“Latent Image”
Written by Eileen Connors and Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 5, Episode 11
Production episode 206
Original air date: January 20, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. It’s time for the EMH to perform his annual physicals on the crew. This time around, he’s using his portable holoimager to take full visual images of the crew for diagnostic purposes.
Kim wants to see his holoimage, which is generated from the inside out, starting with organs, then skeleton, then skin and clothes. The EMH is stunned to see evidence of a surgical procedure on Kim—a procedure that the EMH himself developed, but which there’s no record of, which the EMH has no memory of performing, and which Kim says he has no recollection of, either.
The one crew member who has not reported for their physical is the captain, so the EMH goes to her ready room to make a house call. While examining her, he mentions the surgical procedure on Kim, which isotope decay around the scar indicates was eighteen months ago. Janeway says she doesn’t recall it, either. The EMH requests a full diagnostic be performed on him, which Janeway says that Torres and Kim will do as soon as they’re free.
Not willing to wait for Torres and Kim to finish their current duties, the EMH goes to astrometrics to ask Seven to help him run a self-diagnostic, also telling her why. The surgery in question was before Seven came on board. She is in the midst of a deflector dish recalibration, but will join him in sickbay in an hour.
When she arrives in sickbay, she discovers that the EMH has been deactivated. When she turns him back on, he has no memory of his conversation with Seven, and indeed he remembers nothing since he did his physicals. Seven recounts the conversation with him, and he calls up Kim’s holoimage—which has been deleted. He checks his holoimager, and discovers that all the images from Stardate 50979 have been deleted. Seven is able to reconstruct some of them from residual photons, and finds images of a birthday party for an ensign he doesn’t recognize, a shuttle mission with the EMH, Kim, and the ensign in question, and the EMH in sickbay with Kim and the ensign as patients.
Seven discovers that the EMH does have memories from that time period, but he can no longer access them. She gets rid of the memory block, and he now recalls that there was a surprise birthday party in the mess hall for Ensign Ahni Jetal, who then went on a shuttle mission with Kim and the doctor, during which they were attacked.
Immediately, Seven and the EMH report to Janeway and Tuvok. The doctor worries that there’s an intruder on board who is erasing his memories, and who posed as an ensign on the ship. Tuvok and Janeway say they don’t recognize the alien in the holoimage Seven reconstructed, nor does Seven recognize them as a species the Borg has encountered. Janeway orders Seven to scan for cloaked ships, for Tuvok to run a security sweep, and for the EMH to deactivate himself until they can find out what’s going on.
The EMH agrees, returning to sickbay and removing his mobile emitter, but before he deactivates himself, he instructs the computer to make a copy of his memories from the prior 48 hours. If his program is tampered with in any way, he is to be reactivated, those memories restored. He also sets the holoimager on automatic, to take pictures every five seconds.
Sure enough, he’s reactivated, initially confused, then the computer restores his memory. Angry, he checks the holoimager to discover that the person who erased his memories of the last 48 hours was Janeway.
He goes to the bridge, interrupting a friendly argument among Janeway, Chakotay, and Tuvok about a sumo wrestling match to accuse Janeway of a horrific violation of his very self.
Janeway takes the conversation into the ready room. She had his memory of the incident with Jetal erased, as well as all memory of Jetal, because the incident caused a conflict in his programming that they could not resolve. Erasing his memory was the only viable solution, and she’d do it again in a heartbeat. She then orders the EMH to deactivate so that Torres can, again, rewrite his program to remove the conflict in question. Paris is briefed on all the experiments he’s currently running and whatever medical issues there might be. Paris also reassures the doctor that Janeway is doing the right thing, which the EMH finds not at all reassuring.
Seven goes to Janeway in her quarters, questioning her about the nature of individuality. Janeway analogizes the EMH to a replicator that needs to be repaired, but Seven reminds her that she is part machine, also, and she wonders if Janeway will treat Seven with the same disregard for her wishes if something similar happens. She also allows as how she may have picked the wrong person to be her mentor in how to be an individual as opposed to part of a collective.
