In the thirteenth episode of the first season of Enterprise, NOW I UNDERSTAND THE PRIME DIRECTIVE. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For discussion of genocide, colonialism, anti-indigenous sentiment.
Wow, this is a messy and complicated story about Starfleet ethics, and it is absolutely the reason the Prime Directive is so important. Looking back on it, it’s easy to see the exact point where Phlox and Archer were in too deep, when it was no longer possible for them to back out of this disaster. If the Prime Directive had been in place… well, it’s probably easy to say that none of this would have happened. The Valakians were a pre-warp society, and that would have excluded Enterprise from having much interaction with them.
But it’s a much easier thing to state in hindsight, and let the video for “Dear Doctor” stand as evidence that at the beginning, even I supported T’Pol’s logic. It seemed perfectly logical that Phlox help out the Valakians with this mysterious disease. They had already sought out contact, so would cultural contamination really turn out that bad?
(I LAUGH UNTIL I CRY.)
“Dear Doctor,” however, manages to take this horrific ethical dilemma and filter it through an epistolary narrative device: Dr. Phlox corresponds with the human doctor friend who is currently on Phlox’s home planet of Denobula. The first human doctor to be assigned there, I should note! So even though we don’t meet Dr. Lucas, he’s still a character in the story, and he still affects events, insofar as you consider how Dr. Phlox relates to this situation. It is so far the most intimate character study for the main cast, and I was astounded by how personal this episode felt.
We track Phlox getting used to working amidst humans. It’s about the closest we get to a day-in-the-life style episode, and it’s so compelling. Phlox is a very happy-go-lucky character, but not in the way Neelix was on Voyager. He derives so much joy from getting to try new things, from gaining wisdom and knowing, and from the sheer experience of being alive. The opportunity to live among humans was appealing to him, and we often see how he gets even more experiences on top of that while being on Enterprise. It’s why he is so thrilled to treat the Valakians, too, since it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing for him.
But good intentions can’t always fix everything. Phlox intended to find a cure and he succeeded. Yet that success came at a monstrous price: the discovery that the Valakians were a step in the evolution of the indigenous population of their world, one that was heading for extinction. Now, I don’t feel like this episode address the complicated politics surrounding indigenous issues, which isn’t surprising to me because THIS IS STAR TREK, Y’ALL. Just look to Voyager for one long example of how frequently this show doesn’t get it. This isn’t the worst example I’ve seen, though; it’s just largely unexplored. The Valakians “utilize” the Menk as workers, but the narration tries to suggest that there isn’t any exploitation occurring here. It’s a very soft look at what counts as exploitation, and I’d argue that Valakian society depended on the Menk underclass. Given what we saw of them – the way they assisted the Valakians in the hospital doing relatively menial jobs – I’d say that there was a strong case that exploitation was inherent in this system.
Yet instead, the issue is dropped once Phlox realizes how evolution will play a large part in the inevitable demise of the Valakians. Again, not the worst, but the invocation of indigenous rights felt more like a chance for the writers to make Phlox seem knowledgable rather than providing any significant representation of greater issues. As for the main ethical dilemma itself… it’s disturbing, isn’t it? I didn’t finish this episode and feel good in any way. I rather felt the opposite, which I imagine was the whole point. If Phlox and Archer had not gotten involved in the first place, the Valakians would have died out in a couple hundred years or so, give or take a few decades. As Phlox had put it, they’d reached an evolutionary dead end, and the Menk were set to take their place. As a theory, it’s perfectly normal. It’s something that’s happened countless times in our own history. The problem is that the practice of it feels so much more heinous. Was it genocide to let the Valakians die? Did they deserve it for their condescending and exploitative treatment of the Menk? Was it immoral for Archer to deny them both the cure for their disease and warp technology?
“Dear Doctor” doesn’t bother answering much of what it asks because its focus is on something else: this is a pre-Prime Directive era, and the whole point of this episode was a demonstration of why that directive became so important to Starfleet. We’ve certainly seen a lot of stories about why the Prime Directive isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but lord, this one is brutal and damning. I feel a little odd about Archer eventually agreeing to Phlox’s outlook, as I expected him to remain opposed to it until the end. Perhaps this was his way of moving towards a commitment that resembles what the Prime Directive will become. The problem, of course, is that the decision came far too late.
The video for “Dear Doctor” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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