Dear Doctor Revisited

That's from the episode before. Silent Enemy.

I've just watched Dear Doctor and found it inoffensive. It's a dilemma which clearly Phlox and Archer are cut up about. The fact it doesn't make much scientific sense is just Star Trek gonna be Star Trek. It's a great showcase for Billingsley who's really a treasure for the show.

I can't really see what the fuss is about. I went in expecting this huge, polarising story and... it's just like a 7-8/10 episode of Star Trek. It's not the paragon Braga made it out to be but neither is it some kind of Phlox character-assassination where he comes out of it looking like Josef Mengele.

 

You know in the observer effect when Archer starts speechifying about compassion, empathy, and stuff...

It would have been funny if one of the Oragnians had asked" You mean like you did with the Valakians?"

Archer:: "Well, that's different!"

Organian:"Different, how?"

Archer:" Well, they were doomed to die."

Oragian: "Doomed, you mean like you the moment you decided to send two people to rummage through a trash heap without protection?"

Archer: "Well, no, You could have told us that there was a virus."

Oragnian: "You thought a trash heap was sanitary enough not to take any protection?"

Archer: "Anyway, nature didn't doom us to get that disease"

Organian: "In a way, it did, through your stupidity."

Archer:"...but...but..."

Organian: "How do humans call it? Winners of a Darwin Award."

Archer: "...but... but..."

 

Let's give credit where credit is due, Phlox hoped the alien Black Death would result in the destruction of the race's ruling class and the rise of the underprivileged people living in squalor on the other continent. Who knew that Phlox was a revolutionary anti-capitalist who wanted the rich to be slaughtered? Apparently not the writers.



Phlox's motives are, "These poor people are going to be slaves unless the ruling caste go."

 

This episode is offensive because it contains really, really bad science. Evolution is not forward thinking and does not have a preference. There are no traits that evolution is trying to create - you cannot have a race be 'more evolved' than another. It's nonsensical - nothing is more or less evolved than anything else, because there's no progression scale to place organisms on in the first place. Heck, if being dumber is beneficial to an organism (being smart carries an energy cost) then an organism will get dumber.

Even the blasted disease is nonsense, because evolution would have wiped it out. Star Trek and a lot of TV shows really don't seem to have a grasp on what Evolution actually is. It is such nonsense that I know some lecturers who have used it as an example (along with numerous episodes of Scorpion) to demonstrate bad science in popular culture.

This episode uses bad science to justify genocide. I remember my disappointment with Enterprise in general back in the day (little did I know what was to come) and with this episode in particular.

 

I agree with everything except the "genocide" part. Genocide is taking an active role in the destruction of a race or culture, through means direct or indirect, violent or nonviolent. Archer did nothing to harm the Valakians, or even to aid the Menk in supplanting them. Was that morally wrong? Probably. But, it was not genocide.

 

I could go either way on the question of genocide. On the one hand, I'd argue that the denial of the cure is the act of genocide. Archer and Phlox are both active participants in a situation they willingly involved themselves in.

On the other hand, at the very least, Phlox practiced eugenics. Using a totally wrong conception of how evolution works. He decided that one group of people was superior and thus more worthy of survival than another.

 

Lol, wut?

The junk science isn't what's offensive about the episode, it's the moral decisions based on the junk science that are unconscionable. I mean Archer didn't seem so bothered helping that civilization in..."Civilization". Granted those people were being poisoned by aliens from another world, but that still it didn't stop Archer from getting involved. For me the most damning thing is the implication that this episode might have inspired the Prime Directive. While I have my gripes with the PD, if it came about because of the events of this episode, then the Prime Directive should be tossed a bin and lit on fire.

 

I think that "Cogenitor" is "Enterprise's" main argument for the Prime Directive.

 

Yeah, but doesn't Archer say something like, "Someday Starfleet might pass a regulation...a Prime Directive for situations like this." I distinctly remember Archer making a comment like that in this episode. It could have been in Cogenitor, but I feel like it was made in this episode.

 

It was. But the application of it in this episode was a lot like how it was applied in "Homeward": the Prime Directive at its darkest.

 

There was no prime directive in "Mirror, Mirror", "The Apple", "Friday's Child', "A Piece Of The Action", "A Private Little War", where Kirk et al. interacted with obviously pre-warp cultures with no regard to any kind of cultural contamination. The Prime directive appeared as a plot device in "The Omega Glory" (a terrible episode!) and has since been changed about a dozen times. It's whatever the current writer decides it to be. See the difference between Kelvin Kirk being demoted because aliens that he saved from extinction had taken look at his ship and TOS Kirk beaming in front of pre-technological people without any concern. If that doesn't qualify as inconsistency then nothing will.

 

The funny thing is the premise is actually completely historically accurate and interesting but it is not related to evolution or natural selection in the slightest. The Black Death ravaged Europe and killed countless people but it also resulted in the end of Feudalism as we know it. It destroyed the system that kept the people oppressed and allowed the creation of a middle class, urban populace, and brought about an effective end to slavery in many regions.

Phlox is 100% correct that the ruling class that keeps half the planet in slavery and not so much slums as outright villages on their continent are never going to be able to rise up unless something massively changes the balanec of power in the region.

And yet I *DON'T* think the writers realize that. They seem to miss how horrifying the planetary apartheid is.

As I understand it, the writers thought "Cogenitor" was about the evils of interfering with other cultures and audience members (especially women) thought it was about the oppression some cultures treat women in like the Taliban. They thought it was incredibly good social satire that some cultures are just pure evil in their misogyny and the writers were like, "Man, Trip should have just left it alone."

 

Indeed, talk about being off the mark.

The way they treated the cogenitors was horrible. How can a culture pretend to be civilized and treat some of its kinds that way?

 

Archer's reaction was just so bizarre.

"Capn, Charles chose to DIE before returning to those monsters."

"Yes, Trip, how could you show her what it's like to be treated like a person! Now they know what they were missing!"

 

It seemed they were trying to write Archer as a Captain who would make the hard decisions vis-à-vis the proto Prime Directive, but still violate in extreme cases when he felt it was right. The problem was the writing in the first two seasons was so slap dash that when he somewhat did the latter it was in stories that audience were unimpressed by/didn't care about like Civilization or Detained, but when he did the former like in Dear Doctor or Progenitors, many felt it was misapplied.

It was reminiscent of the increasingly weird prioritization of the PD in Trek, like when Janeway won't warn a civilization about a planetary disaster in Time and Again but will ensure some locals aren't exploited by Ferengi in False Profits. It was generally odd that the inconsistency about how much to seriously adhere to it seem to make characters often look worse rather than better.

 

This sure seems like an indirect, non-violent genocide...

 

Listen man, **** the Valakians. They have a hyper-advanced civilization and keep the Menk in huts except when they're scrubbing the toilets.

No wonder Phlox is uninterested in curing them.

 

If the Enterprise had never been there, the Valakians would have died off anyway. That's why I don't see Archer's actions as genocide.

 

Or that she's willing to let the locals scramble B'elanna's brain because "you have to respect the local laws no matter how stupid and excessive" but earlier she broke Kim and Paris out of jail because "you don't have to respect local laws when you disagree with them"... talk about erratic and inconsistent!!