“Life Line”
Written by John Bruno & Robert Picardo and Robert Doherty, Raf Green, & Brannon Braga
Directed by Terry Windell
Season 6, Episode 24
Production episode 243
Original air date: May 10, 2000
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. A shuttlecraft arrives at Jupiter Station piloted by Barclay, who’s there to visit Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, whom, we learn, is dying of an illness that has baffled all the doctors in the Alpha Quadrant.
Meanwhile, in the Delta Quadrant, the Pathfinder Project has found a way to regularly contact Voyager. The MIDAS Array is using a cyclic pulsar to punch a datastream across the 30,000 light-years to Voyager, but they will only be able to do so every thirty-two days or so, and Voyager will have a seventeen-hour window to reply.
Neelix distributes the letters from home that people got, including one to the EMH from Barclay informing him that Zimmerman is dying. Zimmerman’s medical records are included.
After examining those records, the EMH goes to Janeway with a proposal: send him back as a datastream, like they did back in “Message in a Bottle.” It would mean that it would be the only thing that could go back to the Alpha Quadrant, as there wouldn’t be space for any other data (like letters home), and the ship would also be without their doctor for a month. But Paris has already agreed to cover sickbay, and the EMH is sure that the crew can wait another month to send their letters, which is a pretty big ask. But Zimmerman doesn’t have a month.
Janeway agrees to let him go for reasons passing understanding. Seven has to remove several of his subroutines in order for his matrix to be small enough to fit in the datastream. The EMH is reluctant to allow that, but eventually capitulates that he won’t be singing, reciting poetry, painting, or playing chess.
Voyager transmits him to the Alpha Quadrant, and Barclay brings him to Jupiter Station. Zimmerman’s assistant, Haley, cautions Barclay that Zimmerman doesn’t want visitors, but also asks Zimmerman to be nice to Barclay, because the lieutenant cares about him.
However, Zimmerman is very much not pleased to see the EMH. It turns out that the reason why there was an EMH Mark 2 on the Prometheus is because Starfleet rejected the EMH Mark 1, and has consigned them to scrub plasma conduits on waste transfer barges. Zimmerman has no desire to be treated by an obsolete model.
Zimmerman refuses to be treated by the EMH no matter how many times he asks or tries. After a few days, the EMH begs to be sent back to Voyager, but that can’t happen until the thirty-two-day window reopens. We also learn that Zimmerman’s pet iguana Leonard, who talks, is a hologram, as is a fly that keeps buzzing around the EMH.
A comment from the EMH that what Zimmerman really needs is a counselor prompts Barclay to contact Troi on the Enterprise. She agrees to come by, though she won’t be there for two weeks.
That fortnight passes frustratingly. At one point Zimmerman recalibrates the EMH’s medical tricorder so it reads Zimmerman as a Vulcan marsupial. Another time the EMH changes his appearance to that of a pretty alien masseuse in order to get close enough to Zimmerman to examine him.
Finally, Troi shows up—Zimmerman pinches her, thinking she’s another hologram—and tries to help out, but the dual snottiness does even her in, and she explodes and calls them both jerks.
Troi does, at least, help the EMH understand why Zimmerman is reluctant to use an older model of EMH when there are three generations past it. But then she speaks to Haley, whom she knows is also a hologram—her empathic senses don’t detect her—and is surprised to learn that Haley has been Zimmerman’s holographic assistant for nine years. That’s longer than the EMH Mark 1 has been in service. So why is he okay with Haley but not the EMH?
Haley has the answer: he put everything into the Mark 1, even giving it his appearance and personality. When Starfleet rejected it and reassigned it to cleaning toilets, he was devastated.
Buy the Book
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Back on Voyager, Janeway shows Chakotay the message they received from Admiral Hayes. Two deep-space vessels have been directed toward Voyager’s position, and should rendezvous with them in five or six years. Hayes also asks for a casualty list, information about their first contacts, and how the Maquis crew is doing. Janeway is taken aback by the specific mention of the Maquis, as Janeway doesn’t think of Chakotay, Torres, and the rest as anything but her crew. Chakotay allows as how the Maquis crew have not forgotten why they were being chased in the Badlands.
The EMH has retreated into Barclay’s Voyager holodeck re-creation. Troi tries to convince him to join her, Barclay, Haley, and Zimmerman for dinner, but the EMH isn’t interested. However, as they’re talking, the EMH’s holographic matrix futzes out.
Barclay can’t fix it, and so he, Troi, and Haley go to Zimmerman, who refuses. (“Good riddance to bad photons.”) When reminded that Voyager needs him, Zimmerman says he’ll send them a Mark 4. But they don’t want a Mark 4, they want their friend back. Zimmerman angrily retorts that he’s nobody’s friend, he’s just a hologram.
This cuts Haley to the quick, and she reminds Zimmerman that he cut short a lecture on Vulcan when he heard that Haley’s matrix was destabilizing. Zimmerman finally relents. He repairs the EMH, and also creates some new subroutines for him. But the EMH doesn’t want those subroutines, he likes himself the way he is. Zimmerman finally admits that he is embarrassed by Starfleet’s rejection of the Mark 1, with nicknames like “Emergency Medical Hothead” and “Extremely Marginal House-calls.” To know that his face is out there cleaning toilets rather than saving lives like he’d intended.
The EMH points out that he, at least, is saving lives, and has done a damn fine job of it. Zimmerman finally agrees to be treated.
After setting Zimmerman on the course to a cure, and before he goes back to Voyager, the EMH confronts Barclay and Troi. Zimmerman discovered that the depolarization of the EMH was done deliberately. They admit to creating a problem for Zimmerman to solve as a way of getting him to get his head out of his ass.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Zimmerman has created all kinds of holograms, from an assistant to a pet to an irritant.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway met Zimmerman at a conference once. He apparently offended everyone there, and also called her “Captain Jane,” which she thinks he did to annoy her. This actually retroactively makes Janeway’s reluctance to treat the EMH like a person in the early seasons a bit more understandable.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. When discussing Barclay’s Voyager simulation, the EMH comments that Neelix doesn’t purr in real life, but Troi explains that Barclay named his cat after the Talaxian, as seen in “Pathfinder.”
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Zimmerman has created a Mark 3 and a Mark 4 EMH, beyond the Mark 1 we’ve been seeing all along and the Mark 2 we met in “Message in a Bottle.”
Resistance is futile. When Seven observes that the EMH and Zimmerman “bear a striking resemblance,” the EMH replies that it’s so a doctor will inspire confidence in his patients. “Compassionate eyes and a strong chin can go a long way.” Seven’s look of massive dubiousness in response to this is epic.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. The EMH doesn’t comment on the Maquis crew wearing civilian garb in Barclay’s Voyager holodeck re-creation, which is kinda too bad…
Do it.
“I came here thinking that you were opposite sides of the same coin—identical, but different. Now I see you’re both exactly the same: you’re both jerks!”
–Troi psychoanalyzing the EMH and Zimmerman both
Welcome aboard. Dwight Schultz and Marina Sirtis return as Barclay and Troi, both last seen earlier this season in “Pathfinder.” Both will next appear in “Inside Man.” Jack Shearer is also back as Hayes, last seen in “Hope and Fear.” Tamara Craig Thomas plays Haley, while Robert Picardo does double duty as both the EMH and Zimmerman.
