CRAZY LIKE A PHLOX

The cure for what ails you in the future will be leeches. Or so it appears if Enterprise 's doctor Phlox has anything to do with it. John Billingsley looks back on his first year aboard Starfleet's flagship.

Odd how people turn up in the place you least expect them. Then again, considering how his CV has been shaping up lately, perhaps finding John Billingsley in full Jaffa gear on the set of Stargate SG-1's sixth season shouldn't have been such a surprise.

"I don't understand it! It's the wackiest thing!" the actor laughs on his lunch break (between mouthfuls, naturally) when asked why he's suddenly become such a fixture in the genre. Roles in The Others and Freakylinks , however, made him out to be a bit of a jinx when neither survived beyond their initial 13 episodes. "That's why I was happy so see that Enterprise got picked up for a second year - breaks my streak!" chuckles Billingsley, who of course is now becoming more familiar from his role as Dr Phlox on Star Trek 's newest baby. "Freakylinks , wow! Not many people mention Freakylinks . My octopus arm..." he reminisces, before returning to the here and now. "Yeah, [it's] just the last few years; I really hadn't done any Sci-Fi before that. I had a long stage career and then when I moved to LA I did NYPD Blue and Profiler and The Practice and a bunch of stuff there.
And then all of a sudden I started getting these Sci-Fi shows. It's all coincidence, you know."

Did he like the genre beforehand? "I like any genres the cheques don't bounce," he deadpans. "That's my raison d'etre . You know, I was a big 
Sci-Fi/Fantasy fan when I was younger and I kind of fell off the ladder a little bit; certainly read all the great masters, Asimov, Blish, Arthur C Clarke and yadda yadda yadda, but I haven't really followed the genre all that much in the last 20 years. I watched the original Star Trek as a kid and some of The Next Generation , but I really was coming to it without any strong feelings one way or the other, to be honest with you. I'm certainly not averse to it, but not versed in it either.

The nice thing about Star Trek is I'm the character guy on Star Trek . I come in and say a few wise things, crack a joke or something, then I go home. So I only have to put the rubber head on a couple of days a week. It's nice every now and again to get an episode where I have more to do, but it's not the worst fate in the world to have a private life, so I'm lucky in that regard. The costumes - you caught me on a bad day; make sure you readers realize that I'm wearing 55lbs of rubber and chain metal, so I would not want to play a Jaffa as a regular, that's for sure."

It's the hiatus for Enterprise at the moment, "until June 25th," and Billingsley is pleased with the progress of the show so far. Although the character of Dr Phlox hasn't been the highest profile of the cast, he's had his share of action over the last year; after all, judging by his relationship with Crewman Cutler (Kellie Waymire), he seems to have become the ship's stud. "I'm not sure about that," Billingsley replies. "We'll see what happens there. I do have three wives, that's true. Of course, it does beg the question, ' Do I have one dick for each wife?' I don't know." His interviewer is quick to point out that he really doesn't want to know, but it's too late. "Oh, sure you do, come on! I think eventually they have to square the issue of Dr Phlox's genitalia, it's just a matter of time. I'm the only actor on the show who hasn't flashed his genitalia, for God's sake! There's not a show goes by where Connor's [Trinneer, Tucker] not in his underwear. It's 'Put some pants on Connor, for God's sake!' I don't think you'll be seeing me in my skivvies very soon."

Trying to move slightly away from this line of enquiry, will the Phlox/Cutler romance continue? "She appears one more time this season in the penultimate episode, although there is no furtherance of our relationship. I don't know if they want their relationship to develop or not, but I think they certainly like her as an actress and would be happy to have her continue. But she's doing quite well in her own right, and I believe actually was cast in a pilot this year, so if that pilot gets picked up and it's on the fall schedule then that would be that. So I've lost my girl to another show. My real goal is, though, to have my own wife, Bonita Friedericy, play all three wives. In fact I would like her to play all the women of Denobula [Phlox's home planet]. That way she could cash in on some of that convention coin. Sounds awfully mercenary, for which I'm sorry; as a struggling poor, starving theatre artist for so long, it's a whole new concept."