Janeway, having been reminded that she’s a main character in a Star Trek series, reactivates the EMH and offers to tell him the whole story of what happened on Stardate 50979.
After Jetal’s surprise party, Kim, Jetal, and the EMH took a shuttle out, which was then attacked by aliens, one of whom boarded the ship and shot all three of them with a weapon. It didn’t affect the EMH, but both Kim and Jetal were badly injured. Voyager drove the aliens off with weapons fire, and the away team was beamed to sickbay. However, there was only one way to save them, and only the one doctor, and he can only save one of them, and the time it takes to save one will be a death sentence for the other one. He eventually chose Kim, and saved his life, but Jetal died while he operated.
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Fugitive Telemetry
The EMH suffered an existential crisis, having a complete meltdown in the mess hall, as his program was conflicted between his oath to do no harm and the fact that he chose one patient over another, one at least partly based on the fact that he knew Kim better and thought of him as a friend—a consideration that was never an issue with the original EMH program, but now the doctor has, in essence, a soul.
After being told this, he starts to have another meltdown in sickbay, and Janeway is forced to deactivate him. Torres is ready to rewrite his program again, since this is now the second time he’s thrown a nutty. But Janeway realizes that this is the wrong way to go. The EMH is a person, not just a program, and if it was anyone else in the crew, including a flesh-and-blood doctor, they would give him the opportunity to work through the issue.
So she reactivates him and makes sure someone is with him at all times while he sorts through the problem. After two weeks, he seems no closer. Janeway is sitting with him on the holodeck, reading Dante’s La Vita Nuova. She also falls asleep on him while he’s in the midst of soliloquizing, and the EMH belatedly realizes that, not only is she exhausted, but also feverish. He tells her to go to sickbay, but she says she’s too busy helping a friend. Touched, he insists, and says he’ll contact someone if he needs help. We fade out on him reading a passage from the book.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Despite making him officially chief medical officer, despite not having treated him like a replicator since the second season, Janeway acts as if the EMH is a piece of machinery rather than a member of the crew, at least until Seven whups her upside the head on the subject.
Half and half. Torres questions the notion of the EMH having a soul.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. The EMH’s breakdown happens in the mess hall, and it’s Neelix who calls security on him, which only makes his fruit-throwing tantrum worse.
Resistance is futile. Seven wasn’t on board when Jetal died, so she isn’t aware of the coverup. As a result, she inadvertently leads the EMH to learning the truth, and it’s her reminding Janeway that the EMH is a sentient being with individual rights that gets them to treat him like a person with a psychological problem instead of a machine that needs to be repaired.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Apparently, holoimages leave behind photonic residue that can be used to partly re-create holographic images even after they’re deleted.
Do it.
“The primordial atom burst, sending out its radiation, setting everything in motion. One particle collides with another, gases expand, planets contract, and before you know it, we’ve got starships and holodecks and chicken soup. In fact, you can’t help but have starships and holodecks and chicken soup, because it was all determined twenty billion years ago!”
“There is a certain logic to your logic.”
–The EMH ranting and Tuvok providing commentary.
Welcome aboard. Nancy Bell plays Jetal, while Scarlett Pomers is back as Naomi.
Trivial matters: Jetal was originally the name given to the Betazoid on board in “Counterpoint,” but it was changed to Jurot, and the name was recycled here.
While this is the first time we’ve seen the EMH’s holoimager directly, we’ve seen the fruits of its labors in “Nothing Human” when the EMH was torturing the crew with his slideshows.
In the post-Nemesis Trek novels, Janeway was killed in the TNG novel Before Dishonor by Peter David, but later resurrected in the Voyager novel The Eternal Tide by Kirsten Beyer. When Janeway returns, the EMH quizzes her about the conversations the two shared in this episode by way of testing to see if it’s the real Janeway.
