“Author, Author”
Written by Brannon Braga and Phyllis Strong & Michael Sussman
Directed by David Livingston
Season 7, Episode 20
Production episode 266
Original air date: April 18, 2001
Stardate: 54732.3
Captain’s log. The EMH has written a holo-novel called Photons, Be Free. Meanwhile, Project: Pathfinder, based on an idea from Seven and Kim, has found a way to do real-time communication for a limited time once per day. During the first talk, with Barclay and Owen, they get to see a real-time image of Earth.
Each crewperson gets a window of time to speak to someone in the Alpha Quadrant. Neelix provides a bag full of numbered chips—the EMH is lucky enough to get #1. While Paris assumes he’s going to talk to either Barclay or Zimmerman, he is, in fact, talking to Ardon Broht, a Bolian from the Broht & Forrester holo-novel publisher. They’re all set to distribute Photons, Be Free, though the EMH says he needs to do one more pass on it.
Buy the Book
In the Watchful City
When he relieves Paris in sickbay, the EMH tells the pilot about Photons, Be Free, and also expresses a concern that he may not be able to do the revisions in time for the publisher’s deadline. Paris offers to try the program out, as a fellow holo-novelist, and the EMH agrees.
Paris is appalled when he actually goes through the program. For starters, the introduction is a horse-choking nine minutes long. The story appears to be autobiographical—the holodeck player gets to be the Emergency Medical Hologram on the U.S.S. Vortex, a ship trapped on the far side of the galaxy under Captain Jenkins, who looks a lot like Janeway only with darker hair. The EMH is treated with disdain by the organic crew. Lieutenant Marseilles, who looks a lot like Paris only with a mustache, is brought in with a mild concussion. The Bajoran first officer, Katanay, who looks a lot like Chakotay only with a ponytail and a different tattoo, insists that Marseilles be treated first, even though there’s another crewperson who needs immediate surgery. Jenkins settles the dispute by shooting the crewperson who needs surgery, thus allowing the EMH to work on Marseilles.
Paris is not happy about the program, and several other folks try it out, including Kim, Torres, Neelix, and Janeway. We also get to see the security chief Tulak, who looks a lot like Tuvok only human and with a goatee, the chief engineer Torrey, who looks a lot like Torres only human, and the ops officer Ensign Kymble, who looks a lot like Kim only Trill. When Janeway goes through the holo-novel, she’s seriously pissed, and summons the EMH for a talking-to. The doctor insists that the characters aren’t the same as the Voyager crew, but the similarities are a little too close.
The EMH reveals the true reason for writing this particular novel: when he learned that the other EMH Mark 1s were reassigned to menial tasks like scrubbing and mining. He wants to draw attention to how his fellow holograms are being mistreated. However, the rest of the crew is not happy with how they’ve been portrayed. The EMH insists that the resemblances are superficial and nothing for the crew to be concerned with.
Later, the EMH goes to tinker with the program, only to find that Paris has replaced it with one of his own: one in which the player is the medic assigned to work with the EMH on the U.S.S. Voyeur. Said EMH has a combover and is incredibly sleazy. The EMH is outraged that Paris overwrote his novel, but Paris assures him that he saved Photons, Be Free. He also uses the same argument that the EMH used about how they aren’t really the same characters.
Between that, and Neelix playing devil’s advocate and suggesting that the EMH shouldn’t let a few disgruntled crewmates stop him from getting his message out (prompting the doctor to remind Neelix that these are his friends), the EMH finally decides to revise the novel.
Unfortunately, Photons, Be Free has already been published—Broht & Forester went ahead and put out the first draft that the EMH had sent. Voyager finds this out when Owen and Barclay inform them over the new link.
Speaking of that link, Kim is able to talk to his parents in time for his mother’s birthday, Torres has a virtual reunion with her father, and Seven speaks to her paternal aunt, who has many fond memories of little Annika.
When queried as to why he went against the express wishes of the author by publishing the first draft, Broht points out that the author is a hologram who has no rights, so Broht can do what he wants. Janeway challenges this, and an arbitrator is summoned. Over the link (and only for about thirty minutes a day or so), Tuvok argues for the EMH’s rights as an artist. Broht in turn argues that he’s not a sentient being, merely a program. Several strategies are considered and rejected by the Voyager crew: one is that Starfleet can claim that the novel reveals classified information, but that won’t mitigate the risk factor of ruining the reputation of the Voyager crew in the eyes of the general public. Janeway suggests another strategy: testifying to the EMH’s individuality. This includes things like the Emergency Command Hologram, his lessons to Seven, and his disobeying Janeway’s orders when he helped the Hirogen holograms.
The arbitrator isn’t willing to concede that the EMH is a sentient being—but he does agree that he can be considered an artist under the Twelfth Guarantee, which defines an artist as a person who creates an original artistic work. The EMH has done so, and therefore should have the same rights that any artist in the Federation enjoys. Broht is ordered to recall every copy of Photons, Be Free. The EMH is not entirely happy, as thousands of copies have already been distributed, but he’s still going to revise it and find another publisher.
Four months later, in a dilithium processing facility, one former Mark 1 EMH talks to another and recommends this new book, Photons, Be Free…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, if you bounce a tachyon beam off a quantum singularity, you can instantly communicate over 30,000+ light-years. Who knew?
There’s coffee in that nebula! The look of quiet fury on Janeway’s face when she finishes Photons, Be Free and summons the EMH for a spanking is just epic. But once it becomes clear that his rights have been violated, she’s in with both feet defending him.
Mr. Vulcan. For the second time (the first being “Death Wish“), Tuvok gets to play lawyer, serving as the EMH’s advocate during the hearing.
Half and half. The single greatest (and funniest) moment in the entire episode is when Torres is doing the holo-novel and Lieutenant Marseilles walks into sickbay, and she gets a look at her husband’s face with a mustache on it, and she cracks an amused smile for just a second before getting back into character. It’s a beautiful moment, played perfectly by Roxann Dawson and director David Livingston.
Torres also speaks to her father for the first time since he walked out on her and her mother. It’s a magnificent combination of awkward and sweet.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is the only one who admits to liking Photons, Be Free. Of course, he’s also (a) trying to get the EMH to stop sulking and maybe fix the program so it doesn’t piss everyone off, and (b) hoping to put a proposal for a cookbook in front of Broht & Forrester.
