Dear Doctor: Seriously? I thought it was a great episode and then they continue that senseless harping on the prime directive in a situation that doesn't make sense. Its a disease, genetic or not Phlox is a Doctor. It continues to propagate that naive attitude of how the Prime Directive should be applied. That it should be an excuse not to help rather than a way of protecting a culture.
Also the Prime Directive doesn't exist yet. If you get passed the flawed science behind the premise, the episode "Dear Doctor" was actually decent. I walked away from this trying to figure out what I would have done if I was the captain and didn't have some prime directive handed to me to fall back on. For all the options Archer was given, all of them invariably meant one of these two races were going to suffer.
I always found "Dear Doctor" an enjoyable episode, although the ending is rather questionable. There is the question of whether or not Archer and Phlox committed genocide by withholding the cure to the Valakians "to allow the Menk to grow" - which is a whole other subject in and of itself. Phlox justifies his request to Archer by asking "what if a sufficiently advanced race gave the Neanderthals an advantage over Homo sapiens?" - although, despite Phlox's conclusions otherwise, no one ever asks whether the Menks are that world's equivilent of Neanderthals.
Another problem I have with the episode's conclusion is that it represents a missed opportunity, (one of many the series, really). We get a hint of it when Archer and T'Pol discuss the Valakians' request for the Enterprise crew to share warp technology with them. Archer points out that the Valakians "have no experience" with the technology, and he fears that humanity would have to stay behind to "guide" them - something, T'Pol points out, Vulcan has been doing on Earth since Cochrane's flight. A problematic situation, espeically since Enterprise is really the only Earth ship that can reach the Valakian homeworld in any decent amount of time. The same could have been done with the Valakians' disease - while Phlox could have found the cause, what the writers should have done was, instead of magically have him develop the cure, have him tell Archer that (a little more realistically), that developing a cure would take more work than he can accomplish with the equipment aboard, and even with a team of medical experts, it would still take years, possibly decades, to develop a cure - if there was one to be had. The discussion of the Menk's potential to grow would then have been discussed, with the suggestion that the Valakians work to have the Menk fend for themselves, just in case.
There are three primary reasons why ENT is a bad TV Show.
The first is it violates the canon for the past 30 years. This isn't a bad thing by itself, but when you factor in the massive library of Trek Lore that people have been regurgitating over the past 40 years it does not help it's cause.
The second is the last episode. This is more of a TV issue than a Trek issue. When you go down the road of "it was only a dream" you upset a lot of viewers. Yes it was just one episode, but to treat any TV show that way is just disrespecting your audience.
The third reason is the big reason. ENT has a lousy Captain. Bakula was great in Quantum Leap but as a StarFleet Captain he is just a bad choice. If a person is going to play a Captain on Trek he/she needs three things as a actor. The first is stage presence. Bakula lacks this as an actor, none of his other TV roles have ever had much presence. Patrick Stewart commands the stage/screen. You can see it in every nuance, he is classically trained and it shows big time. Shatner commands the stage because his personality shines through every line, he is not 1/10th the actor Stewart is but he can hold his own against him on screen. Avery Brooks had an imposing demeanor just by his stature, which was evident on DS9 as well as Spenser for Hire. The third thing is the voice. A captain has to have "that" voice. Picard and Kirk are the perfect examples, Brooks as well. Bakula had none of this as Archer and it hurt the series, he was always wishy washy and down trodden in his decision making and while you can say it was the character because he was basically the first Trek Captain, he basically is the same type in every role.
If the ending of the first Highlander was any indication, there wasn't SUPPOSED to be a Highlander 2 - or a Highlander 3, or a Highlander: Endgame, or a Highlander TV series...but Highlander 2 was just a stinker from the standpoint that it implies the Immortals were actually aliens.
I love Enterprise, and I think Scott Bakula did a great job as the captain! But maybe I'm biased, it is afterall the show I watched every week with my father. Apart from the movies and the occasionnal TNG rerun, I only got to watch the other series recently (just finished DS9 and Voyager).
Something a lot of people don't remember : the first seasons of Voyager AND DS9 had some of the most awful episodes I've ever seen. They both get a lot better after, but even the worst episode of Enterprise cannot compare in mediocrity with them. Don't take it wrong, I love both series , but I think the overall quality of ENT was actually better.