Joe Menosky’s first draft of the script had Janeway fall asleep while sitting with the EMH, but the doctor doesn’t wake her or send her off to sickbay, but picks up the book and reads it. Brannon Braga rewrote the scene as it was filmed, which disappointed both Menosky and most of the cast, who preferred the original draft.
The stardate given for Jetal’s death places that event between “Worst Case Scenario” and “Scorpion.”
The revelation that Jetal died toward the end of the third season means that there are now twenty confirmed deaths since they left the Ocampa homeworld, plus an unspecified number who died in “The Killing Game, Part II.” “In the Flesh” gave the crew complement as 128, and they had 155 at the end of “Caretaker” (the 152 Janeway mentioned in “The 37’s,” plus Seska, who left, Durst, who died, and the EMH, whom she wouldn’t have counted at the time). With the twenty confirmed deaths, that means that it is likely that seven people died fighting the Hirogen.
Set a course for home. “Here begins a new life.” This is almost a perfect episode. It’s hard to go wrong focusing an episode on Robert Picardo’s EMH (though they have managed it), and he delivers one of his strongest performances here. For the first time, Lewis Zimmerman’s snottiness is used to good effect, through the EMH’s righteous anger at being violated. And then, when he learns what he’s done, the doctor’s existential angst is magnificently played by Picardo.
There are so many clichés being turned on their ear here, starting with one of the oldest tropes in Trek’s playbook: human fallacy confusing the crap out of a machine, causing it to self-destruct. The ethical conundrum the EMH faces here is just like the ones foisted by Kirk upon Landru in “The Return of the Archons,” the androids in “I, Mudd,” and Nomad in “The Changeling.” And Janeway is forced to shut him down before he goes the way of those mechanical beings.
My favorite, though, is that this script takes one of my least favorite aspects of dramatic fiction in general: deaths of important characters are treated differently and with more reverence than deaths of side characters. More than twenty members of Voyager’s crew have died since they went into the Badlands to chase Chakotay’s Maquis cell, and those deaths have had absolutely no long-term impact on the rest of the crew. Most of them haven’t even had a short-term impact, and a lot of them didn’t even have names. Hell, we’ve only seen two memorial services (one of them in this episode, the other in “Alliances“).
The horrible choice the EMH must make puts this tendency in sharp relief. Harry Kim is in the opening credits. Ahni Jetal is a one-shot guest star. Of course Kim must live and Jetal must die and be forgotten—but this episode makes use of that tendency as a plot point, and it makes the story much more profound than it might be. The EMH considers Kim a friend, while Jetal is someone he only knows as a (very) occasional patient. And the fact that he favored Kim over Jetal haunts him, because it’s contrary to the objectivity and dispassion that he was originally programmed with as what was supposed to be an occasional medical supplement, not a full-time physician. Kim shouldn’t matter more than Jetal.
And that’s the other thing: the EMH isn’t just a machine, isn’t just a program, not anymore. As Janeway so eloquently puts it, they gave him a soul. He’s a person, and when a person has a psychological problem, they work through it. And Janeway belatedly realizes that that’s how she needs to treat this member of her crew—not as a replicator, but as a chief medical officer.
Which leads nicely to why this is not quite a perfect episode: Jetal’s death occurred eighteen months previous, before Seven joined the crew. This is an important plot point, as Seven’s ignorance of the subsequent coverup is what enables the EMH to realize that something is amiss. But there are several problems this brings up. One is that the flashbacks show Janeway and Paris with the same hair they have now, but both had significantly different hairstyles at the end of season three. (At least they remembered to put the hollow pip back on Paris’s collar in the flashback.)
The big one though is that we see Paris assisting the EMH with the medical procedure, and this raises the rather important question: where’s Kes?
This isn’t just an issue with the medical procedure, but also its aftermath. Of everyone on board Voyager, Kes was the one who routinely advocated for the EMH as a person rather than a program. That advocacy is the primary reasons why Janeway now (mostly) treats the EMH like the actual CMO instead of a tool.
