatose on her bed. The T’Pol he’d been interacting with was a hallucination the entire time.
The letter to Lucas concludes with Phlox saying he considered deleting the letter, since it turns out big chunks of it were fictitious, but he decides to keep it for Lucas’ entertainment.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker is apprehensive about the possibility of Phlox messing with his engines, and after he’s awakened, that apprehension is expressed by him bitching Phlox out about the warp coils being misaligned. But he also admits that Phlox did a good job, all things considered.
The gazelle speech. Archer is the last person to be put to sleep, obviously, and by the time Phlox gets to him, the doctor defensively says that everything will be fine and he doesn’t have to worry about Phlox being in charge, as everyone else he put under bitched about that. But Archer pleasantly surprises him (and the viewer, frankly) by not having second thoughts. He was just going to say that Phlox is one of the few people Archer would trust with his ship in this circumstance. Phlox is touched.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. The T’Pol we spend most of the episode with isn’t really T’Pol, and indeed she acts more and more like Phlox as the episode goes on…
Florida Man. Florida Man Has Trust Issues With Doctor Messing With His Engines.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox gets a crash course in running the Enterprise all by his lonesome, and manages to get the warp drive started all by himself, aided only by the voices in his head.
He also says, “I’m a physician, not an engineer” at one point, thus mirroring one of McCoy’s most famous “I’m a doctor, not a…” lines, from the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror.”
Good boy, Porthos! Until he starts hallucinating T’Pol, Porthos is Phlox’s only company on the ship, and it’s rather adorable watching them together, whether going on runs, talking about Porthos’ loyalty to Archer (at one point, Phlox does research and turns up a dog named Scruffers, who traveled three thousand kilometers to be reunited with his human), and with the pooch just generally being Phlox’s handy companion. Sadly, the dog is virtually abandoned once the fake T’Pol shows up…
I’ve got faith…
“I’m fine.”
“You nearly shot the captain’s dog.”
–Phlox protesting too much, and the image of T’Pol providing evidence to the contrary.
Welcome aboard. No guest stars in this one at all.
Trivial matters: Lucas was established as Phlox’s pen pal, and fellow physician in the Interspecies Medical Exchange, in “Dear Doctor.” We’ll finally see him in the “Borderland”/“Cold Station 12”/“The Augments” three-parter in season four.
The scene from The Court Jester that we see Phlox watching is, of course, the vessel-with-the-pestle scene, which is comedy gold from Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns, and Mildred Natwick.
The bit where Phlox thinks he sees something on the outside of the ship may be a reference to the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” one of William Shatner’s most famous non-Trek roles.
It’s been a long road… “Is this a starship or a haunted house?” On the one hand, we’ve seen this movie before, as it were, as this is the exact same plot as Voyager’s “One”: the ship coming across the Space Phenomenon Du Jour that requires that all the crew go into stasis except for the two most interesting characters in the cast, one of whom starts to suffer hallucinations. It was Seven and the EMH in “One,” and it’s Phlox and Porthos here.
(You thought I was gonna say T’Pol, weren’t you? Ha!)
The fact that T’Pol wasn’t real was pretty obvious, honestly, and it was even more so in 2004, as in the wake of The Sixth Sense in 1999, the trope of the person who isn’t really there had been done quite a bit, and because of that film, the audiences were primed to notice when someone never touched anything and only interacted with one person. In particular, three things give the game away with T’Pol almost immediately. One is that, in the flashback, Phlox never mentions how the anomaly will affect Vulcans, which seems an odd thing to leave out—but that’s necessary to keep the misdirect going. Another is that if T’Pol was going to be safe from harm, the issue of Phlox knowing how to do everything on the ship wouldn’t come up—T’Pol would be the one in charge and doing all the things and Phlox would just be there for backup and to make sure everyone stayed in their coma.
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And even if you miss all that, the real obvious part is when Phlox prepares a meal for them both and T’Pol never even touches it. We’ve met plenty of rude Vulcans on this show, but T’Pol is not one of them, and certainly would never act that way toward the ship’s physician.
