“A Night in Sickbay”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Straiton
Season 2, Episode 5
Production episode 030
Original air date: October 16, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise has come to the Kreetassan homeworld to trade for desperately needed plasma injectors. However, the landing party did something to offend the Kreetassans—they’re not told what—and kick them offworld without the injectors. While in decon with T’Pol, Sato, and Porthos, Archer is bitching and moaning about this at great length.
Phlox releases the three humans, but says Porthos must remain behind, as there’s a contaminant the decon gel didn’t take care of.
Archer continues to bitch and moan about the Kreetassans, while Tucker points out that their injectors are by far the most compatible ones they’ve been able to find. They need one and Tucker urges his CO to swallow his pride, use his diplomatic training, and get the damn injectors.
Phlox reports that Porthos has a pathogen that is breaking down his autoimmune system. He’s in an isolation cage in sickbay while Phlox runs tests. Archer confirms that Phlox sent the genetic profiles of all four of the landing party, including the pooch, and yet the Kreetassans didn’t warn them about a pathogen that could harm beagles.
T’Pol and Sato work to try to figure out (a) what they did and (b) how to fix it. Archer, meanwhile, spends all his time in sickbay worrying over Porthos. However, his plan to stay the night there goes awry, as he’s awakened by Phlox doing various things from toenail clipping to tongue cleaning to feeding his animals. Plus, a bat gets loose, and Archer has to help him catch it. (Though in the end, it’s Sato who snags it with hilarious ease.)
T’Pol finally determines that the problem is that Porthos peed on a sacred tree. Seems to me they should’ve figured out that one on their own, but there it is. T’Pol requests that the Kreetassans provide an appropriate apology, while Archer bitches that they should’ve warned him about something in their atmosphere being lethal to dogs, and if Porthos dies, he’s gonna pee on their tree.
Phlox is able to get rid of the pathogen, but he’s worried that Porthos’ autoimmune system won’t recover in time to save him from bacteria and other normally harmless things.
Porthos’ pituitary gland fails, and he needs a transplant, which Phlox does from an alien chameleon he has in his little menagerie.
Archer then goes down to the Kreetassan homeworld and carves up a tree into disk-shaped bits with a chainsaw and arranges them while shirtless and wearing hairpieces while chanting stuff in Kreetassan. For their part, the Kreetassans are so impressed that they provide some spare injectors besides the one they need.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? NX-class ships use five plasma injectors for the warp drive. They can function with four in a pinch—three is right out.
The gazelle speech. Archer is way more concerned about his dog and his pride than he is fixing the ship. We also find out that he’s always had dogs since he was a kid.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol rightly points out that Archer shouldn’t bring dogs on diplomatic landing party missions.
Florida Man. Florida Man Refuses To Let His Captain Cheap Out On Needed Engine Parts Because His Dog Is Sick.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox isn’t just a “people doctor,” he also has degrees in veterinary medicine, dentistry, botanical pharmacology, and hematology. He also reveals that Denobulans don’t have pets.
Good boy, Porthos! Poor Porthos gets rubbed in decon gel, gets sick from an alien pathogen, gets a weird transplant, and has to put up with his human being a douchenozzle. Oh, and be replaced by the world’s most unconvincing puppy double for the surgery scene.
No sex please, we’re Starfleet. Phlox thinks that Archer is cranky because he hasn’t had sex much lately and diagnoses sexual tension with T’Pol, mostly based on how sensitive he is to her opinion. This gets into Archer’s head, and he makes two sexual slips of the tongue while talking to T’Pol, using “breast” for “best” and “lips” for “list,” and later has a weird dream that includes hot and heavy decon chamber stuff.
I’ve got faith…
“I really thought you were beginning to understand human emotions.”
“Not when they apply to primitive quadrupeds who haven’t evolved the ability to speak. Or to use a toilet.”
–Archer being whiny and T’Pol totally not getting why dogs are awesome.
Welcome aboard. The only guest this week is Vaughn Armstrong as a Kreetassan captain. It’s unclear if he’s playing the same Kreestassan captain he played in “Vox Sola.”
Trivial matters: This is Vaughn Armstrong’s last appearance on Trek while heavily made up. Even though most of his roles on Trek have involved heavy makeup and/or prosthetics, all his subsequent appearances will be as some version or other of the human Admiral Forrest.
This is the second appearance of the Kreetassans, after “Vox Sola,” also the last time to date that any has appeared with a speaking part.