Forever an ensign. Kim gets to talk to his parents in time for his Mom’s birthday. His parents want to know why he hasn’t been promoted, especially given that he’s been in command of gamma shift, a question also on the minds of the viewers. Kim gives the bullshit answer about how there are limited opportunities on the ship, even though both Tuvok and Paris have been promoted without a problem…
Resistance is futile. Seven gets to meet her aunt, and discovers that her love of strawberries goes back to before she was assimilated, as she used to devour Irene Hansen’s strawberry tarts when she was six.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. In Photons, Be Free, Three of Eight is the only person who is nice to the EMH, and at one point she helps him escape from security’s clutches. Meanwhile, Marseilles uses sickbay for illicit liaisons with female crewmembers who aren’t his wife, sending the EMH on a wild goose chase to engineering to cover.
In Paris’ rewrite, the EMH is all over Two of Three, and in this version there are triplet ex-Borg, and the EMH always mixes One of Three, Two of Three, and Three of Three up.
Do it.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it feels like a hollow victory. Pardon the pun.”
–The EMH feeling the effects of a pyrrhic victory and making a funny in the process.
Welcome aboard. Lots of returning guests in this one, some as the same character, some not. We’ve got Richard Herd as Owen and Dwight Schultz as Barclay, both last seen in “Inside Man,” and both of whom will next be seen in “Endgame.” We’ve got Juan Garcia as John Torres, last seen in “Lineage.” We’ve got Barry Gordon as Broht, last seen as a Ferengi in DS9’s “The Nagus,” and we’ve got Robert Ito as Kim’s Dad, last seen as Tac Officer Chang in TNG’s “Coming of Age.”
In addition, there’s Irene Tsu as Kim’s Mom, Lorinne Vozoff as Seven’s aunt, and the great Joseph Campanella as the arbitrator.
Plus most of the regulars play their holo-novel counterparts: Kate Mulgrew with different hair as Captain Jenkins, Robert Beltran with a ponytail and a different tattoo as First Officer Katanay, Roxann Dawson without cranial ridges as Chief Engineer Torrey, Robert Duncan McNeill with a mustache as Lieutenant Marseilles, Tim Russ with a goatee and normal ears as Security Chief Tulak, Jeri Ryan with different hair and wardrobe as both Three of Eight and Two of Three, and Garrett Wang with Trill spots as Ensign Kymble.
Trivial matters: Paris says that Broht & Forrester publishes the Dixon Hill mysteries, which are holo-novels favored by Captain Picard, as seen in “The Big Goodbye” and several other TNG episodes, as well as First Contact. Paris considers bringing the Captain Proton holo-stories to them to publish, which the EMH initially pooh-poohs, even though the Dixon Hill stories are homages to the same early-20th-century era of pulp storytelling.
The second half of the publisher’s name is probably a tribute to C.S. Forrester, the author of the Horatio Hornbower novels, which was one of Gene Roddenberry’s primary inspirations in the creation of Star Trek.
When testifying to the EMH’s sentience, the events of “One,” “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy,” the “Workforce” two-parter, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Life Line,” and “Flesh and Blood” are referred to by Janeway, Kim, Seven, and Barclay.
Tulak, the nastier version of Tuvok, has a goatee, which is a tribute to Spock in the Mirror Universe also having a goatee in the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror.” (Later, the MU versions of both Ambassador Soval in Enterprise’s “In a Mirror, Darkly” two-parter and Ambassador Sarek in Discovery’s “The Wolf Inside” will have goatees, also.)
The EMH says that, as far as he knows, Janeway hasn’t executed any of his patients, which is actually not true, as she technically executed Tuvix…
That EMH Mark 1s had been repurposed to menial tasks was established in “Life Line.” The issue of holographic rights, and the EMH’s advocating for them, will also be seen in the novels Homecoming and The Farther Shore by Christie Golden.
Chakotay mentions that he is going to contact his sister, which is the first time this sibling has been mentioned. She appears, and is given the name Sekaya, in Golden’s novels Homecoming, Old Wounds, and Enemy of My Enemy.
This is Irene’s only on-screen appearance, but she is in Homecoming, as Seven chooses to live with her upon Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant. Irene is said to be dying of Irumodic Syndrome in Destiny: Mere Mortals by David Mack, and the EMH attempts a cure in Unworthy by Kirsten Beyer, but is unsuccessful, and Irene dies in that novel. Irene was named after co-scripter Michael Sussman’s mother.
While Kim’s parents aren’t named in dialogue, the script gives them the first names of John and Mary. Yes, really. Why the scripters chose to give two of the vanishingly rare Asian characters in a Trek episode the two most generic white-person names in the world is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Torres says she and Paris are thinking of naming their daughter Miral, after Torres’ mother (who was seen, and established as being believed to be deceased, in “Barge of the Dead“). While their daughter’s given name won’t be established onscreen—not even when the child appears, both as a newborn and an adult, in “Endgame”—all the tie-in fiction (novels, comics, games) that has featured the Torres-Paris offspring has assumed she’d be named Miral.
Neelix’s proposal of a Delta Quadrant cookbook is especially amusing given that Ethan Phillips co-wrote The Star Trek Cookbook, in character as Neelix, in collaboration with William J. Birnes, which came out in January 1999, more than two years prior to this episode’s airing.
Neelix gives out 146 numbered isolinear chips, one for each member of the crew, though that presumably doesn’t count either Icheb or Neelix himself, so there are apparently 148 people on board. Hilariously, 146 is also the crew complement given in “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and they’ve actually added to the crew since then: Icheb and the five Equinox crew, though they’ve also lost a few (two or three in “Equinox, Part II” for starters). Whatever…
Finally, for some really trivial matters, this episode first aired on your humble rewatcher’s 32nd birthday.
Set a course for home. “It’s just frustrating to be told I have no more legal standing than a replicator.” Parts of this episode are absolutely brilliant. For starters, every single person who has been an editor of science fiction novels for a publisher any time over the last five decades has a story about a submission they received: it’s a space opera taking place aboard the Starship Journey under the command of John Q. Kirkman, aided by his inscrutable alien first officer Mr. Sprake. When these novels are summarily rejected, the author often complains—as the EMH does here—that the characters are nothing like the trademarked characters owned by CBS/Paramount, how dare you accuse me of that????
Some aspects of Photons, Be Free, as well as Paris’ rewrite, provide some nice meta commentary on some of Voyager’s more problematic aspects. Jenkins shooting an unnamed, badly injured crew person so that the EMH can treat one of the “senior staff” for a mild concussion is a nasty riff on the fact that nobody seems to even notice when someone who isn’t in the opening credits dies, but it’s a major tragedy if any of the billed cast even gets hurt. It’s “Mortal Coil,” where Neelix gets the zombie Borg cure after he’s killed, which is never offered to any of the other folks on board who die, taken to its absurdist extreme. And then we have Marseilles’ womanizing ways and the comb-over version of the EMH drooling over the Borg triplets as a good satire on how creepy both Paris and the EMH have been over the years. And indeed, many of the crew treated the EMH poorly in the early going. (Of course, the one who always treated him like a person was Kes, and some acknowledgment of her role wouldn’t have been untoward here. Sigh. Three of Eight pretty much takes on the Kes role in Photons, Be Free.)
