“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.