This episode was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form alongside “Carbon Creek.” These were the only two Enterprise episodes to be nominated for a Hugo, and they both lost to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Conversations with Dead People.” Additionally, eight episodes of the original series were nominated (two of which won), as were nine of the thirteen movies, three episodes of TNG (two of which won), two episodes of DS9, and one episode each of Discovery and Lower Decks.
It’s been a long road… “You’re going to drown my dog?” Someone on my Twitter feed recently referred to this as the nadir of Star Trek as a franchise. I’m not sure if that’s the case, given that “The Alternative Factor,” “Plato’s Stepchildren,” “Shades of Gray,” “Homeward,” “Sub Rosa,” “Profit and Lace,” “Threshold,” “Fair Haven,” “Spirit Folk,” and “Dear Doctor” are all things that exist.
But this episode is definitely in the conversation, because holy crap, is it horrible.
We’re in trouble from the first scene with a decon gel scene that looks for all the world like it’s the opening to a scene in a particularly absurd porno flick, with Sato rubbing down T’Pol, T’Pol rubbing down Archer, and Archer rubbing down Porthos, the humans all in their underwear. And it never gets any better. The whole thing of Archer offending the Kreetassans while worrying about his pooch would, at best, make for a silly disposable B-plot, but it’s all there is to this episode.
When this first aired in 2002, I was mostly not watching Enterprise, but I decided to watch this one because I thought it was going to focus on Porthos, plus lots of Phlox, who is my favorite of the sentient characters on the show.
And instead, I got this. Archer being a whiny schmuck for an hour, neglecting the necessary repair work for his ship, all to complain about how the Kreetassans somehow were responsible for his dog being sick even though he’s the doofus who took a dog onto a diplomatic mission. And how did neither he nor T’Pol nor Sato figure out that Porthos peeing on a tree would be a problem? Shouldn’t they have at least guessed that?
The “comedy” bits in this episode are painfully unfunny—most of them involving Phlox’s sickbay antics. John Billingsley does the best he can, and I like that he maintains his professionalism even while his captain is being an ass, but the Goofy Alien Hijinks are just absurd, especially the attempt to chase down the Bad CGI Bat with a net and an origami bat on a stick.
And the whole thing with Archer and T’Pol’s alleged sexual tension is (a) out of left field, (b) nonsensical (Archer’s crankiness is probably more related to the lack of sleep and concern over his dog than wanting to boink his science officer), and (c) handled with all the maturity of an emotionally stunted thirteen-year-old boy. Especially the absurd dream sequence that has more porn callbacks and a cheesy puppy funeral scene. This episode reads more like bad fanfic than an episode written by the show’s two co-creators.
I don’t understand how this episode could possibly have snuck into the nomination pool for the Hugos in 2003. Just a dreadful stupid episode that definitely should be on any list of worst Trek episodes.
Warp factor rating: 0
Keith R.A. DeCandido misses having a dog.
While I was re-watching myself, I was wondering how you would react. Not even Warp 1 for the Beagle? And two more things I wondered about:
– The dear doctor never outright says that he is qualified as a surgeon or general practitioner. The closest we get are his PhD in hematology and the one in psychiatry. And how does a Denobulan PhD translate to other species’ academic traditions?
– On the other hand, in a reasonable universe a beagle should be closer to the human metabolism than a Vulcan. Not that Trek is reasonable in this regard.How does the Interspecies Medical Exchange certify their members?
That being said, not-yet-Starfleet has a long way to go before it trains people like Captain Picard. Perhaps the Vulcans should assign a baby-sitting cruiser to the Enterprise?
I remember back in the day, the toenails scene is the moment I stopped watching this show.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one to invoke SF Debris for the first time in quite a while — and Chuck’s thoughts on why dogs, ah, don’t make good diplomats:
“No, Porthos! We cannot reduce troops in South Korea! BAD DOG! BAD DOG!”
I watched this episode with my beagle, and he was appalled. This episode takes everything that was bad about Enterprise and wraps it up all into one episode. Lame adolescent sex fantasies, a captain taking his freaking dog down to a planet inhabited by others so he can pee amd crap on it, and silliness unworthy of even the most lame 80s sitcom.
I’m not sure this is the worst episode of Trek – even the worst episode of Enterprise (Precious Cargo is still coming up, and it has no redeeming qualities other than ogling Padma Lakshmi).