The first season of the show ends on a cliffhanger, as Billingsley explains: "It's a Suliban episode. Now I don't know whether Suliban are going to continue on in the next season or this is gonna pay them off, but it's a cliffhanger and it appears as if somehow the fabric of Time has been destroyed. Again." He laughs. "Once again, surprise surprise, there's a rip in the Space/Time continuum. I don't have too much to do in that final episode, so I will say that it appears as if the mission is going to be disbanded and we're all going to have to pack up and go home, when suddenly...that's all I can tell you, as I can't follow the plot myself. I sometimes think [ about the writers], "You're just making this up as you go along, guys! Come on, you have no idea what a Temporal Cold War [is]!"

Well, that may be true, but it sounds cool, "It is. It's a great expression when you stop and think about it. But I love them all to death, by God! And actually I do think that they're doing a pretty good job. I went in and pitched some ideas at one point and they were very, very nice about it. Essentially what they said was, 'We've done that one before and we've done that before and that sounds similar to this one'. I guess if you've got four previous incarnations of Star Trek and 600-plus-episodes, it's pretty damned hard to draw new water from the well. I don't envy them. I think what they're trying to do, and probably rightly so, is emphasize some of the personal arcs and let the Sci-Fi follow along, to draw an audience that perhaps is prepared to give this show a shot even if they're dubious about Star Trek , and I think it's important for them not to get drowned in technobable. I think it is important for the characters to be more recognizably human, to have more flaws and more foibles, kind of rub up against each other the wrong way sometimes, do stupid things, fall on their face, make mistakes, break the machinery. To me, as a casual fan, I certainly flew away from Star Trek because I felt there was a loss of high science over the proceedings and it didn't serve the drama. Any dilemma was going to be solved by "What about the tectonic scanner, captain? You could reverse the polarity of the tectonic scanner and that would...' " Billingsley snores. "So, I think so far they have kept the number of deus ex machinas that are machine-based away; generally speaking, it's people having to figure things out."

While Phlox is saddled with some of the remaining technobabble ("I've got a lot of medical crap, yeah"), he's also a very different kind of doctor to what long-term Trek fans might be used to. "I would like them to go farther with this, the idea that he is an anthropologist as much as a doctor and that he has leeches at hand and he's willing to use herbs and any number of non-Western medical techniques. I think they need to go a little farther with that as far as the doctor is concerned, because they still do have me pulling out my handy-dandy cancer solver and waving it around and snap, snap, everything's fine again."

There's also something of a staffing problem on Enterprise. "I don't have a nurse! They're kind of turning Cutler into a little bit of a de facto nurse, but technically I've just plucked her from some other department, for my own nefarious reasons, no doubt."

While Dr Phlox's natural home is sickbay, surrounded by glove puppets in tanks pretending to be useful creatures for medical miracles, Billingsley is keen to interact with his charges a little more. "Well, I wish I had a little more to do with Connor and the captain," he considers. "Except for one episode, Dear Doctor , I haven't really been featured that prominently, so I can't say that there is any one person that I feel I've had much of a chance to interact with. I've had a few scenes with Hoshi along the way; I think they wanted to set up some sense of my having a mentor relationship with her. I think there might be some room to develop the relationship I have with the captain; that was alluded to a bit in Dear Doctor, the sense that we might have different goals, a different sense of what our mission is out here.

"It's tricky with Star Trek , I think, because so much of what Gene Roddenberry wanted and what I think to a certain extent the fans want, is a world in which there is very little interpersonal conflict. The conflict comes from our encounters with alien beings. And I've talked to fans who've actually said in effect that that's one of the things they love, the idea that this posits a future where we've found a way to all get along, which is all very well and good, but it doesn't necessarily always make for the most interesting and dramatic situations. I don't say this with any degree of bitterness because it is the nature of the beast. This is a long-running show, and there are certain dictates that they have to answer to. But what it does mean is that I, as an alien creature, do not necessarily have a tremendous built-in back-story. It's hard for therm sometimes to figure out ways to put me into stories and have some conflict emerge, especially because my guy is fairly buoyant, a sort of sanguine personality."

And with that, John Billingsley slips back into his Jaffa outfit and takes his buoyant personality back to the Stargate set.

Submitted by Jo Healy