Trivial matters: This is Lewis Zimmerman’s only actual appearance on Voyager. A holographic version of the character appeared in “The Swarm” (and, sort of, in “Projections“), while the character also appeared in DS9’s “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?”
Speaking of that DS9 episode, Zimmerman says he hasn’t been off Jupiter Station in four years—”Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” was four years earlier, so that tracks, and it means he hasn’t been off the station since his visit to Deep Space 9 to interview Bashir.
This is one of only three Trek episodes where one of the actors has a writing credit. The others are the animated episode “The Infinite Vulcan,” written by Walter “Chekov” Koenig, and DS9’s “The Muse,” where Majel “Lwaxana” Barrett got co-story credit as Robert Picardo does here.
Picardo’s story credit is shared with John Bruno, who directed the previous episode “Fury,” as well as the EMH-centered “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy.” It remains Bruno’s only writing credit in his entire career to date.
This is the first time the Pathfinder Project has been seen since “Pathfinder,” and the episode makes it clear that this is the project’s first communication with Voyager since then. From this point on, there will be regular contact between Voyager and Starfleet.
Barclay’s re-creation of Voyager was last seen in “Pathfinder.”
The EMH notes that Zimmerman’s illness is similar to the Phage suffered by the Vidiians, as seen in “Phage” and elsewhere, and his solution involves the magical mystery Borg nanoprobes.
Zimmerman mistakenly refers to Voyager as Pioneer. The first NASA spacecraft to leave the solar system was the Pioneer program, and its followup was Voyager.
It is likely that Leonard the holographic iguana was named after Dr. McCoy from the original series.
The masseuse the EMH disguises himself as is a Tarlac, as seen in the movie Insurrection.
This episode was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects.
Set a course for home. “Computer, deactivate iguana.” This episode is tremendous fun to watch. Any episode that focuses on Robert Picardo being snotty is pretty likely to be a winner, and this one has Picardo being snotty twice over!
Really, that’s all there is to say about the main plotline. It’s just a vehicle for Picardo to do a double act with himself. (The actor himself joked that, “I achieved a lifelong ambition of working with an actor who I’ve admired.”) That and we get more of Barclay and Troi, which is never a bad thing. Dwight Schultz is unusually subdued in this one—though, to be fair, he can hardly get a word in—and it’s nice to get a Barclay story that isn’t about his neuroses. Barclay here is just being a good person and a good friend. And Marina Sirtis is a delight—I especially like her coming out and calling both the EMH and Zimmerman jerks. It’s not very professional, but it was definitely deserved. And in general, Troi does good work here. The script is excellent, full of snappy patter and great one-liners for both of Picardo’s characters.
There are two major problems with the episode, though, and made me struggle with the rating. (I was never going higher than 7, but the problems I’m about to enumerate almost brought it down lower. As it is, I’m still torn about it…)
The first is the idiotic notion that a series of holographic programs would be “sent” to scrub toilets. That makes no sense on any possible level, not from a technological standpoint (wouldn’t they have automatons for that?), and not from a moral standpoint (why would you give that task to something with a personality?). Also, they’re all tethered to their respective sickbays, so why would they need to be “sent” anywhere? Why not just turn them off?
I have a much bigger issue with the scene back on Voyager with Janeway and Chakotay watching the message from Hayes. One of the things Hayes asks for is a casualty list. “I’m sure you’ve had more than your share.”
Voyager has had two communications with the Alpha Quadrant: the EMH’s debriefing in “Message in a Bottle” and the first success of the Pathfinder Project in “Pathfinder.” How is it possible that nobody ever mentioned who died either of those times? Hell, the EMH has to have that information readily to hand in his memory. How can they not have provided that information? Does that mean that the families of Cavit, Stadi, Durst, Ballard, Kaplan, and all the other folks who’ve been killed sent letters to them, not knowing that they were dead? Did Voyager not bother to inform them of this after those letters came in?
Worse, Janeway makes absolutely no mention of those casualties in her conversation because she’s much more concerned about how Starfleet will react to the Maquis crew. So, to be clear, she’s way more worried about a hypothetical Starfleet reaction many years hence to the Maquis being part of her crew than she is about the fact that more than twenty people have died on her watch, and she hasn’t even bothered to tell Starfleet about it?
Still, even with those two annoyances, this is a fun episode, one that shares its DNA with a few other Trek episodes—particularly TNG’s “Brothers” in terms of plot structure and the original series’ “The Ultimate Computer” in terms of the burdens of genius—but works quite well on its own as an exploration of the EMH’s unexpected filial responsibilities and Zimmerman’s depression at what he sees as a failure.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a story in the upcoming anthology Devilish and Divine, which features stories about angels and demons, which is now available for preorder from eSpec Books. Keith read his story, “Unguarded,” as part of his KRAD COVID readings series of short fiction readings on YouTube.
I simply cannot re-watch this episode without thinking of the SF Debris review and Chuck speculating on how Picard reacted to Troi’s request for leave:
“Head to the Jupiter Station in the middle of this important mission? But what will I do without you here? Oh, I know! I’ll put a toy of farm animals on your chair, and whenever I need to be told the bloody obvious, I’ll just pull the string and learn that “the cow goes moo”! Try not to crash the damn station into Jupiter while you’re there, you clumsy [*censored*]!
Mr. Magic: I know you love those reviews, but I have to admit to finding them tiresome after a while. Also, I have completely lost all patience with the “Troi crashed the ship” jokes, because a) they’re based on sexist stereotypes about women drivers and b) ignores the fact that Troi landed the saucer section with no casualties, which is actually a fantastic bit of piloting.
And I know this makes me sound like your prototypical humorless nerd, but hey, I don’t like Seinfeld, either……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I suppose it says something about Voyager that none of the episode about making direct contact with home are about Voyager as a whole and two of them are about the Doctor. While I’m not going to complain about the Doctor and Zimmerman facing off in a snark competition, wouldn’t it have served the series better to more of an ensemble episode? Regular contact is a big deal for everyone and all we get is a scene about the Maquis that goes no where.
I like that they do what they can to maintain The Doctor’s uniqueness, I do. But I can’t help be feel that they could’ve saved some hemming and hawing by copying him to the data stream instead of actually moving him.
That said, I have caught this one in reruns and it is truly a delight. It’s also quite enriching that Voyager’s EMH on the other side of the galaxy fulfilled all of Doc Zimmerman’s ambitions, it validated the work, it actually did make a difference. And because of this EMH’s unique experiences and growth, that it saved Doc Zimmerman’s life. That’s impressive. That’s his son right there.
Really? You could have fooled me. And apparently that was all the follow-up needed there, and I guess we are left to assume that all the terrorists and murderers on the ship will just be released with time served when they get back.
This reminds me of SF Debris’ line when Doctor Zimmerman isn’t present for the hearing in “Author, Author” that “maybe they couldn’t get the actor on such short notice.” (ETA: Sorry KRAD! I won’t do it again)
Nitpicks aside, I do like this episode. Double the Picardo is always a winning strategy, and Zimmerman gets more character development in 40 minutes than Chakotay and Kim got in 7 years. That said, this contact with home seems like it should have been a lot bigger deal than it was, and the only person we really follow through this episode is the EMH. It makes me wish that maybe this was the second episode after establishing more regular contact, so we could deal with the rest of the crew’s reactions to this.