Having said that, the episode is tremendous fun anyhow, because the focus is purely on Phlox and John Billingsley is, as always, a complete delight. As is Jolene Blalock, because once it becomes clear that T’Pol isn’t real—even if you ignore the three hints I mentioned, T’Pol’s complete inability to be of any physical or technical assistance makes it clear before long—it’s fun to watch as “T’Pol” acts more and more like, well, Phlox. Blalock very subtly modulates over the course of the episode, and by the time we get to the climax, she’s matching a lot of Billingsley’s tones and word choices. It’s a lovely performance.
This, by the way, is a much better example of how you do a “filler” episode in a season-long story arc. (As opposed to, say, a ridiculous diversion to The Western Planet.) They’re en route to Azati Prime, the urgent sub-mission that they’ve had since learning of the place in “Stratagem,” but they’re delayed by something that gives one of the show’s breakout stars a chance to flex his thespic muscles.
And there’s lots of Porthos. As it should be. He’s a very good dog…
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s next work of Star Trek fiction will be “The Kellidian Kidnapping,” a Voyager short story that will appear in Star Trek Explorer #8, to be released in August.
If you are going to do a one person episode, Billingsley is the perfect choice. Throw in a cute puppy and an enigmatic Vulcan (and when are Vulcans not enigmatic?), and you can’t go wrong.
Wow, I thought “Doctor’s Orders” was awful, a complete waste of an episode. Maybe it wouldn’t feel quite so dreadfully pointless if you hadn’t seen VGR: “One” already, but it’s still pretty terrible.
It’s mildly interesting that there’s a callback to a reference from “Exile” — Phlox told Hoshi that Denobulans consider hallucination a normal, healthy release of stress, but Phlox said he envied those with the ability, implying he didn’t experience it. I guess that accounts for why he didn’t recognize that he was hallucinating here, but still, it seems a bit incongruous that this is how they follow up on that. (I made it a plot point in Live By the Code, IIRC, that Phlox’s daughter had trouble hallucinating when she was upset about the actions of her bigoted brother Mettus, and when Phlox helped her resolve her issues, they were relieved that she was able to hallucinate normally again.)
“Two people aren’t even enough for a Denobulan marriage.”
This episode shares it’s title with a TOS novel in which Doctor McCoy was left in command of the Enterprise. And as pointed out, it shares its plot with Voyager’s ‘One’, which also involved most of the crew being put to sleep to get through an anomaly harmful to them, the non-human medical officer being left in charge with the catsuited female for company and one of them starting to hallucinate. It’s hard to tell whether the surprise twist is really that obvious or if we’ve just seen too much Star Trek: All the usual tells are there, like Phlox being in every scene with no cutaways to T’Pol on her own, plus T’Pol noticeably not eating during their shared meal and being a bit useless: She doesn’t tell him anything he doesn’t know, yet also knows things the real T’Pol shouldn’t.
As a result, aside from the show repeating the last act of ‘One’ with the hallucinating character having to pilot the ship out of the anomaly when it takes longer than expected, there’s no real danger here so it’s mainly purpose is to…give John Billingsley a focus episode? Well, there are worse reasons to make an episode, with Phlox being one of the more engaging and interesting characters. It’s almost a shame that Hallucinatory T’Pol gets added to give him someone to talk to, since the opening scenes of Phlox playing off Porthos are actually really fun and the poor dog gets neglected a bit in the second half.
Mayweather has no audible dialogue (we see him briefing Phlox on the helm but Phlox has a voiceover playing over the scene), while Sato only appears unconscious or as a hallucination. Perhaps as a trade-off to Jolene Blalock’s nude scene last week, we get to see John Billingsley naked with only a few sickbay props to cover his modesty. Hallucinatory T’Pol twice refers to (over) 80 humans on board, reinforcing the suggestion that the crew complement has stayed much the same despite the MACOs joining. She also mentions Phlox telling Sato that Denobulans consider hallucinating healthy, which happened in ‘Exile’.
