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John Billingsley Would be Delighted to Play Phlox Again, Talks Enterprise Finale

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By GustavoLeao / 11:05, 18 August 2010 / Enterprise

StarTrek.com, the new official Star Trek website, posted the second part of a new interview with Star Trek Enterprise actor John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox) in which he answered fan questions. Here is an excerpt.

If you had an opportunity to play Dr. Phlox again in some Star Trek project, how open would you be to doing so?


I'd be delighted. But is there any chance that one could make a wager on the odds of it happening? I'd bet my house it won't happen, but if it did, sure, I'd want to be involved. I enjoyed playing Phlox.


The Enterprise finale was very controversial because it basically wrapped the entire series into a Next Generation holodeck sequence. What were your thoughts on how that was handled?


There are obviously mixed feelings among the fans about the legacies of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, but they were largely responsible for shepherding the franchise through many, many years of shows that people loved and kept watching. So they deserve a lot of credit. I think for them, the idea that they were going to be saying goodbye to Star Trek had a tremendous emotional weight. So they felt, and I can understand this, that they wanted to write the last episode of Enterprise. Having said that, the last season had so much of (writer and executive producer) Manny Coto's fingerprints on it that I think one of the things fans felt was a tonal and almost spiritual disconnect between the nature of the scripts throughout the fourth season and the final script. It was as if suddenly somebody from another cosmos dropped in and wrote the script, above and beyond the fact that the Enterprise's story was swallowed up by the framing device. I think people had just gotten used to Manny's voice. I missed it in the final episode. Frankly, it should have been a two-parter. Our storyline needed to wind up...


I'm all over the map on this one because I have a lot of different feelings about it. My problem with the final episode, ultimately, was that by jumping ahead however many years we jumped ahead, it was as if anything we did in the third and fourth seasons had no real weight. It seemed like the third and fourth seasons were being dismissed, which I'm sure was not the intention, but that was one of the things that bothered me. 

The full interview is here.



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Phlox was one of star trek's strongest characters | Report this post to moderator
By: brett (Odo's file, contact) @ 12:52:32 on Aug 20, 2010 | Edit History (1)

I know people have mixed feelings about enterprise. those mixed feelings are deserved.

i personally enjoy the show. It isn't always the best show but when it worked it was pretty good. At times quite good.

That being said. Billingsley did an outstanding job. I never doubted phlox for a second. He was complex and interesting.

And, by being the only "alien" on board, (t'pol doesn't count because vulcans were not alien to us at that point) he was in a lot of ways the character who represented the audience's perspective. Looking in from the outside.

He was also in many was the moral and emotional center of the show. When the human characters went too far or lost direction he was always the one to ask what was going on or give them the "slap in the face" that the audience was, or didn't know, they were looking for.

You would think this would be t'pol's role on the show too. But she was too caught up in internal conflicts (with the humans, andorians) to be that character.

It is a shame that billingsley will not get the credit he deserves for phlox because he was on enterprise and not a more popular star trek show.

...Or any more watched/popular show for that matter.

You did a good job john. I really enjoyed your work

Brett


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