And I can’t imagine any circumstance under which Kes would sit quietly and be okay with Janeway wiping the EMH’s memory like that. The role that Seven plays in the present-day portions of this episode is the exact same one (making some of the same arguments even) that Kes would have played in the flashback portion, if the writers had bothered to remember that she was even there.
This is still a powerful episode, one that has Trek’s trademark of examining the human condition through non-human characters (in this case, both the EMH and Seven), and uses one of TV’s most tired tropes as a brilliant plot point. And its only flaw is another tired trope, that of forgetting one’s own fictional history…
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido is still doing his “KRAD COVID readings” YouTube channel but for 2021 he’s reading all his Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers novellas in weekly installments. This week, he’ll finish off his four-part reading of Cold Fusion, an S.C.E./Deep Space Nine crossover story in which the crew of the U.S.S. da Vinci team up with Lieutenant Nog to salvage Empok Nor.
Agreed, this is a solid episode, and Robert Picard carries it (as he almost always does) extremely well. It does make me wonder who is acting as the mental health provider on the ship, though. I had assumed that the EMH had been filling that role as best he could in the absence of a counselor, but if any of Ahni’s friends needed support or counseling, they could hardly go to him after her memory had been erased.
To me this actually works against the plot (although not to the point of ruining the episode for me, because it is a good one), rather than for it. The fact that Harry Kim is (apparently) more important to the function of the ship than Ensign Jetal makes it enterally reasonable that, given a relatively equal chance of survival, the EMH would chose to save him over her, in the same way that I would expect he would save Janeway over Tom Paris in the exact same situation. Now, that wouldn’t necessarily stop him from feeling guilty about it, but I always found it curious that no one (especially the practical and not-particularly-emotional Seven, or the ever-logical Tuvok) would even mention it to try to prevent him from melting down. He might consider Harry a friend, but if Harry is genuinely more important to keeping the ship going, then picking him was the right choice.
In fact, by the time we get to “Good Shepard” Janeway and Co. seem baffled by the idea that anyone in the crew would be less than thrilled to be on a ship chugging along nearly a century away from home, losing friends left, right, and center.
Agreed, a brilliant episode, one of the show’s very best. I love it that it doesn’t have a pat ending, that the Doctor is still struggling through it at the end, but he’s being allowed to take the time with help from his friends. We know by now that this show will never follow up on it again, but it’s still the perfect way to end this particular installment.
It seems strange for Janeway to be treating the Doctor like a machine after coming around to accept his personhood, but it’s a reminder that prejudice can be subtle, that we can accept someone up to a point but still have unexamined biases that can crop up when challenged. And Janeway was slow to come around to accepting the Doctor in season 1, needing Kes to help convince her, so this is a logical followup, an indicator that some resistance remained.
“The ethical conundrum the EMH faces here is just like the ones foisted by Kirk upon Landru in “The Return of the Archons,” the androids in “I, Mudd,” and Nomad in “The Changeling.” And Janeway is forced to shut him down before he goes the way of those mechanical beings.”
I’d say a better analogy is to Rayna Kapec and Lal. It’s not just a logical paradox, it’s an overload of emotion, a case of an AI being torn by an irresolvable emotional dilemma and suffering a breakdown as a result. It’s evidently a recurring problem with Trek-universe AIs, and is the reason Soong made Data without emotions until he could crack the instability issue. (I figure Lore avoided cascade failure by being a psychopath, so that he couldn’t get torn by conflicting feelings like love or guilt.)
I keep thinking that Zimmerman really screwed up with this one, would it have been so hard to have random number generator kick in in the case of two equally injured crewmen to break the tie? That actually seems to be something an Emergency program ought to be able to cope with, it is almost guaranteed to come up in regular use at some point. This isn’t even something that would pop up only with long term use. Or have his program take ship position into account, which, again, super necessary in a crisis situation. As, for god knows what reason, Harry is the permanent ops officer and referred to as senior staff, he really should get priority in an emergency.