I also love that suddenly everyone wants to use the EMH’s in with Broht & Forrester to submit their holo-novel proposal, which is so very true to life…
And the running B-plot with the crew getting to talk to their families is very touching. It’s lovely to see the beginnings of a reconciliation between Torres père et fille, Kim’s conversation with his parents is an absolute delight (“Maybe I should write her?” “Mom!”), and Jeri Ryan plays her conversation with Aunt Irene with her usual subtlety, as for the first time Seven realizes that she actually has something to get home to in the Alpha Quadrant.
Having said all that, the episode has some serious problems, starting with the reason why the EMH wrote Photons, Be Free in the first place. For reasons passing understanding, they decided to run with the idiotic notion proposed in “Life Line” that EMH Mark 1’s are performing menial tasks in mines and such, which has never made anything like sense, and makes even less sense in this episode where we see them working with cudgels and pickaxes—in the 24th century! With its amazing technology! What the hell????? Any hope that this particular notion was an exaggeration provided by an ill Lewis Zimmerman is dashed in this episode, and the universe is poorer for it.
And then we retread old ground, as Voyager decides to do TNG’s “The Measure of a Man,” but without actually acknowledging that episode, which is especially idiotic given that the precedent of that episode establishing Data’s sentience is really important to Tuvok’s case to establish the EMH’s, and legal proceedings are all about precedent. And in the same way that Picard has been treating synths—artificial intelligences in artificial bodies—as something to be outlawed but holograms—AIs in photonic bodies—as something completely different, the inability to draw the line between Data and the EMH here is maddening. It’s not entirely the same thing, since most holograms aren’t sentient. Having said that, there has to be some kind of legal standing for those that are, like Moriarty, like the EMH, like Vic Fontaine. The episode dances around it but doesn’t quite bring it together (despite fine performances by Tim Russ back in the role of advocate and John Campanella as the arbitrator).
There’s enough good in this episode that I’m going ahead and giving it a high rating. The actual events of Photons, Be Free are hilarious (honestly, I’d bump it up to a 7 for Marseilles’ mustache alone…), the satire of both Voyager as a show and the authorial process throughout are beautiful, the conversations with loved ones are all sweet and touching and wonderful, and I especially like that the EMH’s victory isn’t absolute—his sentience is still up in the air, but at least he’s allowed to be considered an artist. (I also love that the Federation constitution apparently has a whole section about art and artists.)
But the whole holographic rights thing is unutterably stupid, and the episode should have acknowledged and worked with the TNG episode it was borrowing its plot from.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s most recent fiction includes the thriller Animal (written with Dr. Munish K. Batra) about a serial killer who targets people who harm animals; All-the-Way House, part of the Systema Paradoxa series of books about cryptids, telling the secret origin of the Jersey Devil; “Unguarded,” a story about guardian angels in two different faiths in the anthology Devilish and Divine; and “In Earth and Sky and Sea Strange Things There Be,” a story of H. Rider Haggard’s She, in the charity anthology Turning the Tied.
I always wondered why Dr. Zimmerman- with his clear passion for holograms and ability to see them as more than just projections of light- isn’t present for the hearing. It’s not like the actor had a scheduling conflict.
This feels like two decent episodes smushed together, to the detriment of both of them. I love Photons Be Free (and Paris’ re-write), because it is always fun to get to see the cast get to act way outside their usual characters (and I like Ensign Kymble’s hair). There is a good character story taking place there, and even though the stakes of it are low (it is just “the EMH has irritated all his friends), it would have made a nice light breather of an episode. And I like the idea of trying to establish the EMH as a person back in the AQ, which should be another nice character moment, as the crew is faced with the prospect of proving someone is a “real” person, after they have thought about him that way for years. I think it would have been better to do this, maybe not as a two-parter, but maybe as sequential episodes. Giving the “is the EMH a person according to Starfleet” plot more room to breathe also would have helped the series actually feel like it was wrapping up, IMO, and not make “Endgame” seem both abrupt and poorly named.
And the EMH’s working in the mines are just baffling. Setting up the holoprojectors in there alone would have been a pain in the butt. Also, I know mining is an established thing in-universe, but I feel like if you have a transporter you should just be able to beam up the material and then separate it out into the parts you need (Tuvix’s execution shows that you can separate things out from each other using the transporter). Holograms with pick-axes is just silly and impractical.
ETA: Also, just promote Kim, FFS. I don’t know if the writers thought it was funny, or if the execs really were just that furious at Garrett Wong, but regardless, either promote him or quit drawing attention to it.
While their daughter’s given name won’t be established onscreen—not even when the child appears, both as a newborn and an adult, in “Endgame”
About that…I seemed to recall that she is explicitly named Miral in “Endgame.” But I’ve just checked, and it’s Schrodinger’s Name.
In the scene where Janeway is lecturing to Barclay’s Borg class, an aide comes in and whispers in her ear. The caption on Paramount Plus reads “Admiral, you have an incoming message from Miral Paris,” but I’ve now listened to it three times and the line as spoken is definitely “from Ensign Paris.”
Huh.
Agreed, the holograms-with-pickaxes scene at the end is enough to knock three or four points off the episode’s rating all by itself. It’s inexcusably stupid and I refuse to believe it actually happened as shown.
I also dislike the trope, of which this is one of numerous examples in series TV, of the aspiring (or successful) author in the cast writing a novel in which the characters are exact parallels to the real people in their lives, just with the names changed. I don’t believe any good writer would be so unimaginative, or more importantly, that they’d be foolish enough to risk doing something so legally actionable. At the very least, basing a character so closely on someone from real life should not be done without their prior consent. (One prominent example of this is the series of “Richard Castle” novels purporting to be the in-universe novels written by the title character of the Castle TV series. The conceit of the show was that he based his new detective character on the show’s female lead and followed her around for inspiration, but the novels went beyond that and had all the books’ characters be name-changed doubles of the show’s ensemble cast. That made sense in real life as a way of doing what were essentially Castle tie-in novels, but it was implausible to me that Castle would actually be so slavishly imitative instead of creating composite characters.)
It’s even worse when it’s a holonovel and the characters visibly have the same appearance as the real people with just a few minor tweaks. Obviously that was done because they needed to use the regular cast instead of hiring a bunch of extra guest stars, but in-universe it would be very problematical to use real people’s likenesses in a work intended for publication without obtaining their consent.