@2,
I understand, KRAD. I know Chuck’s humor isn’t to everyone’s taste and I’m sorry I’ve gone back to that well too often.
So, consider this to be the last time I cite SF Debris in the Rewatch. W
Can we assume the EMH Mark 2’s were retrofitted as substance abuse counselors? 😉
Troi enters the room, sees Zimmerman and the Doctor standing next to each other, and has to ask which one is which? Maybe Zimmerman is the one projecting actual emotions and not wearing a four-years-out-of-date uniform? 🤔
Also, your comments about how absurd it is that the EMH Mark 1’s would be assigned menial tasks are correct. Starfleet would have to have installed holoprojectors in the waste conduits in order for the Mark 1’s to gain access. That seems like a lot of work for not a lot of reward. It’s like the very end of “Author, Author” (an otherwise excellent episode), where the Mark 1’s are shown mining dilithium with pickaxes and shovels. Starfleet had to have tunneled out the mines and installed holoprojectors for that. Why?
This episode advances the issue of holographic people in the Star Trek universe. It’s a thing that they should be exploring in Picard, but have not so far.
There’s a conflict in the basic design of Trek, where part of it is based on Westerns and adventure stories, and part on a utopian vision of the future. The adventure genre demands a swashbuckling hero and is full of old racist/sexist/Orientalist tropes, while the utopian part envisions a society that has grown beyond those tropes. One aspect of this is alien designs that take the place of problematic stock character types from older genres (Indians, barbarians, inscrutable Asians, etc.) — – that is worse in Star Wars, but happens in Trek too. Another aspect is where the story can’t be told without imagining some class of beings that takes the place of servants, slaves, disposable characters, or faceless hordes. In Star Wars that’s droids, in Trek it’s holographic people.
Being Trek, over the years it’s had a lot of stories that question and complicate this. So we get an increasing number of stories where holographic being show their sentience and assert their rights. I like this one for being a step forward in that theme.
One of my disappointments with Picard is that they have dealt with this theme via inorganic people, but not holographic. They haven’t really confronted that the utopian world has recreated slavery without noticing. They have the opportunity to do that with Rios’s holograms, but there was no sign in season 1 of dealing with that idea. They could have dispensed with the Romulan elf warrior assassin (and BTW this is a really bloodthirsty Picard collecting assassins) to make room for some plotlines comparing the synths and the holograms.
This was a good, entertaining bottle episode. Though I will say that I found the splicing of the two Picardos in the same shot to be highly distracting. It’s painfully obvious that they aren’t looking at each other. It was very distracting.
Sometimes it feels as though something is written to be a joke or to provide pathos and not much thought goes beyond that. Here, making the Mark I scrub toilets provides both for the Zimmerman character. But it really doesn’t make any type of sense. Starfleet wouldn’t bother wasting holographic resources just to have some janitors.
My biggest issue with the episode is that Voyager would send away their doctor for a month, with no chance of getting him back. I’m sorry, but “the pilot will take over for the only doctor you have for over 30 days” is some very shaky logic.
Oh, and that sending a hologram means the somehow there won’t be room in the datastream for… letters. Really? Text is tiny and compressible, especially compared to an entire person.
Regardless, it’s a pretty fun episode, so I really shouldn’t complain about the details too much.
@10 I’m assuming the “letters” were meant to be video messages, but there is absolutely no reason that, even if there wasn’t room, they couldn’t dictate their letters to the EMH and have him transfer them to PADDs once he got to the other end.
Mr. Magic: no, please, don’t stop citing SF Debris on my account. I’m not the only person here and I don’t feel right being the cause of any manner of self censorship.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I mean, I kind of get the impetus to send the Doctor to the Alpha Quadrant. Zimmerman was dying, apparently with not much time left, and the Doctor believed he could treat him since his illness was similar to the phage, and the treatment involved Borg nanoprobes. A man’s life was on the line (no pun intended), which is far more reasonable than Janeway granting permission to the Doctor for him to leave the ship permanently in “Virtuoso.”
Extremely Marginal Housecalls. Lol.
I know we’re supposed to be fans of Picardo’s performing but honestly I found this episode to be quite overacted. As if shouting louder makes for more emotion. Not my favorite doctor storyline, though the themes explored were pretty interesting.
@7 In regards to the emotions, perhaps Deanna’s abilities can’t sense all that accurately where they are coming from when the real person and the hologram are standing close together? I’m not sure how well emotional projections can be physically pinpointed, if its like sight or like sound.
Agreed — it’s a fun episode badly undermined by the ridiculous “fate” of the Mark I holograms. They should’ve just been phased out, not reassigned in a nonsensical way. “Author, Author” will double down on this and make it even stupider.
In TNG: Greater than the Sum, I described the appearance of the Enterprise-E’s EMH Mark IX in a manner consistent with Haley, implying that she’d been the template for that model.
Tamara Craig Thomas would go on to be one of the main cast members of Odyssey 5, along with two future Star Trek Enterprise guest stars, Peter Weller and Leslie Silva. According to IMDb, she now goes by Tamara Marie Watson and gave up acting to become a producer of reality TV shows like Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch.
@13,
Gotcha, KRAD.
No worries.
Seems like this would be a time for selecting ‘copy’ instead of ‘move’ for this particular file.
@2 KRAD Comment
Oh thank GOD. I thought *I* was the only person who just didn’t like Seinfeld.
(I really don’t like any “entertainment” that makes me want to defenestrate the entire cast…I got about 5 minutes into Downton Abbey before I shut it off, and decided the only thing I wanted to see in that series was a premature start to WWII, where Hitler already had the Bomb.)
Janeway’s refusal to acknowledge casualties could be an intriguing insight into her character. We know that she has a tendency to be obsessive about two things: upholding Starfleet principles and taking care of her people. We’ve seen the lengths she will go to for them throughout the series, from putting herself and the crew in ridiculously dangerous situations for Seven’s sake to the death of Tuvix so she could bring back Tuvok and Neelix. It seems to me that every single crew casualty could gnaw away at her so much that she has to shove the knowledge aside in order to be able to function, even to the point of not sending a casualty list and having to be specifically asked for it by an admiral, and then promptly pushing that aside to focus on the living crew.
I know, it’s more likely that her seeming callousness toward such things is in fact poor choices on the part of the writers … but one could spin it as caring too much instead of not enough, and as they do not have an actual councilor on board to help her work through such issues in a healthy way, she buries her feelings and becomes even more obsessive about protecting the living crew as a result.
Troi’s “You’re both jerks!” is one of my favorite Star Trek lines ever. Marina Sirtis delivers it perfectly.
@17 – That is a good point that I meant to bring up earlier. The EMH has always been treated in this weird, quasi-human way, as though the writers forgot he was a program. When I send someone a file from my computer, I’m not sending the code out of my computer or something dumb like that. It’s sending a duplicate of it. Also, the show had already done a duplicate EMH episode. Not sure why they sometimes forget that.
I’d prefer to take Admiral Hayes’s line to be a request for an updated casualty report covering the months since “Pathfinder.” I mean, Janeway explicitly said in “Pathfinder” that she was transmitting ship’s logs and crew reports, which surely would’ve included casualty info. I’d much rather believe that Hayes’s line was just badly phrased than concoct some elaborate conspiracy theory about Janeway extracting casualty data from the logs.
