Episode 68: Doctor's Orders

Chris Blacks' "Doctor's Orders" offers a fairly fun but ridiculous story that centres entirely around Dr. Phlox.


When Enterprise encounters a trans-dimensional disturbance that would require an additional 14 days of travel to go around, Archer agrees to undertake a risky plan to permit the ship to travel through the disturbance instead.


Why is the plan risky? Because Dr. Phlox's study of the disturbance tells them that humans who are exposed to the interior of the disturbance for longer than a few minutes will suffer significant, irreparable damage to their neo-cortex and may die. So, in order to permit Enterprise to traverse the disturbance in an hour at Warp 4, Phlox must put the entire crew (with some non-human exceptions)
 into induced comas to protect their neo-cortexes.


Wait, says Tucker, I don't feel that it's safe to engage our warp engines inside the disturbance so we better just shut down the warp core and proceed through the expanse on impulse power. Instead of a one-hour trip, it will be a four day trip (and I checked, these calculations are fairly accurate) but that's still better than two full weeks.


Tucker's fears are based, apparently, on absolutely no research or data but are just a hunch. Archer trusts Tucker's hunches so four-days it is.


Of course, at this point I'm yelling at the screen: "Wait a minute! In "Similitude", when Enterprise was trapped without warp engines in that weird place where magnetic crud was attaching itself to the ship, no one said anything about impulse engines! The crew had to resort to some impressive shuttle-pod rescue. Why are the impulse engines suddenly an option again?"


Sorry. I just had to say it.


So, Archer decides to risk going through the disturbance to save time, relies on scientific data to make the decision to put the entire crew into a coma for the trip, but then decides to sacrifice almost four full days by not risking the use of the warp engines for the trip, based on no data whatsoever.


And why doesn't he consider the risk of putting Enterprise at such significant risk of attack for FOUR FULL DAYS with no crew? Isn't that just a little too much of a risk, considering the importance of their mission?


Think about it, Archer chooses to put Enterprise, Earth's only hope, into a situation for four entire days where almost the entire crew has to be in coma, there is no possibility of taking them out of coma during that period and they are still in enemy space. Sure, humans can't survive in the disturbance but, if a Dinobulan like Phlox can survive, one would think that a variety of other non-human species (such as Xindi reptilians, aquatics, insectizoids or arboreals, to name a few) should face no danger in the disturbance and could choose to attack Enterprise while it is at its most vulnerable.


The episode is fun -- it gives our new doctor the chance to deliver one of Dr. McCoy's favourite lines ("I'm a doctor, not an engineer") and, seeing Phlox chatting away with Porthos, wandering the ship at his leisure, watching a movie on his own, is a quite enjoyable experience -- but it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Its set-up contravenes most of the conventions about this mission into the Delphic Expanse that we've come to know.


Of interest to me is the fact that, on this one occasion at least, Enterprise's generally poor quality of script writing actually benefits them in this episode. After watching Phlox go through training on driving the ship and maintaining the engines, my first reaction to the appearance of T'Pol while the rest of the crew are in coma was: "Hey, why would they train Phlox on all that ship's operation stuff if T'Pol, who is completely capable, is still awake?"


That occurred to me, sure, but I wrote it off at first on the basis that the writing is so poor that they probably just missed that point. I didn't immediately jump to the recognition that T'Pol is also one of Phlox's hallucinations. Her behavior as the show progresses, however, was so ridiculous (and, frankly, insultingly stereotypical) that I wasn't fooled for long.