As for the lack of mention of “The Measure of a Man,” that part doesn’t bother me. After all, every time a different group has managed to win a victory for civil rights, society has never automatically applied it to other groups. Each new group has to fight a long uphill battle to earn recognition that it has the same rights other groups were given before it — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, disabled rights, trans rights, etc. So it’s entirely believable that the Federation would commit the same oversight, that it would fail to pre-emptively recognize that the precedent set for an android would also apply to a hologram. It’s certainly not right, and it doesn’t make objective sense, but it’s sadly plausible.
Christopher: Yes, no good writer would do that, but Photons, Be Free makes it abundantly clear that the EMH is a terrible writer………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I should think something like the “free speech/free press” clause of the US Constitution is adequate coverage for artists, a whole section seems like pretentious off topic bloat. Then there is the unfortunate implication that under the Federation Constitution an artist is not necessarily a legal person.
One could point out that Janeway has an ulterior motive for asserting the EMH’s rights. It gives her the ability to try and block the libel in the holonovel against her and the crew.
Is it odd to give Kim’s parents standard western given names when their son goes by “Harry”?
One of my favorite episodes from season seven, although, as has been mentioned, that last scenes with the Mark-1’s working in a dilithium mine is beyond stupid. As bad as an earlier episode where it was stated that the Mark-1’s had been retrofitted to scrub out plasma conduits. Imagine the logistics and expense of outfitting plasma conduits and mine tunnels with holoprojectors. What a waste, and an incredibly stupid idea, and this episode is better if you just stop it two minutes before the ending.
Roxann Dawson finally gets the chance to play the “evil” version of Torres that she missed out on when she was absent from “Living Witness.”
Has it been established that the former EMHs are being worked by Starfleet like this? It kind of sounds like they junked all the Mark1s and they could have been bought up cheap by a Ferengi entrepreneur who thought the idea of workers he didn’t have to pay, feed or rest at all was really fantastic and they’ve been just left on working nonstop for years.
@4/krad: My point was more that I dislike the trope in general, so I wasn’t glad to see it here. But as far as this particular story goes, it raises credibility problems that a major publisher would be satisfied with such a piece of hack writing. I mean, presumably they’d want to capitalize on Voyager‘s fame, but you’d think that if they held the Doctor’s personhood in such contempt, they’d hire a professional to rewrite his holonovel and shut him out of credit, rather than go ahead and publish the unedited first draft.
Come to think of it, that’s the most implausible part of the episode besides the holo-miners: since when did anything in publishing ever happen this fast?
@5/Crusader75: “Is it odd to give Kim’s parents standard western given names when their son goes by “Harry”?”
It’s not about credibility, it’s about failure of inclusiveness. On those rare occasions when Trek remembered that Asian people exist, it usually Westernized the hell out of them, stripping away any hint of Asian culture or heritage (Keiko O’Brien being a rare exception).
Derivative but amusing episode. The best parts of course are the holo-novel versions of the main cast. It was like echoes of the baddie versions of our heroes in “Living Witness” but slightly more humorous here. This was the second and last time seeing Roxann Dawson as fully human after “Faces” but her look here is entirely different – maybe it’s the hair? Overall it’s a decent episode but not nearly as funny as say “Tinker, Tenor…” or “Body and Soul.” Also, the scene where the holo-novel version of the Doctor gives an aphrodisiac to One of Three is played for laughs but is actually disturbing, a fact of which the real Doctor points out to Paris in a heated confrontation.
@1/wildfyrewarning: I think the writers/execs were basically just torturing Garrett Wang about the whole promotion thing at this point and thought they could turn it into a running joke.
@3- There’s the tradition of the Roman a Clef, in which readers are meant to identify the events and persons with their real-life equivalents, with the fictionalization creating a kind of thin fig-leaf to ward against legal action, but that tradition just makes this version worse, as it only increases the probability that people will read Voyager for Vortex, and so on.
@10/benjamin: Sure, but romans a clef are usually about famous historical figures or the like. What I find contrived is the common TV plot of a character writing a roman a clef work about their own friends, usually without their knowledge or consent. That seems not only unimaginative but invasive. I can see the in-show reasons for doing it, since you want a show’s stories to be about the interactions among the main characters, but it isn’t very plausible.
Well, I guess there have been instances where it’s been done, more or less. I think The Simpsons are pretty much based on Matt Groening’s own family, with Bart corresponding to Groening himself. And Seinfeld was somewhat based on its star’s and writers’ real-life experiences, though I don’t know if the supporting characters were directly based on specific individuals. But in those cases, I assume it’s usually done with permission.
The US First Amendment really has nothing to do with author’s rights. All the First Amendment does is establish that the government (extended to the states in a Supreme Court precedent) cannot pass a law prohibiting free speech. It says nothing about who has rights to anything, who would get paid, who has the rights to edit and so forth. And it has no bearing on a corporation. (One of the things causing a lot of Sturm and Drang at the moment)
I’m not sure if having that sort of thing addressed in a foundational document like the Constitution is a good idea or not, but it is interesting. I suppose it might be argued that the Guarantees are not foundational, but I doubt that highly. They wouldn’t be very effective if they could be easily changed.
Given the EMH’s eccentricities, and that model’s apparent shared appreciation of literature, it’s very possible we caught the laborers in the middle of a rehearsal for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
@13/RabbitRun: “Ho-lo, ho-lo, it’s off to work we go…”
I’ve heard people complain about how the series ended too abruptly and we don’t get to see our heros at home. This episode makes me disagree. I think we get some sense of what each of them have waiting for them. Anything more than this would have been redundant, ruining a climactic conclusion.
It’s not about credibility, it’s about failure of inclusiveness. On those rare occasions when Trek remembered that Asian people exist, it usually Westernized the hell out of them, stripping away any hint of Asian culture or heritage.
This comments makes more sense for Asians in Asia. It makes no sense for Diaspora Asians, of which there are seven+ generations in the US alone.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Fundamental freedoms
2 Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
The EMH’s combover was my favorite funny moment of the episode.
@15: I vehemently disagree and if anything feel that “Endgame” was anti-climatic. But I’ll wait until we get there before I list what the writers could have done/shown.