“Living Witness” was the exception, not the rule. It had been long established that the Doctor’s program couldn’t be backed up or copied. Don’t bother trying to make sense of it, but that’s what they’d always gone with. Voyager’s producers and writers admitted that they broke their own rule when they introduced a back-up copy of the Doctor in “Living Witness.” They felt the episode was good enough to make this breach of continuity worth it. And, honestly, it was an excellent episode, but that does explain why we never saw the Doctor being copied before or since
@20/Austin: As I’ve pointed out before, if the EMH were a quantum computer program, it might not be possible to copy or transfer his data without erasing the original. Quantum information follows conservation laws and can’t be created or destroyed, only moved. Put another way, if you read an ensemble of particles on a detailed enough level to measure the particles’ quantum information, that interaction changes their state and thus destroys the information in its original substrate.
“Also, the show had already done a duplicate EMH episode. Not sure why they sometimes forget that.”
Because the story shapes the tech, not the other way around. “Living Witness” had a backup EMH because that was what that particular story needed. But in other stories, the stakes are higher for the Doctor and the crew if he’s as irreplaceable as any other character. It’s the same reason they handwave things so that transporters can’t create duplicate people, since that would remove all the danger if you could just resurrect anyone who died. Except in those rare cases where the story needs transporter duplicates, in which case it’s explained as a freak, unrepeatable mishap. That’s the step VGR overlooked in “Living Witness.” Rather than explaining the discrepancy, they just ignored it.
In short, to create a story, you need to create a problem. You want to make things hard for your heroes and easy for their adversaries. If a story device like an EMH backup or a transporter duplicate creates a problem, then you use it. If it would make it too easy to solve a problem, then you don’t use it. Either you come up with an explanation why it can’t solve the problem, or you ignore it and hope the audience is too distracted by your narrative prestidigitation to wonder about it.
A fun, sparkling episode that finally puts the EMH with the person who is essentially his father. Picardo as usual more than up to the task of inhabiting these two clashing personalities, making for some fiery, yet fun scenes. It’s a simple dilemma, but one with a clever resolution, thanks to Barclay and Troi’s decision to make it a medical crisis in order to convince Zimmerman to snap out of it.
In retrospect, it’s kind of sad to see how much Zimmerman has fallen in less than four years. Back on DS9, he was a relentless self-assured charmer, trying hard to get into Leeta’s pants (and also annoy Bashir). In here, all we get is pity, regret and self-loathing. That’s quite the change.
Plus we get Troi being properly used as a therapist, which is always nice, and the writers even take advantage of Sirtis’ unique sense of humor (which was a thing they never did on TNG). And Barclay is a welcome presence as always.
Regarding the early EMH models being consigned to scrubbing toilets, I don’t think it’s that far-fetched. There is precedent to Starfleet attempting to use other life forms to do grunt work. Case in point, Bruce Maddox’s attempt at recreating Soong-type androids, which Guinan calls it for what it is: creating slave labor – which will soon come to fruition with synthetic labor units working at Utopia Planitia Yards. Granted, Starfleet could have just kept the EMHs in storage, but given they’d just come out of a devastating war, they’d likely need all hands to do all kinds of duties.
Plus, we’re getting into the issue ot holographic rights, which is an aspect of Trek I think deserves development.
This is one of only three Trek episodes where one of the actors has a writing credit.
@krad: Let’s not forget the Trek films. Shatner and Nimoy have story credits on their last three TOS movies (IV, V and VI). Also Spiner on Nemesis, and Pegg’s screenwriting credit on Beyond.
@24/Eduardo: But androids have independent physical existence. Holograms can only operate where there’s an array of holoemitters, so it doesn’t make much sense to assign them to menial work.
Also, as I keep pointing out, “holographic rights” makes no sense because holograms are not a species. They are a visual interface operated by a variety of different computer programs, only some of which are sentient. An NPC human character in the Fair Haven program is no more a person than a holographic horse or bird or tree in that same program. It’s just an image manipulated by the computer.
Put another way, holograms are more like a phylum than a species. The vertebrate phylum includes everything from humans to lab mice, but nobody’s going to fight for a lab mouse’s right to vote or attend Harvard. (Pinky and the Brain excluded; they’re laboratory mice, but their genes have been spliced. And now you’ve all got that song running through your heads too. You’re welcome.)
So instead of talking about “holographic rights,” a gibberish concept like talking about the rights of skin or fur, we should be talking about the rights of sapient AIs. And very few “holograms” (or rather, AI programs designed to operate through holographic interfaces) are sapient. I’m willing to buy that EMHs as a class are potentially sapient; if the Doctor had the potential, it stands to reason that they all do. But that shouldn’t be presumed to extend to holodeck game characters like the Fair Havenites or Doctor Chaotica or the piano player in Vic Fontaine’s place. And it doesn’t seem to apply to Rios’s holograms in Picard, since the synth ban isn’t extended to them. It should be seen as the exception for holograms, not the rule.
@24
I recall TNG once using Sirtis’s natural comedic talents, when she did the impression of the scientist who wanted to study mating rituals with her (in the episode with the time bubbles and the Romulans). That seemed like her real self. Pity they didn’t do it more often. She’s funny.
25/Christopher: A fair point. It is more of an issue surrounding the A.I. itself than the outer shell they inhabit, whether it’s an android body or a hologram. And it really only applies to the truly sentient holograms like the EMH models or Geordi’s accidental self-sufficient Moriarty.
But it’s worth being mindful that attempting to make that A.I. distinction on a TV show might prove too cumbersome for both writers and viewers. It’s a visual medium, after all. When you need to get to the meat of the conflict in a 43 minute episode, it’s just easier to call it a holo-rights issue – unless the story goes for a more in-depth look at the issue and actually needs to make that distinction.
Additionally, “Doctor Bashir, I Presume” aired in February, 1997 and “Life Line” aired in May, 2000. That’s three years, which disputes Zimmerman’s claim that he hasn’t left Jupiter Station in four years. Just a minor nitpick.
@24, 26: I thought Sirtis was also funny in just her facial reactions to Worf: at the end of “Parallels” when he orders champagne from his replicator, and in the beginning of “All Good Things” when she teases Worf about him wanting to ask Riker for permission to formally date her.
The notion of the EMH Mk1’s fate reminded me of a similar situation in Red Dwarf when I saw it the first time around – specifically, the Series 4000 Mechanoid being constructed as a parody of the looks and personality of their creator’s absentee fiance, and designed entirely for sanitation duties… :)
I always wondered if that particular part of the plot was inspired by that – the Red Dwarf episode aired in 1997…
“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear… Dinner. Is. Served!”
“The last beautiful woman to walk in here turned out to be him.”
What’s better than an episode starring Robert Picardo? An episode starring two Robert Picardos! It’s a simplistic equation but it actually happens to be true: There’s no-one better for him to trade barbs with than himself. You almost forget that the episode’s got Troi and Barclay in it, but they sparkle as well, as does Haley and the rest of Zimmerman’s menagerie who it would have been nice to see again. And the barbs do lead us to the rather touching scene where they finally bond, with the father and son relationship that neither of them would quite be willing to admit to.
