the story: The crew faces a difficult moral dilemma when they encounter two competing species on an alien world with a medical crisis pitting their futures against each other.
what it's all about: "Dear Doctor" is the first season episode generally agreed by fans to be the first great episode of the series. It's another foundation episode, in that it's technically about setting up one of the basic elements later taken for granted in the franchise, the Prime Directive, and yet for the first time it feels not only completely natural, but incredibly compelling.
A lot of that is down to Phlox. As one of two aliens in the crew, and out of the two the one from a race created for Enterprise, so with infinitely more to account for, Phlox had a lot to prove. If Denobulans themselves never quite seemed to become significant (they're depicted from the start as ready allies of humans, so there isn't even an arc for that), Phlox quickly earned his place as one of the cornerstones of the series. Enterprise had been from the start posited as Star Trek essentially explaining itself, so that even less could be taken for granted than its predecessor, Voyager, whose crew may have been cut off from home but at least knew what Starfleet's mission was, even 70,000 lightyears away. This meant that every decision was a hard one. None were ever as difficult, maybe, as this one.
Phlox unexpectedly becomes the voice of pragmatism. In the pilot, he famously beams at Archer while declaring optimism to be the order of the day, and yet in "Dear Doctor," he faces a different path entirely. The Prime Directive is a tricky concept. Practically, it represents another relic of the Cold War, the growing reluctance on the part of war-weary Americans to interfere in developing countries. It might also be seen as a metaphor about UFO culture, that ever-present doubt as to whether or not we've been visited by aliens. Certainly with no definitive proof, we have to assume either that aliens don't exist, or they haven't yet made their presence known. Why? Because we aren't ready. That's what Vulcans announced, right from the start, even as explained in Star Trek: First Contact, and then all the more emphatically in Enterprise. But what does that look like when applied to someone else? Kirk never seemed to mind bending the rules, and yet the rules existed. This is why.
It's told in epistolary format, like two standout Deep Space Nine episodes before it, "Whispers" and "In the Pale Moonlight," as well as Next Generation's "Data's Day." One almost wonders why it isn't done more often, if the results tend to turn out so well. Phlox is composing a letter to a friend, his human counterpart in the interspecies medical exchange program, whom we actually get to meet in the fourth season ("Cold Station 12"), and the dominance of Phlox's presence in the episode reiterates not only his importance to its story but in the series as a whole. He becomes, halfway through the season, one of Enterprise's defining assets.
What makes the proceedings all the more remarkable is that the series produces a kind of answer to it in the third season, "Similitude," and that one's a classic, too.
criteria analysis:
- franchise - A study of the concept of the Prime Directive.
- series - One of the key moments of learning how some of the classic Star Trek elements came about.
- character - Phlox steps into the spotlight.
- essential - Actually, he downright commands it.
Kellie Waymire (Cutler)
Dear Doctor is extremely divisive and not at all "generally agreed" to be a great episode. It is not even a good episode. Frankly, it is one of the worst episodes in the whole of Star Trek. It uses a basic misunderstanding of evolution and absurd philosophical nonsense (that species have some kind of pre-ordained biological destiny, which is somehow of greater importance than the lives of people living in the present) to justify what amounts to genocide by negligence.
ReplyDeleteThis episode tries to justify the prime directive (which is, in itself, an altogether dubious concept) to the exclusion of making any kind of sense, and leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Unless you're an unthinking clod who merely accepts the conclusions this episode tries to force on the viewer, the moral stench of this episode lingers about ENT and makes it difficult to appreciate the series or characters thereafter.