2x05 A Night in Sickbay

[2.4/10] What an utter chore of an episode. I love when Star Trek goes comedy. I love when Star Trek goes for something smaller stakes and more intimate. I love when Star Trek goes for cultural minutiae an introspection rather than explosions and firefights. But this was an attempt to do all of these things that quickly turned into forty-five minutes of hot wet garbage.

Let’s start at the most obvious point of this episode: you knew they weren’t going to kill off the dog. Outside of a choice action movie franchise, Hollywood never kills off the dog. So from the minute porthos was revealed to be sick (in another completely unnecessary decon scene), you knew the how the whole thing would end.

Granted, false peril is nothing new for Star Trek. Despite a few serialized elements (like the easily offended Kreetassans still holding a grudge), Enterprise is mostly a case-of-the-week show, which means the status quo has to be more or less restored by the end of the episode. That’s not a problem in and of itself.

The problem is that you have to make the fear and expectation and threat to a crewmember (even of the furry quadruped variety) meaningful through what the other characters do in reaction to it. Here is what “A Night in Sickbay” gives us instead. A goofy Odd Couple routine between Archer and Phlox, some C-level slapstick, a crappy monologue about Porthos being the Captain’s ex-girlfirend’s dog’s puppy, a bunch of Archer horny dreams that nobody was asking for, and a heap of Archer just generally stomping around with a bug up his butt in a way that’s broad and annoying and not especially relatable.

Let’s try to take this piece by agonizing piece. The biggest issue with this episode is that the misadventures of Archer and Phlox in sickbay are just unfunny and uninteresting. Archer being kept up by odd noises, or bitching about the Kreetassans, or trying to convey righteous anger in a way that puts you on his side even a little is just a dead on arrival. At times, the episode seems to be going for a lighter tone, which is something I tend to like, but the comedy here is so broad, so hacky, so sitcom-esque, that it almost makes you wish for a nonstop bout of the deadly serious/severe episodes.

That’s all before we get to the show trying to pull off a will they/won’t they bit between Archer and T’Pol that I find utterly baffling. I’m not blind to the fact that the show has tried to do some Hepburn/Tracy-type material with the two of them in the past, but I just completely fail to see any speck of romance or non-forced sexual tension between them.

The show has continued to try to make Archer/T’Pol happen, and it seems about as well-fated as trying to make “fetch” happen. I don’t know if its some odd, sublimated effort toward franchise penance given how many people seemed to want Kirk/Spock to happen, but the pairing makes no sense and has no chemistry, and devoting much of an episode to the idea that their friction is a projection and reaction to suppressed sexual feelings for one another is a doomed mission from the getgo.

Then it leads to us having to deal with more corny horndog dreams from Archer, mixed with the most cheeseball slips of the tongue immediately after. I’ll admit, the scene at Porthos’s dream funeral uses some nifty little noir tricks, and the focus on the hand-holding makes the sequence memorable, but it’s in service of utter drivel. The fact that Archer and Phlox have a bro-down heart to heart about it afterward only makes things worse, and the tease at the end between Archer and T’Pol is the rotten apple core on the top of the trash pile.

So what’s good about this episode? Not much, but there’s a few decent takeaways. For one, it’s interesting to learn a little more about Phlox’s history and his people’s culture. John Billingsley is one of the better performers on the show, and he can pull off a monologue about being proud of his children, not speaking to others, and missing the whole lot work in a way that Bakula just can’t.

And other the other side of things, I do appreciate the way that Archer realizing he was insensitive about Phlox’s people and their practices gives him the humility and understanding to both apologize to the good doctor, but also to go through the Kreetassans’ rituals for the good of his ship. I still think the whole “Archer’s pride vs. his love for his dog vs. the good of his ship” is half-baked as all hell, but it at least ends on a note of self-awareness and repentance from Archer, which is good and rare thing on this show.

It’s just a real pain to get to that point. Sure, the Kreetassans seem totally unreasonable about what they’re asking of Archer, but Archer is just as annoying in return. It’s fair to note that that’s the point here -- that Archer is being just as stubborn and pestersome as the people he’s railing against, and has to learn and grow. The problems are two-fold: (1.) It’s just not fun to watch Archer be a dick to people for forty minutes, and Bakula isn’t good enough in that sort of role to pull that off in the way that, for example, Hugh Laurie can, and (2.) the episode tries to chalk up most, if not all, of his irritability, to his feelings for T’Pol, which feels misplaced from the beginning, and unwelcome even if it weren’t.

The end result is an episode that you can’t even tell people skip, because it’s clearly setting up more indulgent and gratuitous “friction” between Archer and T’Pol down the line, but which has nothing of substance to offer beyond five good minutes or so with Dr. Phlox. More than anything, “A Night in Sickbay” exposes the weakness of Bakula as the lead of this show, with an episode that puts a lot on his shoulders in terms of comedy, drama, and relatability without much external conflict to sustain the episode otherwise, and he all-but completely fails to rise to the challenge.

(As an aside, one other irksome thing about the episode, which makes it hard to like Archer in this, is that he's a freaking idiot for bringing Porthos down to the planet to meet an easily-offended species in the first place! Sure, the Kreetassans may be unreasonable, but that doesn't excuse his stupidity for introducing an element that's very likely to create more problems than it solves.)