However, it is the most WTF episode in all of Trek, because Berman & Braga – who created the character of Jonathan Archer – decided to assassinate his character. Archer was just beginning to show signs of growth from Season 1, and all of his flaws return amped up to 11. Here he’s petty, stupid, racist, insecure, unprofessional, etc. A man who cannot fathom why someone would be offended his dog pissed on their tree, and gets so upset he suggests flying the shuttlecraft slowly over the planet and pissing on them himself!
I could forgive that it’s a boring episode where just about nothing happens. I could even forgive the exploitative sexual content. But for all that Seasons 3 and 4 try to correct, this is the episode that destroyed Jonathan Archer for me. I cannot take the character seriously.
I mean, seriously, who writes for a Trek show and says “You know what we want to do – make out series lead a laughingstock!”
I really like this episode – I think it was one of my first episodes of ENTERPRISE, if not the first – and I’m perfectly happy to regard it as a bit of slice of life comedy showing Captain Archer having a bad day and eventually coping with it in a reasonably adult manner.
Please note, I’m not going to insist that it’s a GOOD episode, but for some reason it seems to be my STAR TREK equivalent of comfort food and I would be ashamed to pretend otherwise.
And here is whern the fully-engulfed overturned garbage truck gets plowed into by a tanker carrying a load of natural gas.
Archer proves himself to be the worst kind of pet owner here: not only taking Porthos down, but presumably off-leash, and at the very least not checking in this strange place where he can take the dog to relieve itself. It’s like the people who let their dogs run around a rural area because “it’s just empty fields” and “there’s no cars” and get insulted when the local farmer gets upset because the dogs were harrassing his sheep, or threaten to sue becausethe farmer’s dog did its job and protected the flock from predators. Plus, he’s more concerned about his own comfort than the possible trauma he’s putting Porthos through in treatment.
Losing pets is hard. I get that. Dogs, cats, horses… I’ve had to say goodbye to them all. And that grief (and fear) is real and valid, but if that’s what they were trying to show here, they fucked up big time, because all they showed was a self-centered, privileged white male playing the “I’m the real victim card” when faced with consequences for his own fuck-ups. And yet somehow we’re supposed to feel sympathy for him?
Yeah, no, sorry. I’ll save my sympathy for the dog. Especially since he has to live with that.
Archer behaved childishly throughout the majority of the episode, but what galls me the most is that there has not been any real hint of sexual tension between him and T’Pol up to this episode; the fact that Space Frasier had to give the psychodynamic exposition just emphasizes the point.
Many people despise “A Night in Sickbay,” but I think it’s a pretty solid Phlox episode and a nice attempt at the kind of character study that ENT embraced in its first two seasons, before it was under pressure to be action, action, action all the time. I mean, think about it: In this entire episode, the only character whose life is in any danger is Porthos. After so many character-driven TNG episodes that had technobabble B-plots tacked on to create arbitrary danger (I’m looking at you, “Cost of Living”), it’s always refreshing when they’re able to do a purely character-driven episode without any fighting or shooting or keeping the ship from blowing up. (Which is one of the things I like about “Dear Doctor” too.)
And yes, Archer behaves badly, but I cut him some slack for it because he’s worried about Porthos. I can’t despise a story that’s centrally about how much Archer loves his dog.
The thing that drags it down is the poor handling of the “sexual tension” element. And I disagree that it comes out of nowhere. Berman and Braga were trying to create sexual tension between Archer and T’Pol in much of season 1; they just went about it in a hamfisted, juvenile way and it never really worked. (The most blatant instance is when they’re tied together in “Shadows of P’Jem.” The way they treated T’Pol’s sexuality was awful, because they never let her choose to be sexual, just made her the inadvertent object of someone else’s turn-on. See also Hoshi losing her top in her escape attempt in “Shockwave Part 2.”)
But the merit of the episode on that front is that it at least brings the sexual-tension arc to a definitive conclusion and we don’t see it anymore after this. Perhaps they finally realized that it just wasn’t working, that both characters were better served by a mutually respectful friendship.
You know, it’s interesting to note that while the Kreetassans are characterised by a consuming interest in Proper Form, they seem to be quite badly prone to unstated assumptions – especially the assumption that the Proper Way to do things should be readily apparent even to aliens and that they therefore require no coaching.