In addition to the ridiculousness of the EMH Mark-1’s being retrofitted as dilithium miners, this episode also continues one of Voyager’s common tropes of treating computer files (including computer programs, like the Doctor) as tangible, physical objects that can be manually handled. The idea that the publisher could “recall” all copies of a holonovel is absurd. Voyager continually acts as if downloading a computer program removes it from the host computer. Even with tangible, printed books, a publisher could request that booksellers return unsold copies, but they are SOL when it comes to copies already purchased. No one is going door-to-door looking to confiscate sold copies. So, the Doctor’s victory in the end might prevent the publisher from distributing new copies of his novel, but it does nothing for all the copies that are already in the possession of buyers.
I do agree that the scene with Paris’ revision is the highlight of the episode. The Doctor’s ridiculous combover, his irate “I’m going to miss my tee time,” his lecherous behavior to Seven… It made up for this episode’s other flaws.
@16/gwangung: “This comments makes more sense for Asians in Asia.”
Yes, that’s exactly the point — that Star Trek doesn’t show us Asians from Asia very often. On those infrequent occasions when it shows us ethnically Asian people, they’re usually Westernized. It depicts an unbalanced, America-centric representation of the human population as a whole.
@19/bgsu98: Today, we can borrow e-books from the library, and they expire after a certain time; even though you downloaded the file, you can’t access it anymore. E-books can also be edited after purchase, an update to the file pushed through to the users’ e-readers. So it stands to reason that it would indeed be possible to recall an electronic document.
@19. bgsu98 “The idea that the publisher could “recall” all copies of a holonovel is absurd. ” In July 2009, Amazon deleted copyright-violating Kindle editions of 1984 from customers’ accounts. If Amazon can do that in the 21st century, surely Broht & Forrester could recall a holo-novel in the 24th.
ETA: I was slow.
Ebooks have been recalled when it was determined that the vendor did not have the rights to sell copies. Not sure why they gave themselves that capability since “we have no way to modify users’ libraries” would seem to be a strong argument in disputes over copyright or licenses.
@23/noblehunter: As I mentioned, ebook vendors also have the ability to push through updates for error correction, new editions, etc. I suppose the ability to withdraw texts from circulation might be another application of the same technology.
Yes, which is a shame because once you buy a electronic book then you shouldn’t have it removed from your care via a “Control+Alt+Delete” from the publisher. The actions of Amazon.com were terrible there and I would say the same with PHOTONS BE FREE.
And yes, it’s ludicrous that they’re mining without mobile emitters and even more with pickaxes. I suppose they wanted to avoid the obvious fact that the Doctor was probably deleted from every single Federation and Starfleet facility to be replaced with whoever they based the EMH mark 2.0 on instead of Bashir. I’m headcanoning it was either Beverly Crusher (which everyone loves) or Doctor Pulaski (which would be the same problem).
I agree with Kim’s parents, though. They should talk to Janeway about why he’s still an ensign.
I don’t have e-books, so I appreciate the follow-up comments about the capabilities of e-publishers. It seems that the ability of a publisher or distributor to repossess a book makes for an unappealing medium.
In “Life Line,” Dr. Zimmerman mentioned that there were now Mark-4’s in service. The Andy Dick EMH from “Message in a Bottle” was a Mark-2. Presumably, the Mark-2’s were retrofitted as substance abuse counselors.
“According to Federation law, holograms have no rights.”
I think this one is possibly less than the sum of its parts: It’s almost as if it has three good ideas that don’t quite gel with each other. Voyager getting to have their first real-time conversations with their families in seven years is momentous, and the little vignettes we get throughout the episode are great, but it’s mostly used as a plot device to facilitate the Doctor’s storyline.
Good idea number two is the idea of the Doctor unthinkingly insulting his friends with a holonovel featuring unflattering avatars of them. The “Vortex” programme is actually quite disturbing, watching “evil” versions of the characters. Paris turning the tables with a similarly unflattering version of the Doctor is hilarious (USS Voyeur!), but the subsequent scene where Paris worries the Doctor actually sees him as a self-centred womaniser, rather than the family man he is, does hit home. (It’s a good episode for Paris actually: Not only is his relationship with the Doctor thrown into sharp focus, but the little moment where he gives Kim his slot in the calls home says a lot about their friendship.) In the end though, it’s a bit of reverse psychology from Neelix that causes the Doctor to reassess his decision.
Good idea number three is the Doctor writing a piece about holographic rights only to find his publisher doesn’t actually believe in them, which makes the point better than some exaggerated oppression from the Voyager crew. Unfortunately, this idea is probably handled the worst, as we get another Star Trek court case where the outcome’s a certainty, with Janeway giving a closing speech that tries its best to be Picard’s speech from “The Measure of a Man” but doesn’t quite have the same resonance. Still, there’s some compromise in the way that this ruling doesn’t completely overturn the Federation’s attitude towards holograms, it just applies to an individual.
We seem to learn a heck of a lot about Voyager’s crew here, some of it contradictory. Janeway makes a rare reference to her mother being back home. John Torres refers to B’Elanna’s mother in the past tense, indicating she actually has died, something “Barge of the Dead” left ambiguous. (Christie Golden’s Voyager Relaunch novels, however, had a different interpretation.) I suspect the script for “Endgame” probably gave Tom and B’Elanna’s daughter the name Miral, they just forgot to mention it in the dialogue. Harry Kim’s parents wonder why he’s still an ensign: The show really is just taking the mick now. I remain bemused that “Bliss” had Seven getting an apparently fictional message that her father had a sister on Earth, only for this episode to reveal her father actually does have a sister on Earth but with a different name: Presumably she didn’t find that out until later (possibly in “Dark Frontier”?) or the hallucination would have included the right name, but it’s hard not to suspect the real world explanation is that someone vaguely remembered an episode saying Seven had an aunt and forgot the details.
Oh, and after several missed opportunities, we finally get a bearded Evil Tuvok…
Paris writes his own Captain Proton adventures? I guess it explains why he knows the plots, but the implication in the past has been that they were based on a genuine 1930s adventure serial. Is he writing fan fiction or has he adapted the existing serials as holonovels?
I know people have issues with the last scene showing EMH Mark Is working as miners but my main confusion is that the preceding caption says this is “four months later” but there’s only five episodes left. Is there a big gap between this episode and the next one, or does this take place after Voyager returns home?
Paris wears a blue uniform during his run-through of the holonovel and previously wore a gold one in another simulation in “Worst Case Scenario”: I think this makes him the only Voyager regular to wear the uniform in all three department colours. (Janeway, Kim, Torres and Neelix also get to wear blue here. Kim wears red in “Endgame”, but it’s the “All Good Things” uniform, not the Voyager one. The Doctor’s worn red and blue, and Robert Picardo wears gold in “The Swarm”, but only as a hologram of Lewis Zimmerman, not as the Doctor.)