Spock mentions that the Earth-Romulan war was fought with "primitive nuclear weapons" in the opener of "Balance of Terror" and later Scotty says the Romulan ship is "powered by pure impulse." Most fans considered this to mean the Romulans didn't have warp drive until their later dealings with the Klingons (whatever that was). That assumption, when you stop to think about it, is pretty silly when you figure that 1) The Romulans were an interstellar power by at least the 22nd century and 2) They fought a fairly extensive interstellar war with Earth.
i think you forget that watching TOS even once i seem to remember that there was no UFP until later into season 1 and start of season 2, spock smiling at the beginning, the vulcanians?, warp 10 being exceeded easily by the enterprise.... and so on.
it is true that romulans at that time and earlier were using impulse ships to travel, in exchange to use their massive plasma weapon, other variants of the bird of prey may not of had this weapon and can travel at warp as it was never touched on in canon, stuff like this is where the problem begins.
i think you forget that watching TOS even once i seem to remember that there was no UFP until later into season 1 and start of season 2, spock smiling at the beginning, the vulcanians?, warp 10 being exceeded easily by the enterprise.... and so on.
True, there is very little continuity in TOS, due to the fact that not all of the details were ironed out yet (and has cause quite a bit of trouble for future series). Which is in part why I mentioned that that particular war was between Romulus and Earth, not Romulus and the Federation.
it is true that romulans at that time and earlier were using impulse ships to travel, in exchange to use their massive plasma weapon, other variants of the bird of prey may not of had this weapon and can travel at warp as it was never touched on in canon, stuff like this is where the problem begins.
Absoultely true. There's been a lot of fan speculation regarding that particular ship (one particular good one is that the BoP was "dropped off" by a mothership of some sort, or at least towed close enough to a point to perform its mission). Especially since ENT (which is regarded by CBS as canon, whatever your personal opinion is ) is that the Romulans did have warp drive capabilies since the 22nd century.
Absoultely true. There's been a lot of fan speculation regarding that particular ship (one particular good one is that the BoP was "dropped off" by a mothership of some sort, or at least towed close enough to a point to perform its mission). Especially since ENT (which is regarded by CBS as canon, whatever your personal opinion is ) is that the Romulans did have warp drive capabilies since the 22nd century.
This is actually a very likely reason. Think about it. We know from Enterprise that the Romulans used drones as well rather than commit troops and ships to de-stabilize a region of space. Even in TNG/DS9 Their military is built to be efficient, swift, and tactical but not so strong in a direct head-to-head matchup.
If the Romulans intended to attack a well-armed and potentially vast alliance, that they knew very little about, committing a vast arsenal of expensive warships requiring rare dilithium, antimatter, and technology woudl cost you a lot to build and be a huge risk. A strategy of building vast carriers/motherships to drop of cheap expendable warships has a lot of advantages when you cannot be certain who has the upper hand and you need to deal an offensive war. This is why carriers became more important than battleships during World War II naval combat.
Well, there's a workaround for everything... We Trekkies know that like no other fanbase.
I always had this mental image of six or eight of those V-shaped Starfleet vessels, built without warp coils or reactor (presumably cause exotic metals and dilithium would be hard to come by, and it lets them use an existing production line), carrying heavy nuclear cap-buster warheads in their nacelle housings instead, latching onto the container ports of J or Y-class freighters, conscripted for the war, to deliver them to whereever the fighting is. Travelling in convoys escorted by the handful of NXes and half-saucers they had.
But it's not like the warp thing was a very big concern to me, and if it had been, it'd have been First Contact's fault for giving humans warp 1 a century before that war even happened. If TOS didn't pin a date on it right at the start. My gripe with Enterprise will always be what it could've and should've been, not what it was...
I love Enterprise, and I think Scott Bakula did a great job as the captain! But maybe I'm biased, it is afterall the show I watched every week with my father. Apart from the movies and the occasionnal TNG rerun, I only got to watch the other series recently (just finished DS9 and Voyager).
Something a lot of people don't remember : the first seasons of Voyager AND DS9 had some of the most awful episodes I've ever seen. They both get a lot better after, but even the worst episode of Enterprise cannot compare in mediocrity with them. Don't take it wrong, I love both series , but I think the overall quality of ENT was actually better.
I did feel the same with DS9 and lost momentum halfway through, but somehow I got hooked to Voyager and watched it till the end. Might be the characters appealed more to me.
Comments
I always found "Dear Doctor" an enjoyable episode, although the ending is rather questionable. There is the question of whether or not Archer and Phlox committed genocide by withholding the cure to the Valakians "to allow the Menk to grow" - which is a whole other subject in and of itself. Phlox justifies his request to Archer by asking "what if a sufficiently advanced race gave the Neanderthals an advantage over Homo sapiens?" - although, despite Phlox's conclusions otherwise, no one ever asks whether the Menks are that world's equivilent of Neanderthals.