In all honesty, I have a suspicion that this particular storm in a teacup (and to the Kreetassans’ credit it never threatens to become something worse) will be regarded with embarrassment by both sides, as one example of the rather parochial attitudes of various species prior to the Rise of the Federation (since while Captain Archer accidentally trespassed against local custom by assuming the locals would understand that a dog needs to do what a dog needs to do, the locals don’t seem to have gone out of their way to highlight the status of the grove in which the offence was, in all innocence, committed).
@9: I have to admit that I didn’t see the “tied together” scene as being about sexual tension between the characters so much as a “boy/girl tied together,” as you said, juvenile sexual situation.
I’m not entirely through the series, but in Future Tense, we have the exchange about humans and Vulcans having children together, which I thought was blatantly building on “A Night in Sickbay:”
Perhaps my quibble is with Bakula’s acting; I just never get the sense that there is any attraction between the two characters but for the fact that he has explicitly sexual fantasies about her in this episode.
I think it’s the sexual tension subplot that really sinks this one for me. Everything else is goofy, but that was off-putting. Fortunately, as has been mentioned, they never bring it up again after this, so at least there’s that.
THIS episode got a Hugo nomination? That is the most shocking thing I’ve read so far in this rewatch.
@12/sheepdot: “I have to admit that I didn’t see the “tied together” scene as being about sexual tension between the characters…”
That’s exactly why it didn’t work, because it didn’t arise from character, but was just about shoving T’Pol’s sexiness quite literally into Archer’s face. But it did seem to me that the writers in season 1 were trying to build up an arc of Archer being attracted to T’Pol; they just did it so poorly that it never clicked, and here they confronted it and wisely moved past it.
@13/David: “I think it’s the sexual tension subplot that really sinks this one for me.”
It’s a low point of the episode, and I wasn’t at all fond of it. The episode has significant flaws, to be sure, but I don’t think it’s as terrible overall as its reputation would have it.
Yeah, I got nothing to add.
Just one thing: Spock’s Brain was funnier, even unintentionally, and that episode didn’t need cringe-worthy comedy bits to do so.
I like Porthos as a character, even though I’ve never been much of a dog person. Usually he brings out the best in Archer, and doing a story about him getting cranky over his pet’s health can and should have worked. But somehow they just made him out to be a very unprofessional captain and diplomat with the whole Kreetassan situation. Would Forrest, Soval, Starfleet and the Vulcans even allow him to retain command if they ever read the mission reports of this one?
Also, this was clearly meant to be a bottle show, despite the CG bat. Between this and TNG’s Shades of Gray, if they ever need to save money again, maybe it’s better if they don’t spend a whole episode inside sickbay next time.
Amazing. I had no idea this episode was such a nothing burger. It reminds me of a YouTube music channel where the guy defined “bad” as “the absence of good”. This episode just does not on the surface have much bad about it, but nothing good about it. Still, that leaves it open for bile fascination, so I may give it a watch anyway.
I’ve read all these ST rewatches and this was the first to tug at my heart strings: KRADs one sentence bio at the end…
Like Voyagers Threshold this episode sticks in my mind and is memorable because of its flaws
Eduardo: as I said in the rewatch of the episode, “Spock’s Brain” is nowhere near the worst episode of the original series, and the myth that is the worst thing ever is one that I’ve been fighting against. Also, this is the third straight bottle episode, which you don’t usually see this early in the season……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One night in sickbay and the world’s your oyster.
This crap was nominated for a Hugo Award? That seems to make that organization lose all credibility.
7.7. Malevolentpixy
I used to live in a small town in Southern Utah and occasionally city folk would be surprised to learn that sheepherders were armed and didn’t care that Fluffy was just playing with the sheep.
@22/krad: “Also, this is the third straight bottle episode, which you don’t usually see this early in the season……….”
I wouldn’t call “Dead Stop” a bottle episode, since it required building several new sets for the repair station. Maybe a semi-bottle episode at most, due to the lack of guest stars besides Roxann Dawson’s voice.
For that matter, I think the exterior hull set for “Minefield” was a new build, unless I’m forgetting something. So that one’s mostly a bottle show but not completely.
Apparently Archer is a fan of late 20th century parody songs. There was one titled “Dead Puppies Don’t Have Fun” that seems to be his favorite based on this episode.
I understand that it’s unfair to Porthos that he be cooped up on a Starship with limited chances to be a dog, but at least establish relations with the Kretassans and ask if Porthos can come down to stretch his legs and get some exercise rather than bringing him down in the Shuttlepod from the start. As for Porthos himself, the Ferengi may be right in equating his intelligence with the size of his ears. I bet he’s figuring out ways to get more cheese after this incident.