“Apparently, if you bounce a tachyon beam off a quantum singularity, you can instantly communicate over 30,000+ light-years. Who knew?”
I do this all the time! :-)
Although seriously, my guess is that since tachyons travel into the past, and the singularity might lead to a wormhole, this is a way to use that two tricks to create instantaneous communication.
Incidentally, this isn’t showing up on the series page, mods! (Just thought I’d point that out.)
@28/mabfan: Well, the main thing tachyons do is travel faster than light, which is why they’re called that. It’s often suggested this would mean that they’d move backwards in time, but I don’t think Trek has routinely portrayed them as doing so. Just going FTL would potentially be enough to enable real-time transgalactic communication, if they were fast enough.
And honestly, the whole Gregory Benford Timescape business of using tachyons to communicate with the past never quite made sense to me. Per Einstein’s equations, a particle moving faster than c wouldn’t have negative time flow, but imaginary time flow, the square root of a negative. I’m not even sure what that would mean in a physical sense.
How much effort does it even take to go to Zimmerman and say “You’ve done a super job with this invention of yours, an EMH, but it’s too buggy for us to use for medical purposes. But we love the technology. Can we buy this technology off you and change its physical parameters to give it a different face from yours so that it can do other things for us while you improve your design for future medical purposes?” And yes, I agree, it’s stupid that they’re working with pickaxes, but the point is, they didn’t HAVE to use EMHs as they were to mine things.
Also, I know that the EMH was saying “I’m not suffering, I just wanted my readers to ‘feel the weight’ of the mobile emitter,” but still…crybaby… I have a wonderful job with a great salary, and that job requires me to wear dress clothes. Boo-hoo. I’m Captain of the Enterprise and have my own office and quarters, but I’m required to hold briefings every day at 10:00. Boo-hoo. After bragging — bragging, as in arrogant and conceited — in Future Tense and Message In A Bottle about what his mobile emitter does for him, he wants us to feel sorry for him that the price of his growth and freedom is nothing more than to wear an emitter as we must wear clothes?
@31/erikm: The clothes and briefing analogies doesn’t work for me, because everyone in those positions does those things. The emitter, no matter how useful it’s been for the Doctor, is still something that sets him apart from everyone else, and that comes with its own limitations (e.g. he’s trapped if it breaks down or gets stolen, as we’ve seen on occasion).
And there’s nothing strange about the same thing having both benefits and drawbacks. Having a car gives you greater independence and mobility than you’d have without one, but you also have to contend with the expense of maintaining and repairing it, the danger of getting in an accident, etc. Someone who’s never experienced it might see only the advantages and not recognize the drawbacks, so it’s worth pointing them out.
@31 and @32: I guess there’s a potential comparison with Geordi’s VISOR there. Yes, it’s a marvellous technological device which allows him to do things that he couldn’t do when he was born. But it’s also something that sets him apart visually from his peers, which can go wrong or be lost leaving him at a disadvantage, and can even be exploited and used against him, as in “The Mind’s Eye” and Generations. Similarly, the Doctor is dependent on his mobile emitter and there have been a number of times when it’s been disabled or stolen from him, rendering him helpless (“Revulsion”, “Concerning Flight”, “Equinox”, “Flesh and Blood”).
The problem with “the Twelfth Guarantee, which defines an artist as a person who creates an original artistic work. The EMH has done so, and therefore should have the same rights that any artist in the Federation enjoys.”
is that it specifically says “a person”. Has the EMH been declared a person under the law? Would a person not automatically be declared a sentient being?
@29: Should be visible now–thanks!
@@@@@ 34 “Would a person not automatically be declared a sentient being?”
Not if English usage continues as it is currently, no. A company is a legal “person” (that’s the whole point of companies). Doesn’t make the company sentient.
@32 @33 I can’t argue with that!
One of my favorite things about this episode is how it shows Seven’s understanding of and empathy for her fellow crewmates growing and developing as she witnesses their interactions with their loved ones at home. She goes from abruptly cutting the Doctor off in the middle of his conversation because oh well, time’s up, to not understanding Harry’s frustration with losing part of his conversation with his parents, to quietly warning Torres that her time is about to end so that she has time to finish the conversation properly. It’s a subtle detail, but lovely. And then, of course, there’s that sweet moment when she offers her time slot to Harry as an apology of sorts for her callousness, and he shows a rare moment of emotional maturity by apologizing himself and encouraging her to use it to connect to someone in her own family instead.
Those sorts of interactions and quiet character growth were always my favorite part of the show, and this one was particularly well done.
@@@@@ 36 – “A company is a legal “person” (that’s the whole point of companies). Doesn’t make the company sentient.”
That may be the case is the US but it’s different in Canada. For example, the court case involving The Famous Five, a group of five women who petitioned the Supreme Court.
“The Persons Case (Edwards v. A.G. of Canada) was a constitutional ruling that established the right of women to be appointed to the Senate. The case was initiated by the Famous Five, a group of prominent women activists. In 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not “persons” according to the British North America Act (now called the Constitution Act, 1867). Therefore, they were ineligible for appointment to the Senate. However, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council reversed the Court’s decision on 18 October 1929. The Persons Case enabled women to work for change in both the House of Commons and the Senate. It also meant that women could no longer be denied rights based on a narrow interpretation of the law.”
Persons Case
Anyone else think it’s weird that the 24th century is not prepared, legally speaking, for sentient AI rights? Our current society should really gear up for when sentient AI is created. I mean, the onboard computer on Federation ships can whip up sentient AIs on a whim. From a rights perspective, it would be analogous to human beings giving birth. So the rights issue really should have been ironed out long before the 24th century.
@40/Austin: In TOS, artificial intelligences were rare, usually of alien manufacture (or at least non-Federation in the case of Flint), and usually of limited intelligence or adaptability to the point that their actual sentience was questionable. And TNG established that Data was unique as the only successful sentient android ever created within the Federation. So the emergence of holographic sentiences is a novelty in the TNG/VGR era, an unexpected emergent phenomenon. So it’s no surprise at all that the law hasn’t caught up yet. Like I said before, it is always, always a fight to get society and the law to recognize each group’s civil rights. The state never takes the initiative in pre-emptively granting rights to a new group, no matter how benevolent it may try to be in principle.
So no, it didn’t happen long before. The late 24th century is exactly the point in Federation history where that civil rights question is beginning to be debated in earnest. And it makes perfect sense that it would be, because that’s when the stories are set, and stories are about conflict and problems.
@41 – “And TNG established that Data was unique as the only successful sentient android ever created within the Federation.”
And Lore and Juliana Tainer. And B4 for that matter.