The show should not have said two equally injured crewmen triggered this crisis. If they wanted to do the EMH’s simulated feelings break his program as an episode, they should have had Jetal be a lesser injured crew person who would have easily survived if the EMH didn’t pick Harry despite him being all but red tagged in triage and whose survival wasn’t assured at all. Then you’d have some meat on this turkey.
Also, Janeway’s method of dealing with this is easily the most childishly supervillaineque way of solving this. Obviously she must just be bored and is over complicating all this for personal amusement. Otherwise she’d just have deleted the memory and told the EMH that Jetal died after having her head phasered off and the alien menace’s weapon had destabilised his programming. What did Jetal do to Janeway to be unpersoned? Did she defy her in someway too?
This episode is good character performances on the first viewing, but it fails the fridge logic test and doesn’t have much to add for a second viewing.
Also, is this episode before or after Ashes to Ashes, I forget. One of these episodes wastes the opportunity of the other, and I forget which one was which.
Solid episode with important discussions in that most Trekkian way of a being’s personhood even if he is artificial, and an excellent showcase for Robert Picardo.
I never noticed the inconsistency with the time frame of when Jetal was killed and the fact that Kes should have been there as well as consistency issues with Janeway and Paris’ hairstyles. I assume the writers just hoped the audience wouldn’t even think of these things.
My two issues are: (1) That this just goes to show that since Kes left the ship, that someone else needed to step up or be trained in medical procedures to supplement the EMH to prevent or mitigate situations like what happens with Jetal from taking place. And (2) As I griped about in the comments of another Voyager episode rewatch, the death of Jetal would have hit harder for the audience or have been someone we cared about if she had been developed by the series prior to this one-off appearance. Or at least make it a character we had seen before: Carey or Vorik for example.
Seems to me that the writers forced Janeway to be prejudiced in order to serve the story. Totally inconsistent with her history.
@3/Kayom: I disagree with your point that the show shouldn’t have had stated that both Jetal and Kim had equal injuries. If they did it as you think they should have, where Kim is severely injured and Jetal less so but dies anyway because the EMH works on Kim, what would cause the Doctor’s existential crises in this situation? As with any real-life doctor, he wouldn’t need to treat someone that he perceives as only slightly injured and so treats the other patient in more of a life-or-death situation. The doctor should feel no guilt in that situation because he was following standard medical triage procedure. No, the real ethical dilemma, as showcased in this episode, is what happens to the doctor when he has two equally injured patients but decides to treat the one who he knows better and the other patient dies in the interim. The show got it right.
I should have been clearer, Jetal who still needed treatment but had a better chance of survival, and Harry being near death’s sweet release from his living hell of being Harry, but the Doc picked Harry even though Jetal’s chances were better anyway. They both need treatment to survive, death assured without it, but triage preference ought to have gone to Jetal. The Doc chooses Harry due to the program’s pretend feelings and has a program conflict due to it.
@3- The EMH must, of course, have triage protocols that would allow him to make a rapid choice in that sort of situation. It would beggar belief a medical program designed to operate in emergency conditions would not. The crisis, therefore, is that he believes that the ways in which his programming has developed and grown has compromised his in-built ability to make an objective decision. Day 1 EMH likely could have dispassionately saved one patient and continued about his business.
kayom: I agree with garreth, your hypothetical would make the story not work, because under no circumstances would the EMH operate on someone less injured first. The whole reason why there’s an issue is because he had to choose one over the other for non-medical reasons because they had equal injuries (and both were ensigns, probably of the same relative import to ship’s operations). Without that, there’s no dilemma.