Phlox is shown relaxing on a bunk at one point: It’s previously been established that he needs very little sleep and tends to spend his nights in sickbay, although he was shown to have quarters in ‘Two Days and Two Nights’. He refers to his “fifth grandmother”: Presumably both his grandfathers would have three wives but I don’t have any idea how you’d decide which is the fifth. (And presumably his grandmothers would have three husbands and if I go any further down that rabbit hole I’ll get a headache…)
@2. ChristopherLBennett: Clearly you are either a green-blooded hobgoblin or a Cat Person.
– WAGS FINGER –
On a much more serious note, this episode has one of the best-executed Jump Scares in the series (if not the franchise) to date, with the show’s record of adolescent glee when it comes to ‘decontamination’ leaving us just credulous enough to be caught napping when it comes to an apparently-unmotivated shower scene (I may or may not have issued a LOONEY TUNES scream when the show skipped straight from coy flirtation to Gribbly Make-Up).
All in all, I think we can safely call this one of the most Classic Sci-Fi stories ENTERPRISE ever made, complete with that twist-in-the-tale ending: kudos to Roxann Dawson, cast and crew for making it a Very Good version of the old Starship-as-Haunted-House/Alone in the Dark plot (and reminding us that reusing an old script is perfectly justifiable when the new version uses that familiarity to highlight and/or play with the differences between the characters & settings involved).
Also, more Porthos is never a bad thing: I’m especially amused when Doctor Phlox somehow manages to be shocked by the quintessentially canine willingness to have what everyone else is having, whether they actually should or not.
@3/cap-mjb: Thanks for mentioning Diane Duane’s Doctor’s Orders. It’s a much better story than this was. It reuses a number of concepts from Duane’s early Trek computer game The Kobayashi Alternative.
“Presumably both his grandfathers would have three wives but I don’t have any idea how you’d decide which is the fifth.”
I figure it’s either by chronological order of marriage, or by distance from the speaker in the family tree.
“(And presumably his grandmothers would have three husbands and if I go any further down that rabbit hole I’ll get a headache…)”
I had to go down that rabbit hole to develop Denobulan culture for Live by the Code. To quote from my annotations:
It was necessary to limit it all to “second-tier” relationships at the furthest (spouse’s spouse or spouse’s other children) to keep the math under control. After all, each of Phlox’s wives’ six additional husbands would have two other wives, each with two other husbands, and so on. (Assuming that each individual shares only one spouse with each other same-sex individual, which always seemed to be the implication.) In theory, you’ve got an unlimited daisy chain of marital connections. Limiting it to two degrees made sense, since presumably each wife would spend a fair amount of time with all three husbands, so Phlox might see his wives’ husbands relatively frequently and thus see them as members of the immediate family. But you’d be less likely to see those second-tier wives or third-tier husbands or more distant spouses, except at big gatherings.
This is a pretty good episode when viewed on its own, but in context, it just contributed to the impression that I had had throughout Enterprise that Star Trek was basically out of ideas. Even the best episodes were just remakes of better ones from other series.
@3. cap-mjb: I suppose that the most straightforward approach to numbering grandmothers would be by seniority and proximity (Phlox would logically number his biological grandmother(s) as ‘first’ and ‘second’* so it seems logical to number the remaining grandmothers by their date of marriage to his grandfathers.
The really interesting question is how Denobulans reckon things when a relationship is purely adoptive: I’d assume simple seniority (from eldest to youngest) applies.
Here’s a question: do the other spouses of ‘Second Fathers’ and ‘Fifth Grandmothers’ count as family, period, or as in-laws by Denobulan reckoning? (The more I think about Denobulan family, the more convinced I grow that genealogists must have had immense importance and influence in Denobulan society prior to the invention of genetic testing: the avoidance of inbreeding must have been quite a problem when relationships are so extensive and intricate).
*I’m assuming that the Maternal line traditionally takes precedence, since it’s always much easier to keep track of the mother when it comes to mammals, regardless of available technology – so “First grandmother” would be Phlox’s maternal grandmother, biologically-speaking, with “Second grandmother” his paternal grandmother.
About a quarter through the episode I did remember watching it, a decade or two ago, so no big reveal for me this time. That changed the experience this time around.