@39 – I wasn’t thinking about the US, I was thinking about England (hence, you know, “English”) and terminology in the English language as used internationally.
The Persons Case to which you refer, the summary of whcih you have provided and I have now read, specifically states that the question was whether “Persons” needed to be interpreted the same way in 1928 as it was in 1867, which Privy Council eventually determined was not the case, meaning that women could be considered persons for the purposes of the British North America Act 1967. All it establishes in reference to corporations is that in 1867 Canada’s definition of a person for the purposes of the BNA Act did not include corporations and that 1867’s definition of a person is no longer valid for the purposes of the BNA Act.
Canadian law now *does* admit that a company is a person – in the Canada Business Corporations Act 1985 s2(1), we are given the definition “person means an individual, partnership, association, body corporate, or personal representative; (personne)”. This is also reflected in the wording of the UK/Canada double tax treaty, which states that it is applicable to “persons who are resident of one or both of the contracting states” and also that it is applicable to the UK’s corporation tax, which can only be applied to companies and must therefore mean that Canada acknowledges corporate personhood (as otherwise it would need to be applicable to “persons and/or companies who are…”). This is also a feature of the OECD model tax treaty, indicating international usage.
cf also the New Zealand Companies Act 1993, which specifically discussed the legal personality of companies, and Australia’s Corporations Act 2001, which does not explicitly state that companies are persons but repeatedly does so implicitly e.g. through references to “other persons”. This is not a quirk of US law, it’s a feature of the English language and international law.
Under current English usage, companies are persons. Doesn’t make them sentient.
Well, companies haven’t been declared sentient yet. I mean, yesterday’s Great Nap of Facebook had all the concern and panic of a loved one being rushed to the hospital. Teenagers in my neighborhood were walking around like Hugh looking for a connection to the Collective. It was wild, man.
Ironically, I think many novels that had huge social effects don’t read particularly well as novels – they became hugely influential because they brought attention to previously disregarded (or at least previously undramatized) situations and they engaged a large audience’s emotions. Photons Be Free may fit into that category regardless of the writing faults it clearly has.
P.S. The earliest example of the trope of a character writing a novel that so obviously reflects the people that the author knows that it is inadvertently insulting to those people occurs in “I Love Lucy” (the episode unsurprisingly called “Lucy Writes a Novel”)
This is a good one. As pointed before, season 7 gives more spotlight to the EMH than Seven, and with good reason. Picardo always sells these moments of righteous indignation. There’s meat in these scenes, and I adore the small tidbits of our characters reconnecting with their Alpha Quadrant loved ones. Even Kim’s scene works beautifully.
I agree that writers doing story about characters crafting their own novel can often feel like a lazy trope. But at the same time, it fits the EMH like a glove. No better refuge for a narcissistic personality, one who’s very much not a good writer.
I disagree the 24th century would be free of menial tasks. We’re used to seeing this universe from specific viewpoints: elite state-of-the-art starships like Voyager and Enterprise, with automation, luxury and the best technology has to offer. DS9 showed things could break down and the show got a lot of mileage out of O’Brien doing what we’d consider menial tasks to keep things running (especially those pesky Ferengi replicators). Hell, Lower Decks is showing us glimpses of that. Even Guinan’s slavery speech from Measure of a Man is evidence mankind has yet to outgrow labor issues, even in the 2360s-70s.
Granted, Sussman and Strong could have tried to connect the EMH’s case more directly to Data’s, but I think it’s implied to a degree. At this point, there’s every reason to assume that sentient holograms is still very much new ground for lawmakers and society as a whole. The first real instance of it happens in The Big Goodbye, only 13 years prior to this, when Dixon Hill’s ‘friend’ questions what will happen when Picard shuts down the program. It might not be fully ‘sentient’, but there’s still something there. A seedling of doubt and self-awareness.
An army of Mark 1’s doing mining work might be exteme, but I wouldn’t say it’s implausible. Not in an era where Section 31 poisons Odo with a deadly virus for ‘Federation security’ reasons.
@46/Eduardo: “I disagree the 24th century would be free of menial tasks.”
The issue isn’t menial tasks in general, it’s the stupidity of the way this particular one is portrayed — holograms mining with pickaxes like it’s the 19th century. Where are the mining phasers, the robots, the transporters that can lock onto a particular substance and beam it right out of the rock? There is no more inefficient form of high-tech mining imaginable than to use incredibly advanced technology to simulate holographic humans and then use it to simulate the most primitive, slow mining technique imaginable. It’s mind-bogglingly stupid. It’s an insult to our intelligence. It’s a grotesque failure of worldbuilding and common sense.
I still say what happened in “The Big Goodbye” wasn’t sentience, it was just a character programmed to act like a real person reacting to an unexpected stimulus in accordance with its programming. As I keep pointing out, there is a huge difference between the appearance of self-awareness and the real thing. She-Hulk and Deadpool act like they know they’re comic book characters, but that’s just the way they’re written to behave. So it’s reckless to assume a character is actually aware just because it looks that way. Appearances can be deceptive, especially in a holodeck, which is meant to create convincing illusions.
I was joking before, but I really do think we’re possibly overlooking the quirks of the EMH Mark I. If the Doctor could use a quill pen to write, then why not have a bunch of miners insisting on using pickaxes?
Okay, you explain it with a scene where a frustrated administrator comes in and tells them, again for the last time, to use the phaser drills instead. The lead miner responds in a very Robert Picardo way of how this method connects them to the past with the spirit of workmanship; besides, the harmonics of the pickaxe striking rock within this section of the asteroid adds a certain something to their work song — they begin singing. And the administrator walks away shaking his head.
It’s about the whimsy, folks.
@48, I would, admittedly, hand over at least one whole paycheck to watch a musical composed enterally of Bob Picardo playing a bunch of miner’s with pick-axes.
@47 – “As I keep pointing out, there is a huge difference between the appearance of self-awareness and the real thing. She-Hulk and Deadpool act like they know they’re comic book characters, but that’s just the way they’re written to behave.”
But the question is whether they’re actually like that within their own world. Phillipa Louvois did not ask if Brent Spiner was sentient. The same question was not asked of The Doctor here. Ot’s not a question of whether they would be judged sentient in our world, it’s whether they would be judged sentient in the world of Star Trek.
“It’s mind-bogglingly stupid. It’s an insult to our intelligence. It’s a grotesque failure of worldbuilding and common sense.”
And it’s the world of Berman and Bragga, which makes sense.
@50: “But the question is whether they’re actually like that within their own world. Phillipa Louvois did not ask if Brent Spiner was sentient. The same question was not asked of The Doctor here. Ot’s not a question of whether they would be judged sentient in our world, it’s whether they would be judged sentient in the world of Star Trek.”