Another problem I have with the episode's conclusion is that it represents a missed opportunity, (one of many the series, really). We get a hint of it when Archer and T'Pol discuss the Valakians' request for the Enterprise crew to share warp technology with them. Archer points out that the Valakians "have no experience" with the technology, and he fears that humanity would have to stay behind to "guide" them - something, T'Pol points out, Vulcan has been doing on Earth since Cochrane's flight. A problematic situation, espeically since Enterprise is really the only Earth ship that can reach the Valakian homeworld in any decent amount of time. The same could have been done with the Valakians' disease - while Phlox could have found the cause, what the writers should have done was, instead of magically have him develop the cure, have him tell Archer that (a little more realistically), that developing a cure would take more work than he can accomplish with the equipment aboard, and even with a team of medical experts, it would still take years, possibly decades, to develop a cure - if there was one to be had. The discussion of the Menk's potential to grow would then have been discussed, with the suggestion that the Valakians work to have the Menk fend for themselves, just in case.
Ah, but hindsight is but 20/20.
Eve more worse, not seeing the slaughter and enslavement of the Bajoran people.
The first is it violates the canon for the past 30 years. This isn't a bad thing by itself, but when you factor in the massive library of Trek Lore that people have been regurgitating over the past 40 years it does not help it's cause.
The second is the last episode. This is more of a TV issue than a Trek issue. When you go down the road of "it was only a dream" you upset a lot of viewers. Yes it was just one episode, but to treat any TV show that way is just disrespecting your audience.
The third reason is the big reason. ENT has a lousy Captain. Bakula was great in Quantum Leap but as a StarFleet Captain he is just a bad choice. If a person is going to play a Captain on Trek he/she needs three things as a actor. The first is stage presence. Bakula lacks this as an actor, none of his other TV roles have ever had much presence. Patrick Stewart commands the stage/screen. You can see it in every nuance, he is classically trained and it shows big time. Shatner commands the stage because his personality shines through every line, he is not 1/10th the actor Stewart is but he can hold his own against him on screen. Avery Brooks had an imposing demeanor just by his stature, which was evident on DS9 as well as Spenser for Hire. The third thing is the voice. A captain has to have "that" voice. Picard and Kirk are the perfect examples, Brooks as well. Bakula had none of this as Archer and it hurt the series, he was always wishy washy and down trodden in his decision making and while you can say it was the character because he was basically the first Trek Captain, he basically is the same type in every role.
Every good series needs a little slaughter and enslavement in it. Everybody knows that.
Its better than watching Highlander 2 back to back. :eek:
O.o it's that bad?
If the ending of the first Highlander was any indication, there wasn't SUPPOSED to be a Highlander 2 - or a Highlander 3, or a Highlander: Endgame, or a Highlander TV series...but Highlander 2 was just a stinker from the standpoint that it implies the Immortals were actually aliens.
Something a lot of people don't remember : the first seasons of Voyager AND DS9 had some of the most awful episodes I've ever seen. They both get a lot better after, but even the worst episode of Enterprise cannot compare in mediocrity with them. Don't take it wrong, I love both series
i think you forget that watching TOS even once i seem to remember that there was no UFP until later into season 1 and start of season 2, spock smiling at the beginning, the vulcanians?, warp 10 being exceeded easily by the enterprise.... and so on.
it is true that romulans at that time and earlier were using impulse ships to travel, in exchange to use their massive plasma weapon, other variants of the bird of prey may not of had this weapon and can travel at warp as it was never touched on in canon, stuff like this is where the problem begins.
Absoultely true. There's been a lot of fan speculation regarding that particular ship (one particular good one is that the BoP was "dropped off" by a mothership of some sort, or at least towed close enough to a point to perform its mission). Especially since ENT (which is regarded by CBS as canon, whatever your personal opinion is
This is actually a very likely reason. Think about it. We know from Enterprise that the Romulans used drones as well rather than commit troops and ships to de-stabilize a region of space. Even in TNG/DS9 Their military is built to be efficient, swift, and tactical but not so strong in a direct head-to-head matchup.
If the Romulans intended to attack a well-armed and potentially vast alliance, that they knew very little about, committing a vast arsenal of expensive warships requiring rare dilithium, antimatter, and technology woudl cost you a lot to build and be a huge risk. A strategy of building vast carriers/motherships to drop of cheap expendable warships has a lot of advantages when you cannot be certain who has the upper hand and you need to deal an offensive war. This is why carriers became more important than battleships during World War II naval combat.
I always had this mental image of six or eight of those V-shaped Starfleet vessels, built without warp coils or reactor (presumably cause exotic metals and dilithium would be hard to come by, and it lets them use an existing production line), carrying heavy nuclear cap-buster warheads in their nacelle housings instead, latching onto the container ports of J or Y-class freighters, conscripted for the war, to deliver them to whereever the fighting is. Travelling in convoys escorted by the handful of NXes and half-saucers they had.
But it's not like the warp thing was a very big concern to me, and if it had been, it'd have been First Contact's fault for giving humans warp 1 a century before that war even happened. If TOS didn't pin a date on it right at the start. My gripe with Enterprise will always be what it could've and should've been, not what it was...
I did feel the same with DS9 and lost momentum halfway through, but somehow I got hooked to Voyager and watched it till the end. Might be the characters appealed more to me.