Did you notice the contrast betweeen the nude scenes in this episode and the last one? T’Pol was clearly intended as fanservice, Phlox as comedy. A difference in the way society sees women and men, or a difference in the function of the two characters in the cast? Or the difference that Phlox was alone on the ship? I guess they would have tried to make a lone T’Pol sexy, too.
And I noticed an offhand remark that implies full impulse is faster than light. Something strange in the Expanse, or I can’t do the math, or they can’t do the math?
Christopher & jaimebabb: I understand where you’re both coming from with the complaint about how the story idea isn’t new, but I find myself not caring about that. I mean, Shakespeare hardly ever had an original idea in his life. Not that Enterprise is Shakespeare, but the execution of the idea is significantly more important than the idea itself, and I think this version of the idea is executed well, mainly due to the general wonderfulness of John Billingsley.
I mean, look at the idea of a space opera where a unique ship with a small crew that includes a charming white dude in command, with a second in command who is more serious and probably the most talented person on the ship, and they have adventures. Am I describing Blakes 7, Andromeda, Lost in Space, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Farscape, or Guardians of the Galaxy?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
o.m.: Oh, it’s totally sexism. And ageism and body-type-ism. A middle-aged chubby guy naked is funny. A young svelte woman naked is hawt.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh, and in a bit of trivia that I thought was too trivial even for the Trivial Matters section: this is the second episode in a row that shares a title with a Star Trek novel that’s written by a friend of mine. Last week was “Harbinger,” also the title of the first Star Trek: Vanguard novel, written by David Mack, and the above-mentioned Doctor’s Orders by Diane Duane.
That last, by the by, is a classic case of why the execution is more important than the idea, because the idea of Diane’s novel is self-indulgent nonsense, and can only be justified by some ridiculous hand-waving of bizarre Starfleet regulations that make no sense. But it doesn’t matter, because it gives Diane — who is one of the three or four best writers of Bones — a chance to write McCoy in charge of the Enterprise.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It felt to me watching this episode like they had run out of money, so they had to crank out an episode as cheaply and quickly as possible, which meant no new sets, no big effects, no guest stars, and recycling a Voyager script. That said, the results are enjoyable enough to watch, though the first time I watched it I was mostly just frustrated that they were spending yet another story not moving the season’s plot along at all. It really is only with subsequent watches that I’ve been able to enjoy myself.
@5. ChristopherLBennett: Well Mr Bennett, at least you now have an inflatable way to keep your head warm in cold weather – trying to keep Denobulan family trees from going Full Kudzu as you plot them out!
On a more serious note, apologies for having missed your own post while typing my own rather-redundant one: it’s interesting to note that we seem to have started from the same basic premise (and it’s defiantly interesting to try working out how same-sex spouses handled enumeration when they adopt: one gets the rather charming mental image of a ceremony where the names of all those spouses involved are put into a sort of piñata which the child then smashes – seniority being assigned by the order in which the child picks up the names from where they’ve fallen*).
*Doubtless there are other party games that could be deployed for the purpose – with an emphasis on the child choosing the number by random chance).
Heck, there are probably as many traditions for enumerating the parentage as there are Denobulan cultures and subcultures!
I realized watching this episode years ago that it was basically a remake of Voyager’s “One” which is also a pretty good episode and didn’t really need to be remade. But this is also the kind of episode that could be made cheaply and also still be entertaining which this one is. It’s fun watching Phlox slowly go crazy and I think I may actually not have been playing that close attention so that I didn’t initially realize that the T’Pol that Phlox was talking to was only hallucinatory. And I love Blalock’s performance later in the story where she’s basically freaking out as Phlox is too. There was a specific moment where she can’t figure out how to operate the ship’s engines and just passes that duty onto Phlox that was so hilarious! The moments of Phlox walking around sickbay naked with parts of the set obscuring his naughty bits was also funny to me because I thought of it as an allusion to similar scenes in Austin Powers. Anyway, this is an inconsequential but fun little diversion from the main season 3 story arc.