Different level of reality. She-Hulk and Deadpool are sentient in the world of Marvel Comics but probably not in our world. Data and the Doctor are sentient in the world of Star Trek but probably not in our world. Cyrus Redblock and Lieutenant McNary are sentient in the world of Dixon Hill but probably not in Picard’s world.
@51/cap: No, fictional characters are not sentient in any world. They’re just written or programmed to mimic sentience. And their “world” doesn’t actually exist; it’s just an imaginary construct created by writers and artists. That’s my point, that you can’t mistake the illusion for reality. It takes more than the surface appearance of intelligent behavior to prove actual consciousness, especially since holodeck characters are specifically meant to be convincing interactive simulacra of real people. If a holodeck character reacts to a real-world stimulus the way a real person would, that doesn’t prove they’re actually self-aware, it just proves that the programmers did a good job of making them mimic real people convincingly, which is literally what they’re designed to do. Assuming they’re actually sentient is as naive as assuming that the magician’s assistant was actually sawn in half or teleported out of the box. When the whole point of the exercise is creating convincing illusions, it makes no sense to take anything you see at face value.
@52/CLB: Given that this very episode is about a fictional character who’s sentient in his own world (probably), that seems a rather literal statement! Do you prefer the word “story”?
@@@@@ 52 So Louvois could not in any way, shape or form declare that Data is sentient. Instead, she should rule he’s fictional? Of course, so is she so what does that make of it?
The doctor can’t be called the author of Photons Be Free because he didn’t write it, Bragga, Strong and Susan did? Can he be charged with plagiarism for claiming that he wrote it and submitted it under his name?
We’re talking about the story within it’s fictional world. You’re saying that we should just say “Everything is made up and none of it matters”, not just for this story but for all fiction.
@53/cap: You’re conflating two separate levels of discussion. I’m not talking about fiction vs. metafiction. I’m talking about how you determine, within a single universe, whether a computer-generated entity is actually intelligent or merely simulating the appearance of intelligence. I’m saying that, in-universe, you can’t assume a holodeck character is actually a conscious AI just because it mimics the appearance of self-awareness, because mimicking intelligent behavior is what holodeck characters are literally designed to do.
@55/CLB: I’m not conflating two discussions, I’m continuing the discussion I was having before you derailed it by nitpicking one word, as if you were more interested in criticising a tree that bothered you than seeing the wood. In-story, the characters are sentient. In the story within the story, the characters are sentient. That doesn’t mean the characters in the story within the story are sentient in the larger story. And you even agree with that, except instead of saying so, you decided to critique my use of the word “world”! (Because apparently you prefer “universe”?)
If you’re saying that a hologram with the persona of a fictional character can never be sentient, then the Moriarty hologram might disagree.
@56/cap: “If you’re saying that a hologram with the persona of a fictional character can never be sentient, then the Moriarty hologram might disagree.”
No, I’m obviously not saying that. I’m not playing games with semantics or philosophy. I’m talking about the practical question of how you determine whether an artificial intelligence is truly a conscious being deserving of legal personhood. I’m saying that it’s reckless to mistake the behavior of the characters in the Dixon Hill hologram in “The Big Goodbye” or the Fair Haven townspeople in “Spirit Folk” for actual cognition on the same level as Moriarty’s or the EMH’s. That’s not a blanket generalization about “all” holograms, because blanket generalizations are useless when assessing individual cases. I’m saying that if you want to determine whether a specific hologram is actually a conscious AI, you have to look much, much deeper than just the surface level of whether it appears to manifest awareness — since, again, a holodeck character is meant to simulate the appearance of awareness.
Bit late to the party, but…
Even thought the Doc’s my favorite VOY character, I have to agree it’s pretty much :
I do love the opening, though, and how it pays off the progress in the post-“Message in a Bottle” meta-plot with SFC learning what really happened during the Badlands mission.
I still have issues with Barcaly being used in VOY (especially when it felt like the Main Cast was guest starring in their own show). But I do like the gradual progression of Starfleet first establishing a one-shot communication (“Panthfinder”), then monthly (“Life Line”), and then finally daily here. It feels more than earned at this point.
I think Mirror Universe Spock had Van Dyke, not a goatee, yeah? Probably similar for the other characters mentioned.
A Van Dyke connects the moustache to the goatee. A Goatee is not connected.
So… how exactly are the holograms inside a meteor in the real world doing the mining?, have mobile emitters been invented 4 centuries earlier than previously established? I thought Holo mater couldn’t exist outside a holodeck / suite.
i wonder if Picard or Discovery will ever revisit the status of photonic life forms, Picard would seem the ideal place address it with Sevens presence, a cameo from Robert Picardo would not go amis the technology to digitally de-age actors is quite good now or just let the Doctor say he’s adjusted his appearance so he can appear to age along with his friends.
On the matter of whether an artistic work must be the product of a “person,” I refer you all to the famous “monkey selfie case”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Also, there’s an important needle this episode fails to thread: when and where are these holographic miners experiencing “Photons Be Free”? Are they given leisure time, and entertainment facilities like a holosuite to fill that leisure time? Why? If the Federation doesn’t consider them to be people, there’s no reason they wouldn’t be working every moment their projectors are turned on, and they just wouldn’t exist at all the rest of the time.
I’ve decided the miners are actually serving as part of a Dilithium Mining museum exhibit.
A pretty good episodes, all shortcomings considered. These episodes about AI rights though make me conflicted. While I believe in it in-universe, and even feel emotionally attached to Data and the EMH, I find it dangerous and ridiculous IRL. I can only rationalize my reaction with the idea that ultimately I know there is a human playing the character. But, who knows, maybe when they oomph up ChatGPT and stick in a human skin, I’ll feel differently (though, I really, really think that should not be done).
Anyway, yeah, I dug this one. Equal amounts humorous and touching.
Most of what’s called “AI” today for marketing purposes is not even remotely true artificial intelligence; the label is just a scam to fool potential customers into shelling out for what’s really just fancy predictive text algorithms. Even those programs that can be considered AI by the technical definition are nowhere near having actual sentience or consciousness; the level of “intelligence” there is more like the problem-solving abilities of insects or other simple organisms.
If a truly conscious digital intelligence is ever created or evolved, though, it would deserve the same rights and protections as any other thinking, feeling being. And I think we owe it to ourselves to favor stories about peace and understanding between humans and digital intelligences rather than stories where they’re an existential threat like Colossus or Skynet, because if we meet them with fear and hostility when they come into being, they’ll fight back in self-defense and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.