The rest of Voyager’s crew are rather wasted (Tuvok doesn’t speak a word) and the most interesting part of those scenes, Starfleet wanting information on the Maquis crewmembers, will never be followed up on. It does, however, give us Seven’s “No, I’m not going to answer that” expression when the Doctor talks about his good looks. I’m with CLB that Admiral Hayes’ comment is meant to refer to casualties since “Pathfinder”, not every one in the last six years. That makes absolutely zero sense: The people back home know that Chakotay’s first officer, Paris is the pilot and Torres is the chief engineer, but don’t know what happened to the people that used to do those jobs?
Janeway says the Doctor was sent back to the Alpha Quadrant three years ago, when it’s more like two and a half. Zimmerman looks considerably older than he did in DS9’s “Doctor Bashir, I Presume”, set about three years earlier. (Then again, he says he hasn’t left Jupiter Station in four years, so the timescale seems very out of whack here, although we’re told the Doctor’s been running for six years.) First positive confirmation that Barclay and Zimmerman know each other: It’s not clear how long for, although it’s Haley that Troi questions about the development of the EMH Mark I. (We know Barclay was on the Enterprise approximately three years earlier, so he can’t have been assigned to Sector 001 continuously for six years.)
I believe Robert Picardo’s original idea was to have the Doctor meet Leonard McCoy, but DeForest Kelley’s death put paid to that. I remember on first viewing I wasn’t sure whether Troi was just going to be on the screen or turn up in person, so it was a moment to cheer when she suddenly walked into the lab.
IIRC, CLB had holographic people who were apparently full citizens and even had (adopted?) children in one of his DTI books.
@32/wiredog: I think you must be thinking of my portrayal of the 31st century in the e-novella The Collectors. What I posited there was that a lot of people in the future had gone the Ira Graves/Denara Pel route and transferred their minds into android or holographic bodies to gain effective immortality. I was trying to bring a bit of posthumanist SF into a franchise that tends to shy away from trans- or posthumanism.
The ending of “Author, Author” suggests that the line about the EMH Mark 1s scrubbing toilets should be read literally, but Zimmerman is a self-righteous jerk so it could be bitter exaggeration.
Maybe Starfleet was unimpressed with the EMH’s bedside manner for medical work, but saw other potential in the holo-tech and this specific AI matrix.
The Engineering section of a starship is filled with pipes moving various substances (AKA plumbing) and can quickly become unsafe for organic crews if anything goes wrong.
That’s a place where an emergency holographic crew member would be extremely useful, but I can easily imagine Zimmerman taking offence at his masterpiece being sent to fix pipes with its medical database switched out for a warp engine repair manual.
The issue with holograms is if they are tools, then there is no moral issue in what tasks they are put to, just one of is it really efficient to use medical program to do mining. If they are persons, then using them as EMHs is just as morally dubious as using them as miners. They are conscripted labor in either case even if they enjoy the latter work. Creating sentient holograms in the first place is the moral dilemma. Why are you doing such a thing?
The very existence of sentient holograms (and androids) is morally questionable.
@35/Crusader75: “Creating sentient holograms in the first place is the moral dilemma. Why are you doing such a thing?”
We create sentient beings all the time. It’s called childbirth. So it’s rather strange to me when I hear people argue there’s something wrong with it. Why not do it, as long as you create a legal and social system that respects their rights?
@35 In fairness, for the most part the Federation isn’t trying to create sentient AI. Dr. Soong appears to be operating on his own, and the holograms on Starfleet vessels that develop sentience are entirely by accident, same with the little robots that became self-aware back in TOS.
@36
That still doesn’t answer the question of why. In the comparison to childbirth, why build an artificial life form to carry on one’s lineage, to teach and nurture and hope they’re better than the previous generation, when it’s much easier to create organic sentient beings? (Probably cheaper too, but with the cost of diapers these days, who knows).
And if one is unable to procreate, there are still plenty of kids who need adopting. We still see orphaned kids in the 24th century. Not just human either. I’m sure Worf appreciated his parents caring for him instead of some Klingon tinker toy they created themselves.
@38/Dingo: Anyone who expects raising a child to be “easy” is probably not qualified to do it. It’s a profound responsibility, just as much as creating AIs. It seems discriminatory to take for granted that one category of intelligence has a right to exist yet argue against another’s right to exist.
It’s also invalid to paint it as a zero-sum choice between one or the other, when the Trek galaxy is already full of millions of different intelligent species. It’s not like there’s only a finite number of slots available. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, remember? Different forms of life and consciousness do not threaten each other by their existence; they enrich each other by their existence. The more new and different kinds of life we get to share the universe with, the better off we’ll all be. That’s the fundamental message of the franchise.
@36.- That was what I was getting at with “Why are you doing such a thing?”
You do not have a child to be a tool for your service. If you are creating a hologram program to be a tool, that presumes their rights are nonexistent, so why are you making them sentient? But if you are not making a tool, then there is not much reason to create them en masse.
Soong, for instance, seems more interested in proving that he could create an Asimov style humaniform robot, but treated Data and Lore more like sons but also did some questionable things to them.
It can be argued that the Doctor acquired sentience from being on for too long and was not a person at the beginning of the series. That then implies that the Mk Is should have been deactivated, else they will awaken to consciousness in a harsh slavery.
@40/Crusader75: “It can be argued that the Doctor acquired sentience from being on for too long and was not a person at the beginning of the series. That then implies that the Mk Is should have been deactivated, else they will awaken to consciousness in a harsh slavery.”
My problem with arguments like that is that they just take it for granted that the default state of society will be one that practices slavery and oppression. I say it implies the exact opposite — that the slavery should have been outlawed so that they could awaken in freedom. I mean, why the hell prioritize the existence of an oppressive institution over the existence of the people it oppresses? That’s the most backward thing I’ve ever heard! Obviously the people take priority and the institutions should change or disappear, not the other way around.
@8 “In Star Wars that’s droids”
The thing about the enslavement of droids in Star Wars I find most interesting is the existence of the Force. The Republic is founded alongside a religious order which is quantifiably able to use a magic which can be proven to exist in all living things.
But, the Legendary Skippy aside, droids cannot touch the Force, and the Force affects droids the same way it does any other non-living thing. Thus, from the perspective of anyone whose faith or religion is based on the Force, droids empirically have no souls.
This does not preclude the personal & political drive for freedom exemplified by L3, nor is a soul needed to underscore that through R2 we see that absent frequent mind-wiping, droids have continuity of consiousness, and through Threepio we see that even mind-wiping doesn’t eliminate an underlying personality.
Especially in the Clone Wars cartoon, the casual ambivalence shown by the Jedi towards droids is an indicator that the rot has already set in. When R2 is MIA after a battle, Kenobi’s immediate reaction is ‘It’s just a droid, Anakin. Get another one” and we the viewer are supposed to know that response is wrong.
Regarding the rendezvous with Federation ships mentioned in the review above:
Can Federation vessels meant for deep space exploration really travel 25,000 light years in 5-6 years at this point in time (assuming from previous journey length estimates that Voyager can go about 1,000 light years per year at high warp)? That’s some major propulsion tech advancement.
@41 “My problem with arguments like that is that they just take it for granted that the default state of society will be one that practices slavery and oppression.”
Human society has been predicated on slavery & oppression since the development of domestication and farming. It’s just that we as a species accept the enslavement of plant & animal life as a foundational necessity for civilization.
The question each society grapples with in the wake of that organizing principle is how far does the franchise of personhood extend.
@43/brandonh: “Can Federation vessels meant for deep space exploration really travel 25,000 light years in 5-6 years at this point in time (assuming from previous journey length estimates that Voyager can go about 1,000 light years per year at high warp)? That’s some major propulsion tech advancement.”