@13. The method of keeping Mr Bennett’s brain warm via the complexities of Denobulan family trees may be infallible, but clearly spellcheck could use some retraining …
I found it ironically amusing that Mayweather was instructing Phlox on the use of the helm. With the way Mayweather is often shoehorned out of episodes, it’s like he’s actively directing his own removal from this episode’s plot!
@11/krad: I agree entirely: I was utterly bemused by the claim that a captain can leave anyone he wants in charge and they’re then in charge indefinitely until the captain says otherwise…but the novel is so goddamn fun that I just went with it and enjoyed the craziness.
As someone without Paramount, I love when the rewatch schedule lines up with the Heroes and Icons channel schedule.
Not the strongest Phlox episode, but it still mostly works as a one-off episodic outing to fill the long journey to Azati Prime. I’ll take this over Picard season 2’s (or Discovery‘s S2) messy serialized plotting any day. It’s hard to go wrong when you follow the blueprint of one of Voyager’s better episodes – and the hallucination angle also had me reminded of TNG’s “Frame of Mind” more than once. Season 2’s “A Night in Sickbay” is a reminder that Phlox’s Denobulan eccentricities can easily rub viewers the wrong way. This one manages to balance the icky with the fun mostly well.
It’s hard to go wrong when you put the strongest performers together under a “tense” situation – even more so with Dawson behind the camera. Even if it’s a simple straightforward hallucination story with a predictable twist, it has enough meat in it to keep it interesting. Well paced episode.
Regarding the Sixth Sense twist, I wonder how long it will be before that kind of twist becomes fresh again. It’s not just Trek (though it doesn’t help that Enterprise tried it less than five years after the film came out) that’s saddled with this problem. Any show or film that tries anything similar gets unfairly compared to that one-time genuine moment of storytelling surprise. I’m hopeful in another 20 years or so we can get a similar story without being compared to Shyamalan’s work. I know the twist was effective back in ’99 (I should know – I saw it on opening day), but I also question as to why it gained so much popular traction. It set expectations so high, even Shyamalan himself couldn’t top them in his own filmography (though there have been a couple of decent post-Sixth Sense movies hidden amongst his multiple duds).
@9 KRAD — I know that this isn’t the point of the discussion, but you and I disagree on whether Jet, the captain of the Bebop in Cowboy Bebop, could be described as “a charming white dude” or as being less serious than Spike… ;)
–Andy
AndyHolman: Fair point, I was stretching a lot there, but the wider point holds…. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@20/Andy: From what I can tell, none of the characters in Cowboy Bebop‘s main cast have clearly defined ethnicities. Spike is often assumed to be white, but there are a couple of references to him being Japanese or East Asian. There seems to be a lot of debate over what Jet’s ethnicity is. Faye claimed to be Romani, but was also suggested to be from Singapore. And Edward’s name is a mix of nationalities, so there’s no telling with her. It makes sense that the members of an offworld human diaspora in the future would come largely from mixed or ambiguous backgrounds (although both Faye and Ed are Earth natives).
@9/krad: While we’re at it, why are you counting Lost in Space on your list? If you mean the original series, I wouldn’t say Don West is the most talented person on the ship, except when it comes to military matters. And if you mean the Netflix series, Maureen Robinson is the commander there, and she’s easily the most talented member.
@22 CLB: Sure, I’d happily agree to saying that none of the characters in CB is anything other than ethnically ambiguous. And, if anyone wanted to make a declarative statement about a character’s race, that’s cool for them. I just wanted to pedantically say that, if someone’s feeling were that Jet is completely white, it wouldn’t fit with my view. (Which, since I’m putting it on the internet, must be the most important view of all ;) )
@21 KRAD: I cede your point, good sir. :)
krad, I don’t know why you think it’s revealing that T’Pol never touches anything. If Phlox is hallucinating her in the first place, he could further hallucinate her holding a phaser or eating his food.
Eh, this episode would have been much better if it didn’t copy Voyager that much. The doctor and Porthos alone without any hallucinations could have been pretty entertaining and easily fill a full episode even without any big danger or anything. It would have been more than enough to be forced to switch to warp speed in itself.