In the sixteenth episode of the third season of Enterprise, I COULD NOT NOPE ENOUGH FOR THIS EPISODE. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
I’ve watched a few really solid horror films in the past week (The Girl With All the Gifts, A Dark Song, and IT, if you’re curious!), and thus, I have been in a mood to be frightened by the things I’m watching. Plus, I love it when Star Trek plays with other genres, much like this episode does, so I was definitely biased in favor of “Doctor’s Orders” right from the start.
But if I put that aside, I still believe there are a couple phenomenal performances in this episode, and they’re paired with Roxann Dawson’s brilliant work as director. This was clearly a difficult story to pull off because it relied on just two actors – Jolene Blalock and John Billingsley – to carry the action with almost no input from the rest of the cast. That’s a feat in and of itself, but there’s so much here to accent that part of “Doctor’s Orders.” The premise is practically identical to that one episode of Voyager where Seven was kept alive in that radioactive nebula, and yet, I wouldn’t say these episodes are the same or that they dilute one another. Both of them can exist within the greater Trek universe, and both of them certainly entertained me.
While the Voyager episode was more about Seven’s first real experience with loneliness and isolation, I felt that “Doctor’s Orders” wasn’t as much of a character examination than a horrifying experience that toyed with the audience. Don’t get me wrong! It’s important that Phlox learns self-sufficiency, that he trusts himself and his abilities during a traumatic and frightening time. But I want to take my analysis in a different direction. See, it’s common within the horror genre to have a character seemingly “imagine” something, only to have the other characters unable to verify what they’ve seen. Within Star Trek as a whole, we usually get confirmation that the “thing” they’ve seen was real. The same goes for horror. It’s more common that some element of the supernatural or scary thing requires that it only be viewed by the main character. Given how strange the Expanse is, it was entirely believable that some sort of entity could evade the sensors and still terrorize Phlox.
But this doesn’t go in that direction. Since we see things from Phlox’s point of view, we assume (or at least I did) that there really was something on Enterprise that wasn’t appearing to T’Pol. It was only a matter of time before that was confirmed, right? So it was surprising to me that at the two-thirds mark of the episode, we discover definitively that Phlox is imagining everything. (Y’all, let’s just take a moment to acknowledge how hilarious it was that I realized this but did not realize that this should have included T’Pol. SHE LITERALLY SHOWED UP OUT OF NOWHERE AT A CONVENIENT TIME.) This isn’t a last minute twist to resolve the plot, though. Instead, the show lingers in this reality and makes it the actual conflict. It’s not about the validity of what Phlox sees, but what he does with these false visions of reality. Even if they aren’t real, how they affect him counts as VERY MUCH REAL. It’s such a fascinating choice, especially since we never really know if there was anything he experienced in his last two days that was real. Did the disturbance actually expand? Was it necessary for Phlox to engage the warp engines? I’d like to believe he really did save the crew from ten weeks in the disturbance. It fits with the general theme of Phlox’s characterization!
LET ME ALSO SCREAM ABOUT ROXANN DAWSON. Oh my god, the camera work in this episode was phenomenal. I love the way it swirled around Phlox whenever he was searching for the thing that had invaded Enterprise. There’s that incredible sequence where Phlox and T’Pol discussion isolation that’s framed with a wide shot that slowly closes in on the two of them, AND IT IS PERFECTION. So much of “Doctor’s Orders” works to exploit the anxieties of the audience. Is something behind Phlox? Will it appear at the edge of his vision? Because Dawson and the production crew hid the “thing” from being fully viewed for more than half the episode, that glimpse of the insectoid Xindi was a billion times scarier. It’s delayed gratification, especially since the audience wants so badly to know what it is that’s sneaking around Enterprise.
So yeah. I loved this episode, despite that it’s similar to another Trek adventure. BRAVO.
The video for “Doctor’s Orders” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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