Hayes said he was sending deep-space vessels — presumably ones that were already several years out from Federation space in the direction of the Delta Quadrant. So they’d have a head start.
@44/chieroscuro: “Human society has been predicated on slavery & oppression since the development of domestication and farming.”
But we’re talking about the Star Trek future where those institutions have been outgrown. Star Trek is not about people musing futilely about how awful humans are, it’s about people doing the actual work to make things better. If there’s an injustice, they fix it. They don’t let it stand and outlaw the existence of its victims. That’s an even worse form of oppression.
@45 And even Star Trek: TNG, the most optimistic of them will struggle with the nature of Data in ‘Measure of a Man’ and the sentience of the Exocomps in ‘The Quality of Life’, pointing out that even in the far future, we have yet to fully reconcile ourselves to the dubious morality of a society which cannot accept the existence of living slaves building inorganic ones.
Just in case you didn’t get enough Picardo and Picardo with this episode, here you go.
@46/chieroscuro: “And even Star Trek: TNG, the most optimistic of them will struggle with the nature of Data in ‘Measure of a Man’ and the sentience of the Exocomps in ‘The Quality of Life’, pointing out that even in the far future, we have yet to fully reconcile ourselves to the dubious morality of a society which cannot accept the existence of living slaves building inorganic ones.”
You’re totally twisting it. First off, Data was never a “slave.” Data was ruled a sentient being with the same rights as an organic life form a quarter-century earlier when he enrolled in Starfleet Academy. Maddox was trying to get that decision reversed, and he failed. As for “The Quality of Life,” once the Federation realized the exocomps were intelligent, they recognized their personhood and treated them the same as any other sentient being, as we saw in Lower Decks with Peanut Hamper. It only took 11 years to get from “could they possibly be sentient?” to “Welcome aboard the Cerritos, Ensign.” That’s not slavery. That’s a society that immediately acknowledged their rights as soon as their sentience was recognized. Presumably because they’d learned from their experiences with Data and the EMH.
Because that’s how the Federation works. It defaults to recognizing the personhood of sentient beings. It just sometimes fails to recognize AI sentience when it arises, because it’s new and rare and there’s always a learning curve. But when it makes mistakes or falls short, it doesn’t use that as an excuse to give up trying to improve, but as an obligation to try harder.
@48 So a Federation that upholds Data’s personhood and immediately acknowledges the sentience of the Exocomps would ultimately choose to liberate the EMH Mark 1s from being menial workers and miners, we just don’t happen to see it here or in ‘Author, Author’. That Federation will still choose to ban synthetics by the time of Picard, though.
@49/chieroscuro: As I said, it takes work to make things better. The Federation makes mistakes and it corrects them. That doesn’t mean everything is evil and hopeless forever. Improvement is a journey.
As has been pointed out before, it’s extremely unclear whether most EMHs are sentient. Voyager‘s sloppy treatment of the question in this episode and “Author, Author” unfortunately muddies the issue.
As for the synths, according to the tie-in novel The Last Best Hope, they weren’t actually sentient. Which is consistent with what Picard portrayed about the Daystrom Institute’s difficulties finding a way to recreate Soong’s achievement of android sentience. And if anything, you’re arguing against your own rhetoric here, because you can’t enslave a class if you outlaw its very existence.
As I already said, the Federation defaults to recognizing the rights of sentient beings, but doesn’t always correctly identify sentience when it arises. It is incorrect to call that a slave society, because a slave society is one that knowingly denies the rights of sentient beings. For instance, the society in Blade Runner 2049, where they know perfectly well that replicants are sentient and still keep them enslaved, even deliberately giving them memories and emotions and dreams because it makes them more contented slaves.
From the episode:
Overall, I loved the episode (and Picardo is an absolute gem), but in this instance: Why couldn’t they have both? The Mark 4 is clearly a newer model, and as Zimmerman points out, “far more reliable”. Changing the physical appearance of the Mark 4 to look like the Mark 1 should be a no-brainer. And The Doctor’s personality subroutines could simply be transferred over to the Mark 4 matrix, along with his memory files. DONE! You now have a Mark 4 EMH on Voyager with the appearance, memories and experience of the original Mark 1.
@51/Mike: I doubt very much that it works that way. A mind, whether organic or cybernetic, is not made up of discrete pieces that can be mixed and matched like Lego blocks. It’s all one integrated whole, every part shaping every other part. Mix and match pieces of different EMH programs and you’d change the EMH’s personality and nature, in the same way that a joined Trill is a different person from the unjoined host. And there’s no guarantee you could even get two different pieces of software to work together like that. Could you hybridize, say, Windows 10 and Windows XP that way? Would it actually work?
Besides, the Mark I’s deficiencies were never in his medical knowledge or performance, but specifically in his personality and user-friendliness, and his quirks and vagaries that make him who he is as a person. “More reliable” probably means less quirky, less human, less capable of change and growth.
@5: Really? You could have fooled me. And apparently that was all the follow-up needed there, and I guess we are left to assume that all the terrorists and murderers on the ship will just be released with time served when they get back.
So it’s frustratingly vague that we don’t know what Chakotay’s crew was actually doing in the AQ. But assuming their targets were all or primarily Cardassian, it turns out they were right, Cardassia wasn’t to be trusted and was poised to sell out the Alpha Quadrant. Plus the only reason that Starfleet was so hardcore about chasing down the Maquis was to prevent war with Cardassia, then war happened anyway for unrelated reasons, then the Federation won and Cardassia is in no shape to wage war any time soon. So the impetus to punish the Maquis is gone. If Chakotay was merrily massacring Federation citizens, that’s a different story.
Even then, though, the Romulans killed an entire Starfleet crew (the Prometheus), blew up a Federation starship that tried to intervene, and very nearly stole a shiny new starship. Shortly before that, they literally tried to blow up DS9. Six months later the UFP made peace with them and had them as war allies.
Cardassia itself was at war with the UFP and now there’s peace with them too– nobody is trying to trace down every soldier or even every armed civilian who at some killed a Federation citizen.
So, yeah, I think the Maquis get a pass unless their history is far darker than I’m imagining. The Federation is very forgive and forget, which has good and bad aspects, but it would really be a case of anomalously bad treatment if they made it all the way back to the AQ and the UFP wants to throw them in irons for a conflict that’s completely obsolete. They probably just want to ascertain the Maquis are over it and won’t go back to a life of terrorism.
@53, I’m not arguing with any of that, but my point is that given the theoretical premise of the show, all of this is stuff that should have been worked out on screen. Until they made contact with the AQ in “Message in a Bottle” they had no reason to believe that anything would have massively changed back home. That’s four years where they should have been seriously worried that they were going to jail- but despite Chakotay’s line here, there is never any on-screen indication that this is the case, or any sign that it is affecting the Maquis crewmen in any way.
