1x13 Dear Doctor

Worth watching
Themes: Phlox development, first contact, moral dilemma

Enterprise encounters pre-warp space ship with one very sick crewman onboard. He isn't really all that surprised to see he is saved by aliens. In fact, his first question is if that is warp capable ship. Turns out two other warp capable species already visited their world, one of them Ferenghi which even vulcans haven't met yet.
Their people, Valakians, are dying by millions and sending spacecrafts aimlessly to space is a desperate attempt to find some advanced species that could help them. They live harmoniously alongside other humanoid species, Menk, who they consider primitive but good workers.

Meanwhile we get to know dr. Phlox, and his views on humans through series of letters addressed to his human colleague that works on denobulan home world. Crewman Cutler makes a return after Strange New World episode. She seems to have little bit of a crush on our doctor, something that he finds a bit confusing. She assists him in finding a cure. Turns out this disease is genetic and will wipe out Valakians completely in the future. Archer again pretty rashly demands Phlox to create a cure without thinking about implications such a cure could have.

I would sincerely hope Starfleet captain would have more of a pause before making that kind of decision that will forever change the fate of two humanoid species, and though Archers heart is in the right place he shows time and again that he just isn't wise enough to be in that position. I'm hoping it's just his arc throughout this series, and by the end he will become model of what a starfleet captain should be. He even hints at development Prime Directive, but this moral dilemma really isn't that and whole argument of not having reference is not a valid excuse. It's clearly wrong to meddle in evolutionary process, and Phloxes parallels with sapiens and neanderthal are spot on. To make things even worse, Archer makes a remark along the lines of: "who cares what happens in a 1000 years, this is now". As it is, only Phloxes wisdom saved Menk from being doomed to being lesser species of the planet.

Aside from Archer being a total dumbass, this is one of the better episodes of this season so far. While previous episode showed how unprepared humans are for dealing with dangers of space, this episode ties in that theme by showing how unprepared they are for dealing with decisions that could change the course of galactic history.

Fun facts about denobulans: they hibernate for a week every year but don't require much sleep, it's usual to have multiple spouses.

[9.7/10] What drew me to Star Trek as a kid was its sense of perspective. Deep down and across series, the show is, even at its darkest, about a sort of utopic and distinctly American view of the future, where everyone is still speaking English and the Great Western Canon is still referenced by people centuries in the future, and our heroes, even plastered with forehead prosthetics and extrapolated to hundreds of years from now, are recognizable enough to be relatable.

And yet, every Star Trek series has had at least one character who represents the sense of being an outsider to humanity, from Spock on The Original Series to Saru in Discovery. They might be an alien, or a shape-shifter, or some kind of artificial life, but they represent an important internal check on that implicit hegemony of experience. Yes, most Trek series feature a weekly encounter with the strange and the unknown, but when you have characters who are a regular part of the series commenting on, and thus explicating what it is to be human, the commentary is stronger because the call is coming from inside the house.

That’s why episodes like “Dear Doctor” are so enjoyable, engrossing, and to use a well-worn Star Trek term, fascinating. By putting the audience in the head of an alien like Dr. Phlox (or in the positronic brain of an android in spiritual cousin episodes like “Data’s Day” from The Next Generation), it not only gives the viewer the chance to understand a character who’s a little less familiar in more depth, but also to reexamine the other characters, the way of life projected onto the screen and, if done well enough, ourselves, through that lens. There’s even the sense of a throwback to the letter-writing episodes of MASH, where the conceit of correspondence home and voiceover let us see the workings of a military medical unit in a different light and internalize some tough moral calls.

That’s a perfect analog for what goes on with Dr. Phlox in “Dear Doctor.” In writing a pen pal-esque letter to his fellow exchange student (a human doctor practicing on Danobula), Dr. Phlox details his observations about humans’ ability to feel compassion for anything and everything, to have strong opinions about the right and wrong about other cultures, about a budding personal relationship with crewman Cutler, and about the ethical challenges he faces trying to find a cure for the genetic condition affecting an entire species of humanoids on a nearby planet.

It’s the latter point that provides the meat of the episode, but it’s the smaller moments that really make this one tick for me. As I said in my last couple of write-ups, I like just getting some of the texture of Enterprise. Seeing Dr. Phlox trading bites of slug with one of his pets, or teaching his native tongue to Hoshi, or hearing T’Pol’s sentiment that immature humans tend to find interspecies relationships to be a novelty doesn’t advance the plot much. But they’re little human moments (if you’ll pardon the expression), that let us understand Dr. Phlox, and the slice of this world he occupies, better than we would without them.

The biggest of these little moments in the amiable concordance that Phlox has with Cutler, whom we met for the first time in the “hallucinogenic cave” episode. Here, she’s kinda sorta courting a puzzled but intrigued Dr. Phlox, taking him to movies and kissing him on the cheek and trying to make plans. The combination between Phlox’s personal interest and his professional curiosity makes this plot a winner. Phlox’s scenes with Hoshi and T’Pol where he’s figuring out how he wants to proceed are revealing, and I love the contrast between his worries and where he lands.