If there are biodiversity issues with bringing one’s pets into foreign countries, shouldn’t there be similar protocols bringing any kind of animal to a new planet with life? Shouldn’t this issue at least be addressed?
Also, I believe bottle episodes don’t require extensive special effects shots. “Dead Stop” clearly had many.
@28/garreth: “Also, I believe bottle episodes don’t require extensive special effects shots. “Dead Stop” clearly had many.”
Usually, yes. I just looked it up, and I’m surprised to learn that the origin isn’t what I thought. I thought they were called bottle shows because the cast were bottled up on the standing sets. But it turns out it was coined by The Outer Limits producer Leslie Stevens to mean an episode shot quickly and cheaply, “as in pulling an episode right out of a bottle like a genie.” So the term refers to an episode that costs less and takes less time to shoot than usual. “Dead Stop”‘s new sets and abundant FX would disqualify it.
Similarly, “Minefield” had a wealth of effects, and shooting the mine sequences with the actors in spacesuits was probably time-consuming and complicated. So it wouldn’t really qualify either, except in the limited sense of being a shipboard episode.
But “A Night in Sickbay” is definitely a bottle show. No action to speak of, only a couple of alien makeups and guests, little in the way of effects beyond Phlox’s bat creature and the fake Porthos.
garreth @24: The Hugos are chosen by fans, so it doesn’t make any sense to criticize the “organization” for the nomination. And as we saw during the Puppy years (OMG, was that painful!), a relatively small set of fans can have an oversize influence on the lists of finalists. (I’ve been voting for the Hugos since 2011 but have very rarely nominated anything, simply because I don’t read/watch enough new stuff to be able to nominate coherently. Actually, I usually use the Hugos to decide what new stuff is worth reading. Among other things, that’s why I now love basically all of Seanan McGuire’s stuff and the Harry Dresden books.)
@30/bad_platypus: I didn’t realize the Hugo’s were chosen by fans. I assumed it was an organization of professional critics. So it makes much more sense now that this episode was nominated by fans versus critics. But still, there were better episodes in the second season to choose from IMHO than this one.
The Hugos aren’t just picked by “fans,” but specifically by people who are members of that year’s World Science Fiction Convention, the previous year’s WorldCon, and the subsequent year’s WorldCon. So, for example, this year’s Hugos will be chosen by members of the 2021 con in Washington DC, the 2022 con in Chicago, and next year’s in China.
So the awards are chosen by a subset (people who vote) of a subset (people who go to WorldCon) of the fan base. So we’re talking a statistically irrelevant percentage of the readership/viewership.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@28 – Walter Koenig adressed the issue in The Infinite Vulcan. When Stavos Keniclius arrived on Phyllis, he inadvertently introduced a strain of staphylococcus that nearly wiped out the Phylosians. Funny that an episode that also introduced a giant clone of Spock also had some of the best science in the series. It’s been pretty much ignored ever since when it’s “Let’s beam down in t-shirts and jeans” all the way. I’d imagine that there’s a number of planets that had plague-like outbreaks shortly after being visited by Starfleet.
Adding to krad’s (mostly) accurate take @32: And the nominations are a fraction of the final voters—there are a lot of people like me who vote but don’t nominate. For example, in 2021, there were 2,040 people who voted in the “Best Novel” category, but there were only 1,093 nominating ballots, barely 50% of the voting body. Most of the other categories have nominating sets that are 1/4 to 1/3 the size of the final voting body.
One slight correction to krad’s description: You don’t actually have to attend the WorldCon to vote and/or nominate; there’s a “Supporting Membership” available (typically for about $50) which allows you to vote in the Hugos without attending the con. (I’ve never been to a WorldCon but have voted in the Hugos every year since 2011.) You also get access to the electronic “Voter Packet”, the content varies from year to year, but most years you got all the short fiction (novellas, novelettes, short stories), excerpts from the novels (sometimes you’ll get a full novel, but that’s getting rarer these days), and a smattering of things from other categories. It’s a pretty good deal (IMO) for $50.
I actually interrupted writing this post to get my Supporting Membership and download the Voter Packet for this year. I’ve got a lot of reading to do in the next month!
