Dear Doctor

DVD, Enterprise S1 (Dear Doctor)

Cosy. That's a suitable word that sums up the style of this episode, if not the content. There are nice little scenes set at night with campfires burning, or in empty rooms in the early hours. I love that kind of thing! The music by David Bell is superb, evoking the kind of scores that worked so well on Voyager, with a kind of knowing, but comforting sound.

Giving Phlox the limelight is another plus, with the voiceover style a rare event on Trek, giving the episode a distinct feel of its own. Another plus is the continuity stuff with reference to the Ferengi (you shudder to think what they did on the planet - probably sold them some defective medicine), Jeremy Lucas (who I believe we later meet in Season Four, though played by a different actor), and of course Crewman Cutler, the likeable recurring character from 'Strange New World'. Sadly this is her final appearance I believe, as she died in the following years. They set up the friendship between her and Phlox (another in a long line of things they never paid off!), and she was generally charming (and I'd have loved for her to recur more often), but I didn't feel it was appropriate for her to pursue the Doctor, even when she knew he was married. It made her look cheap. I would have been in favour of a nice ongoing friendship between them though.

Phlox gets to have some good 'connecting' moments with several people, particularly Hoshi who he is in the process of teaching his language to. T'Pol and he share a conversation, and the Captain has words (not the first time a commanding officer has disagreed with a doc!). The crux of the matter is a typical Prime Directive story, with Archer even namechecking this as something that will no doubt be formulated one day, but I didn't feel the story went quite deep enough to make a solid go of it.

I never like the way Trek characters assume evolution is scientific fact (it's actally theory, unproved), but that isn't my main problem. The story wants to be both a 'Phlox's Day' episode, and an examination of the kind of problems later crews faced in the philosophical department. It doesn't go one way or the other quite enough, and with only 42 minutes neither is satisfactorily explored. The Phlox side of it gets better treatment, but at the expense of getting to know these (frankly dull) couple of races. At the end they decide not to give them the tech or knowledge to ensure survival and the alien doc just calmly accepts their decision.

The alien characters aren't built into people, they are merely there, so that when the damning decision not to help them as much as they could is reached we don't care as much as we should. I have to say I like it when a character is focused on, and on this series it tended to be less often than the others, but it does feel a disjointed affair and so not the kind of satisfying, feelgood whole that it should be.

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