It's been a long week for Billingsley, who plays alien Dr. Phlox, a native of the planet Denobula. The episode in production, "Doctor's Orders," airing Wednesday, Feb. 18, is almost a two-person -- and one canine -- play. The focus is on Phlox, Vulcan science officer T'Pol (Jolene Blalock) and Porthos, the beagle belonging to Enterprise's Captain Archer (Scott Bakula).
In the teleplay written by Chris Black and directed by former "Star Trek: Voyager" regular Roxann Dawson, the starship Enterprise is passing through a section of space whose particular properties are injurious to human physiology. Phlox proposes putting the crew into induced comas to get them safely through the region, hoping that nothing goes seriously wrong with the ship.
But as one might expect on "Star Trek," it does, leading Phlox to lament, "I'm a physician, not an engineer!"
Between pages and pages of dialogue, and daily applications of his complicated makeup, Billingsley is struggling to keep up, especially since just nine hours separate his previous and current workdays. Dawson, who played a half-Klingon in "Voyager," sympathizes.
"I have empathy for John Billingsley," she says during a break. "I know what it feels like to be underneath his makeup. I know with the hours he's working, nine-hour turnarounds are barely human. I understand where he's at. The latex definitely gave me that."
"Doctor's Orders" also includes a nude scene for Phlox, which meant full-body makeup.
"I have a spiny ridge glued onto my back," Billingsley says. "There are some striations painted down my front to match my face and hands. Of course, I was hoping there would be other appendages and protuberances, so that people would be walking around in slack-jawed admiration for the rest of the run of the show.
"After all, I have three wives. What does that suggest? What does that imply?"
"Doctor's Orders" also represents one of the few times that an episode focuses almost entirely on non-human characters.
"It's all aliens, all the time," Dawson says. "Us humans are pretty weak."
This concept is one that appeals to Billingsley, who isn't entirely pleased with the "rah rah" spirit of "Enterprise's" first two seasons.
"One of the things you feel has happened," he says, "is that we, meaning humans, have been the all-knowing folks teaching the other species, even the Vulcans, but especially the Klingons, the Andorians, all of the species we encounter. We have a lesson to impart about how to be better.
"One of the things I always liked about the first 'Star Trek' is the deflation of Kirk's hubris. Frequently, at the end of an episode, it would be Kirk going, 'Oh, I didn't realize you guys were gods. I'm sorry.' Many of them ended with a defense of our rather small and insignificant amount of knowledge and understanding.
"In the first and second season, we were able to master every situation so perfectly that it just became routine. There have been episodes in which there has been a moral struggle, but when it comes down to brass tacks, we're gonna win.
"I have always been interested -- and am still interested, and will be interested -- in having us lose. For the most part, most of the explorers of the world lived short and violent lives. That's the nature of things, of course, but that runs into the demands of network television."
However, the perspective the show's writers have given to Phlox intrigues the actor. "I'm a fairly philosophical person, and it's very interesting that he has an almost Buddhist-like viewpoint," Billingsley says. "For all his incredible joie and his earthiness, he really takes the true long view.
"It is a universe in which we are specks of dust, and we will turn into something when we die and come back as something else -- on and on, the cycle of life. I hate to say it, but if the Xindi destroy Earth, Phlox is the one who's going to go, 'That was terrible. Now, my next assignment ... .'
"When you play somebody who has that sanguine attitude and a reflective nature, it can be tricky writing episodes that pull him into a dramatically compelling situation."
"Doctor's Orders" inflicts on Phlox, a garrulous member of a community-oriented species, the one thing he detests most of all -- solitude.
"What's interesting to me," Billingsley says, "is the idea that my character is hallucinating because he is a person that is extremely sociable and needs to have people around. In isolation -- and it's exacerbated by the anomaly -- his penchant is to hallucinate activity. He needs hubbub, Bub."
On the other hand, having an episode practically to himself doesn't allow Billingsley to engage in his normal gloating in front of his harder-working cast members.
He even has a song for it (set to the tune of Harry Belafonte's "Day-O"): "Character actor have more fun; six days off and the check still come. Other people work, I lie in the sun. Character actor, he have more fun. Day-O, d-a-a-ay-O!"