In a private moment on the planet, he tells Cutler that he has three wives already, who each have two additional husbands. In not so subtle terms, he’s taken T’Pol’s warning to heart, warning Cutler of what she’d be getting into. But when she’s undeterred (or at least willing to take a “let’s see where this goes” approach, Phlox seems quietly pleased. And when he has to deal with a difficult moral decision that he thinks is right, but which tears him up inside, he finds that he’s glad to have a friend, someone who can provide a bit of that vaunted human compassion, when he needs to. It’s not a groundbreaking story, but a sweet and sincere one with hidden depth.

That moral dilemma comes from the local planet, which has two species: the Valakians, a technologically-advanced but pre-warp people who are dying from a genetic disease that will wipe them out within two centuries, and the Menk, a more primitive people who are immune to the disease and developing increased intelligence and capability. The two seem to live in harmony, but it eventually becomes clear that any choice the Enterprise crew makes, whether it’s curing the disease or providing pre-warp technology or simply leaving things as they are will mean a substantial disruption to the current status quo, to say the least.

It provides the most interesting moral thought experiment that Enterprise has posed thus far, and may be the most I’ve ever liked Archer. For once, he makes the tough call here, the one that makes him feel uneasy and which he tortures himself over, but which he thinks is right, rather than just going with his gut. His little speech at the end of the episode lays things on way too thick, but it quickly becomes apparent that this episode is about the origins of the Prime Directive (or “General Order 1” if you’re old school), and why Starfleet doesn’t mess around with pre-warp societies.

It’s easy to wonder why the Prime Directive exists when, in almost every episode where it’s brought up in Star Trek, there’s some sort of moral crisis where the captain decides to throw caution to the wind and do what he or she feels is ethically correct, regardless of whatever the blasted regulations say, damnit! It’s not a far leap to chalk it up to a standard “You don’t play by the rules”/“But I get results, damnit!’ routine, that can get kind of rote.

But here, you start to understand why Starfleet has what Gene Roddenberry himself once referred to as “the anthropologist's code” of non-interference. It’s not just about picking sides or “playing god” as Archer bluntly puts it. It’s about the law of unintended consequences, about how evolution and the development of species and the inner workings of another culture are so complex that just plopping down and monkeying around in it could be naive at best and disastrous at work.

I like how these considerations widen Archer’s perspective a little. T’Pol reminds him to be concerned about Starfleet’s advanced equipment getting nicked by the locals. When Archer breaks the news to the Valakians that a cure isn’t possible, they ask to be given warp technology, and he wrestles with the idea of whether they’re ready for what’s out there, whether they’d destroy themselves anyway trying to replicate it. He worries about whether trying to help these people won’t just be a brief errand of mercy, but rather a century-length comittment.

That latter possibility something that T’Pol pithily reminds Archer of, as he starts to understand not only the thought process of the Vulcans he so resented, but also the kindness and sacrifice they’ve shown by sticking with humanity for this long. In the end, Archer makes a very tough, very Vulcan decision, and it feels like we learn more about him too, and about where Starfleet is at in this nascent stage, through it.

But that decision goes through Phlox. It’s he who has to navigate the waves of those endless reveals and unintended consequences. A simple distress signal on a small spaceship turns into him trying to help cure 50 million people. The discovery that a cure would be difficult, if not impossible, turns into a question of whether it’s right to give this terminally ill people warp technology and introduce them to the possibilities but also the perils of being a full citizen of the galaxy. And an investigation into whether a cure could be achieved through the Valakians’ immune neighbors, with whom they live in harmony but who are treated as low-skilled workers and shuffled off to reservations, reveals that the Mank may be on the evolutionary cusp of overtaking their (benevolent) Valakian overlords.

So Phlox, and eventually Archer, has to make a choice, particularly when Phlox does, in fact, come up with a cure. Do you cure the Valakian at the risk that they’ll continue to blunt the growth of the Mank? Do you choose not to tell the Valakian about the cure so that they happy-if-subjugated Mank can continue to grow and develop? Or, if you’re, Phlox, do you even decide not to share your findings with your captain for fear that, as a human, his blinding compassion won’t let him do anything but interfere.

After a very fair late night debate between the two, with cogent arguments on both sides, Phlox convinces the captain to “let nature take its course,” and not interfere with the Valakians or the Mank one way or another (short of offering them a palliative, rather than a cure). Philosophically, I believe that too is a choice (essentially favoring the Mank in this species-sized trolly problem), but one that makes sense when you consider how quickly Archer’s and Phlox’s and everyone’s perspective on the problem was forced to get wider and wider the more they learned about the situation. It’s easy to see those telescoping issues and decide, “we are not equipped for this.”

That’s the hard thing about broadening one’s horizons -- it can force you to acknowledge how narrow your view of things was in the first place. Using Phlox as our lens helps the viewer to reflect on how much our view of humanity, how much our view of what’s right, is socialized into us by the perspective we grown up with and the community we’re raised in. We see him, and Archer, discover how many other views of looking at things are out there, and they, like us, are changed by it. That’s what Star Trek at its best, and indeed all art its best, can achieve.