Many of the episodes were constrained, and tried to be economical about reusing standing sets whenever possible, that’s television. This one was definitely a bottle episode, see the “Inside A Night in Sickbay” behind the scenes featurette where Bakula talks about this being one of the lower cost episodes which he refers to as “ship shows”. In Rick Berman’s words it was “another relatively inexpensive and somewhat humorous show that was more character driven”.
There are times when Star Trek reminds me of a local community theater group instead of massively expensive television show produced by professionals. Others have already eloquently expressed the many things wrong with this episode, but it is difficult to for me to care about this episode enough to actively dislike it. Meh.
“If their carelessness has hurt Porthos or, god forbid, ends up killing him, they’re going to find out what being offended is all about.”
I have absolutely no idea why this seems to have come to be regarded as Enterprise’s biggest turkey. I had the same reaction to it as when I got to ‘Threshold’ in the Voyager Rewatch: Among its many saving graces, it’s absolutely goddamn hilarious, and it’s clearly meant to be. Phlox, like his counterpart on Voyager, is an absolute battery of one-liners, although in this case they’re less deliberate jokes and more holding up a magnifying glass to his differences to humans (“Their kidneys are considered a great delicacy”). His grooming habits, his eccentricies (in human terms) and I have to admire the chutzpah of an ad break cliffhanger being one of his bats getting loose (inevitably followed by him and Archer sneaking around with butterfly nets).
Okay, I can see the problem some people have with Archer: He’s not the most mature of people. I can empathise with him considering his dog a priority, but bringing him along on a diplomatic mission is a curious choice that he never quite justifies. They were obviously trying to move away from the stoic Picard-like captain and show a human from before Rodenberry’s “no ego, no conflict” diktats. Possibly they went too far the other way: I like my heroes flawed, even if it does make them very frustrating at times. I also like shows that are brave enough to let us laugh at their heroes. I may have said this before but I’ll be interested to see how he’s portrayed going forward. His attitude towards T’Pol has softened considerably since the early episodes, but he can still be abrupt with her at times. Is this the first time he actually apologises for it? The idea that it’s sexual tension isn’t entirely insightful (nor is Archer’s wet dream the best way to show it) but ultimately it comes down to the fact that Archer wants her to like him and gets frustrated that she doesn’t react to things the way he suspects. This seems to shut down the romantic possibilities hinted at in Season 1: They have a (mutual?) attraction but seem to subtly resolve not to act on it.
I was laughing my head off at Archer’s vain attempts to match T’Pol on the treadmill, followed by her casually ending her session. (“I obviously can’t keep up with you.”) And anyone that doesn’t have their heart melt by that opening panning shot ending with the reveal that Archer’s massaging Porthos: Congratulations, you’re a Borg.
I am definitely starting to rebel against the idea that Hoshi was a flat character and she’s starting to remind me of Kes a tiny bit. Maybe she didn’t get enough focus episodes but any episode that gives her more to do than say “Hailing frequencies open, sir” demonstrates that she is absolutely awesome: Seemingly running the night shift and negotiating with the Kreetassans, sharing jokes with a suitably deadpan T’Pol (“Do we have a chainsaw on board?”), checking in on Porthos and managing to casually grab a bat out of the air.
Neither Dominic Keating nor Anthony Montgomery has any dialogue in this one, with Reed only appearing in Archer’s dream. We get the first mention of Phlox being older than he appears in human terms: He has five grown-up children but doesn’t get along with two of them. (This will be followed up on in “The Breach”.)
@37. cap-mjb: You are entirely correct to remind us that Cap’n Archer failing to keep up with Sub-commander T’Pol on that treadmill is hilarious (Also, I definitely agree that this episode works best as comedy, most especially as a gentle comedy).
This was on last night so I watched (most of) it. What a terrible episode.
I would respectfully suggest that “A Night in Sickbay” was ENT’s version of a certain president’s recent debate performance – something so unacceptably bad that the powers that be knew drastic action was necessary. Only here, the show didn’t do anything and after only 2 more seasons it was cancelled.
Nothing about this episode is good but Bakula is unbelievably bad. You can see what they’re going for, and somebody like Sir Patrick Stewart likely would have been able to pull it off, but Bakula never rises above seeming to be the stunt double stand in who was asked to ad lib some lines only they ran out of time to reshoot with a real actor. I’m not at all surprised by the comment above calling this episode the character assassination of Jonathan Archer because that’s exactly what it is.
They mis-cast the lead. They got their starship captain all wrong. It was pretty clear for awhile but this episode cements it. That was of the biggest missed opportunities for this show that could have been so much better than it was.