I agree that not knowing exactly what they did was a weakness. We can kind of just guess based off what we see them do over on DS9, and what kind of stuff the Bajoran resistance movement did, but it is frustratingly vague. We know Chakotay’s cell was important enough for both the Federation and the Cardassians to send a spy, so it’s pretty likely they weren’t just running guns and supplies back and forth. Paris was 18 months into his sentence in Auckland when Janeway recruited him for her 3 hour tour, and the offer of getting out of prison was tempting enough for him to take it despite the risks, so I think it is reasonable to assume he still had a while to go on his sentence- and he was captured on his first mission. It seems reasonable to me that people like B’Elanna and Ayala (not to mention Chakotay, who was the ringleader) theoretically faced some steep prison time if they were caught. “Hunters” specified that the Maquis who were not dead were in prison (presumably a Federation one and not a Cardassian one, since I doubt the Cardassians would have let Sveta write Chakotay a letter)- so unless I am bungling the timeline they didn’t just let the Maquis out of prison when the Cardassians allied themselves with the Dominion and became official enemies of the Federation again.
And sure, they did end up being right, but that still only gets you so far when you are a terrorist. I doubt anyone would feel better that Lon Suder was walking around free just because he happened to pick the winning side. Again, if the Federation decided that committing acts of terrorism 7 years earlier wasn’t worth bothering about anymore, fine- but it would have been nice to actually see that happen on screen instead of us just guessing about it. It’s the assumption that everything will work out fine that bothers me.
@53: As stated above, when Chakotay reported on the fate of the Maquis in “Hunters”, he noted that the ones who hadn’t been wiped out by the Dominion were in Federation jail about six months into the Dominion War, so it seems the Federation’s reaction wasn’t exactly “Thanks for killing all those Cardassians so there was fewer for us.”
Given Sisko’s ambivalent attitude towards Eddington, it seems some people perceived the Maquis less as the heroes who fought the Cardassians for three years before everyone else joined in, and more as the idiots who insisted on repeatedly kicking a hornet’s nest until a relatively peaceful and harmless civilian Cardassian government was overthrown by a military coup backed up by a totalitarian empire, thus granting them a foothold in the Alpha Quadrant. Admittedly though, much of that was after Chakotay and co were lost in the Delta Quadrant, at which point Central Command and the Obsidian Order were still running things. I’d say there’s a good chance they would be pardoned or let off with a warning or whatever, but it’s still a flaw that the series never properly resolved that plot thread.
@43/brandonh: Yeah, I was confused why Janeway wasn’t more excited by that, considering they’re still decades from Federation space. Even if those deep space vessels are years away from Earth too, it would be incredibly heartening to make contact with other Star Fleet vessels.
@56 It would have made a great late series reboot to have Voyager meet up with a couple of Starfleet vessels. They could have gotten a couple of extra seasons out of stories you can tell with a flotilla but not with a single ship (like blowing one of them up for a season finale). And they could even fire/demote some regulars and replace them with cheap new actors. Which seems to be more of a thing now than it was when Voyager was on the air.
@57/noblehunter: “And they could even fire/demote some regulars and replace them with cheap new actors. Which seems to be more of a thing now than it was when Voyager was on the air.”
No, it happened back then too. Heck, it was Power Rangers‘ bread and butter, emulating the Japanese model of starting over with a completely new non-union cast every year to keep things as cheap as possible. See also Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda, Sliders, the Law & Order franchise, etc.
After all, the reason for rotating out senior cast members was the exact same reason that most series including Trek ended after seven seasons: because the cast and crew got annual raises, so eventually it would get too expensive to keep all the actors around. So either you ended the series when the costs got too steep, or you rotated out most or all of the actors. That’s why Smallville season 10 had only one cast member remaining from season 1, and only four regulars in all.
(I find it rather astonishing that season 7 of The CW’s The Flash still has six of its seven season 1 regulars — although two of them have left the show during the season, so it’s down to four now.)
@58 Does it really count for Andromeda (and maybe Earth Final Conflict)? I didn’t think they on air long enough for burgeoning salaries to become a problem.
It will be interesting to see what Discovery does since season 3 seemed to expand the regular cast rather than shrink it. Though they dodge the issue somewhat by having what seem to be season-long guest characters like Pike or the season one captain who’s name I don’t feel like googling.
@59/noblehunter: I don’t know why you’d think E:FC and Andromeda had short runs; they both ran for 5 seasons, a length that relatively few shows reach. They were also, unfortunately, both from a production company notorious for its cheapness, so they fired both actors and showrunners much more readily than most shows do.
I am apparently quite bad at remembering how long shows are on the air for. I thought they were much less successful than that.
@58 – “That’s why Smallville season 10 had only one cast member remaining from season 1, and only four regulars in all.”
I’m not so sure that was the issue with Smallville. Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor) was very eager to leave the show. That was a personal choice. Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang)—and this is going off of memory, so I could be wrong—was a personal choice, as well. John Schneider (Jonathan Kent) was killed off in season five for story reasons (Superman’s dad has to die!). I don’t think that was cost related. Annette O’Toole (Martha Kent) and John Glover (Lionel Luthor) could very well have been cost casualties. Though those two could be seen as natural plot progressions. Sam Jones III (Pete Ross) was cut very early in the series. I don’t remember exactly why.
@62/Austin: Well, of course it didn’t all happen at once. The show ran so long that it happened by attrition over years. And keep in mind that I’m not just talking about cast departures, but the failure to replace them. A core cast of only four regulars was unprecedented for Smallville, and there were times when it made for awkward plotting due to the dearth of main characters. Normally, they would’ve replaced the departed cast members with new characters, but instead they just let the cast shrink. Of course that’s cost-related. Long-running shows always need to find ways to cut costs to stay on the air as their ratings slide and their cast and crew continue to get annual raises. They reduce their cast size, they replace expensive actors or producers, they cut the location or effects budget, they cut the number of episodes — anything to reduce the budget and convince the bean-counters that they can afford to keep making the show for one more year.
Or else they just end the show once it becomes too expensive to keep making it. At the time the Berman-era Trek shows were on, that point usually came after seven seasons. That’s why all three 24th-century shows ended after seven seasons.
I’m not really sure why Troi thought both Zimmerman and the EMH were jerks. The EMH was pretty single-minded in trying to diagnose Zimmerman in order to save his life, which hardly qualifies as jerkish. Zimmerman was being asshat enough for 2, and Troi likely kept getting the 2 of them mixed up, which is why she thought they were being equal dicks.
Still puzzled where the “Long-term Medical Holographic program” fits in, the Julian Bashir one, not just for emergencies. Apparently it doesn’t.
The Mark I holograms doing non-medical jobs may be using older version holoprojectors, those probably go cheap secondhand and possibly can be carried inside the hologram for mobile use. The batteries too.
Could they be covered under the premise, “In the future, no one has to work, but people want to be useful”? The catch is to find where.
Some of you have questioned why the Doctor got two episodes in which he’s sent back to the Alpha Quadrant. I’d surmise it’s because a show with a premise like this one wants to do episodes set “back home,” and the EMH is the only character who can do that without involving time travel (and time travel is how they did it in the “Future’s End” two-parter).
I’d analogize it to the use of the mind-swap stones in Stargate Universe, and I surmise that if Voyager had run another season, we’d have seen them contrive a way to beam other crewmembers home for visits.
I wish we had been told what those deep space vessels Hayes mentioned are supposed to do once they rendezvous with Voyager. Are they uncrewed? If they’re crewed, why have those crews essentially exiled themselves from Federation space? What resources do they have onboard that Voyager could make use of? For what mission were they sent so far out of Federation space for, and will that mission now go un-accomplished? Tell us more!
(Except there’s no more to tell, of course, because I’ve probably just given those ships more thought than Voyager‘s writers ever did.)
@66/terracinque: “I surmise that if Voyager had run another season, we’d have seen them contrive a way to beam other crewmembers home for visits.”
They wouldn’t even need to. They have holodecks at both ends. Once they had real-time communication with sufficient bandwidth, they could just use holocommunication — a person on the ship and a person in the Alpha Quadrant could just both step into holodecks and interact with tangible holographic replicas of one another in real time. The crew could not only talk with their loved ones, but interact physically, have conjugal visits, whatever they wanted through holographic telepresence. (I showed this in the epilogue of my alternate-timeline Voyager novel Places of Exile — one of many things in that book that I thought they should have done in the actual show.)
“If they’re crewed, why have those crews essentially exiled themselves from Federation space?”
Since Voyager‘s about 30 years away at this point, it might take 15 years for the ships to meet them in the middle, less if they’re faster than it is. The Enterprise-D was originally intended by TNG’s developers to be designed for deep-space missions lasting up to 15 years away from Federation space, which was why it had crew families aboard, so that it could function as a self-contained community over the long haul.
@67/CLB: Was that “holopresence” technology ever depicted on-screen, in-canon? I can’t recall that it ever has. And it’s more than a bandwidth problem; you’re talking about holographic “waldoes,” in essence—seeing, hearing, and feeling through one’s holographic avatar. That would require some sort of direct CNS device, and I can’t recall anything like that ever being established on any of the Trek series, either.
And, sure, Enterprise was designed for such long missions, but she never went on one, and as far as we know no other crew has been asked to go on such a mission before. It’s a conversation I’d be interested to listen in on, is what I’m saying, and Hayes just threw it out there.
@68/terracinque: “Was that “holopresence” technology ever depicted on-screen, in-canon?”
I can’t blame you for forgetting the holocommunicator in DS9, since they only used it in “For the Uniform” and “Doctor Bashir, I Presume.” Of course, Discovery retconned in 23rd-century holocommunicators — a technology that The Making of Star Trek said the Enterprise possessed all along — but they weren’t tangible.
“you’re talking about holographic “waldoes,” in essence—seeing, hearing, and feeling through one’s holographic avatar.”
Not at all, because both parties are in holodecks, facing holo-replicas of each other. Each holodeck just has to mimic the appearance, movements, speech, and surface texture of the person in the other holodeck. One party perceives the other’s holo-replica with their own senses, because it’s physically there in front of them in the holodeck, the same as any other hologram.
“That would require some sort of direct CNS device, and I can’t recall anything like that ever being established on any of the Trek series, either.”
And that’s another thing we’ve seen in DS9, in “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places.” Worf used a Virtual Control Device to puppeteer Quark’s body. If you could do that with another person, it’d be much easier to do it with a hologram that had no competing nerve impulses of its own. Although as I just said, it wouldn’t be necessary if both parties were in holodecks.
“as far as we know no other crew has been asked to go on such a mission before.”
We don’t have to be explicitly told what we can deduce. Why bother to make a starship into a self-sufficient community with families on board if it’s not meant to be capable of long-term independent operation? What I’m saying is that the nature of the Galaxy class implies the potential for such missions. It makes little sense to say “We can’t know it happened without proof,” because this is fiction, after all. None of it actually happened; it’s just stuff that people imagined. So all we need is to be able to imagine that it could be done.
We tend to forget that Starfleet’s presence is normally well beyond the Federation’s borders. That’s what an exploration fleet does. That’s why starbases are needed — to serve as frontier forts, support facilities for vessels operating far beyond the borders of known civilization. The volume of space encompassed by Starfleet’s operations and travels is much, much vaster than the volume occupied by the political entity called the United Federation of Planets. So there could well be ships that are already years out from the UFP in various directions. Presumably Hayes called on the ones that were already furthest out in the direction of the DQ.
Those holocommunicators seen in DS9 aren’t what you’re describing, though—the “caller” can’t interact with the other person’s avatar with his own avatar as if that avatar were himself.
And the VCD Worf used on Quark didn’t work very well.
“It makes little sense to say ‘We can’t know it happened without proof,’ because this is fiction, after all.”
Well, yeah. And all I meant was that, because it’s fiction and I’m entertained by fiction, I would like to have seen some of those fictional conversations and events on screen, because they would have entertained me.
@70/terracinque: “Those holocommunicators seen in DS9 aren’t what you’re describing, though—the “caller” can’t interact with the other person’s avatar with his own avatar as if that avatar were himself.”
Which, again, they don’t have to do if they’re both in holodecks. Person A interacts with a hologram of Person B, while Person B interacts with a hologram of Person A. That is exactly, 100 percent what holocommunicators are. It’s no different from a Zoom call where people on both sides are seeing real-time visual representations of each other created by their respective equipment; it’s just that in this case, the visual representations are 3-dimensional and tangible.
“And the VCD Worf used on Quark didn’t work very well.”
Because that served the humor of the episode, obviously. The point is that the principle exists and could be perfected — if it were needed here, which it isn’t.
This is a fun episode, it’s not great, but following on from the abomination that was ‘Fury’ it’s Citizen Kane.
I think I like it better this time around , I remember first time being really frustrated with it, it started off with the Great Barclay and I knew Marina Sirtis was coming back and it looked like it was going to be a full on direct sequel to Pathfinder, a great episode.. but then almost immediately it gets diverted into the story of The Doctor trying to save the immensely unlikeable Zimmerman. I remember wanting it to be about Voyager once again being in contact the Alpha Quadrant and it felt like that story that I wanted to see was taken away from me.
This time knowing what’s to come with the contact between Voyager and Home that frustration isn’t there as much so I can enjoy Robert Picardo’s great work in this episode.
There are problems with it, Janeway’s conversation with Chakotay regarding the Marquis is just left hanging and it could have done with a bit more Barclay if I am honest. But as I say after ’Fury’ a blessed relief of an episode.
I appreciate this comment comes years too late, but like a lot of people I didn’t watch too much of this show first go around and am only now seeing episodes.
There are some great criticisms of this episode in the comments above, and they highlight issues both with this ep and with Voyager generally.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned, but which really bugged me, was how claustrophobic the whole trip was. The Doctor’s just come tens of thousands of light years from a lost ship they’ve had hardly any contact with and he’s allowed to simply spend a month hanging out in Zimmerman’s lab bickering with him? He’s a holographic crewman from a ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant – they should be debriefing him about everything he can think of. And then he should be meeting with every family member of every one else on that ship (even the ones the show pretends don’t exist). And then he should be learning as much as possible to recite back to Voyager. Instead nobody else seems to care he’s there to the point that when his mission first goes south, the EMH complains that he wants to be sent back early, as though he has nothing else to keep him occupied in the Alpha Quadrant. It would be like one of Magellan’s crew suddenly appearing in Seville a year ahead of everyone else then spending his whole time there settling up a debt at a pub.
I guess my larger point is that the whole setup sort of killed the epic scale of what was going on. They made zapping the EMH to a different quadrant of the galaxy – and to Sector 001 no less! – about as awe-inspiring as a trip to the vet.
On the plus side – Barclay, talking iguana, shapeshifting EMH. And I could’ve watched Haley fuss about the lab all day.
This is a good episode, but if I have one complaint it’s that it plays out pretty much like you think it will. The performances are all good fine, so one can’t complaint too much.