Also “Ashes to Ashes” is in season six, so we’ll get to that down the line.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5/Austin: As I said, I don’t think it is inconsistent. Prejudice isn’t an on-off switch; it’s more complicated than that. You can think you’ve overcome a bias but still have unexamined preconceptions you haven’t recognized, ones that don’t come out until they’re challenged directly. Overcoming it is a process of gradual learning, and the episode got that right.
If I have a problem with the premise of this episode, it’s that it requires the entire crew to have agreed never to mention Jetal again, so that the Doctor wouldn’t know she’d ever existed. That would be difficult to pull off. Although they did try to touch on it by establishing that she mostly worked belowdecks and rarely interacted much with the Doctor or the command crew.
As the Re-Watch’s resident SF Debris fan, heh, I think Chuck Sonnenburg’s My Way or Janeway gag sums up my feelings about this episode.
No, seriously, this is one of my favorite episodes of the series too. Another high point of Season Five.
@7/kayom: Okay, that makes what you’re saying clearer but is still an entirely different scenario and ethical quandary than what we’re presented with in this episode. If the show did it as you are suggesting, then the EMH is absolutely not acting ethically and not following triage procedure by not treating the officer with a better chance of survival and still choosing to treat his friend instead. That would necessitate the captain looking into correcting his program/ethical sub-routines. As presented in the episode, the EMH didn’t commit any unethical malpractice, he simply had equal options presented before him and had to make a choice to end that stalemate but which still leads him to his existential crisis.
@10 – My issue with it was the way it was presented. Janeway just coldly compares him to a broken replicator. Not exactly subtle. Besides, nowhere in all the previous episodes had she ever treated him like anything but a person. So for her to suddenly be like, “Eh, he’s just a broken toaster,” is so left field that it is almost a character assassination. Subtle would have been her coming to her wit’s end on how to handle his breakdown and then reluctantly deciding that he is still technically a computer program and that aspect can be manipulated. Instead, we got her cold dismissiveness of his entire personhood.
@3: Zimmerman didn’t predict a scenario of a continually-running developing a living consciousness and emotional personhood.
It’s fairly obvious that they couldn’t have had Kes appear because it would have meant hiring Jennifer Lien back after unceremoniously firing her. And presumably they felt they had to set the flashbacks there so that they could have the plot point about Seven not knowing about the cover-up. But they could have done both if they just set it between “The Gift” and “Day of Honor” – no Kes, and Seven not yet self-actualised enough to even know what’s going on or be trusted with secrets by the rest.
I also always rationalised that Janeway’s regressive attitude about the EMH in this ep is not what she really believes now, but rather what she is telling herself now to justify her decision then.
And I agree about the central choice between Main Character and a random goldshirt we’d never seen before this episode. Given my previous whingings about Voyager doing this, I was all ready to starting ranting again. But in this case, it was precisely because this was somebody we didn’t know well (and because we as viewers spend all our time with the senior staff, they don’t know them well either) that the EMH chose as he did. Just this once, the fact that it was a random goldshirt is actually kinda the point. And that makes it slightly more okay with me.
Yikes! I accidently posted this on the Nothing Human section when I Intended it for this one…sorry.
Overall, I like this episode. The point they are making is a good one.
That said, It always sticks in my craw how Janeway is made to look like the bad guy for doing the procedure at all. By that I mean, her taking on the attitude that the Doc is a glorified tri-corder is of course wrong, (and seems somewhat misplaced given how far her and the EMH had come). It seems like that motivation was placed in the dialog to justify the ‘change of heart’. But the implication is that she made the wrong decision having the procedure done in the first place.
But again, this doesn’t make sense.
Just a few episodes ago Janeway ordered a crew member to undergo a medical procedure (one the EMH fully engaged in) that said crew member explicitly REFUSED to have done (Nothing Human). And this was considered the right choice by the majority of the crew (including the EMH, ostensibly).
Now, all of the sudden, Janeway is being accused of trampling on the rights of the individual.
Anyone who takes on a commission is, to some extent, giving up some of their rights for the good of the mission and/or crewmates. They are giving an individual, in this case the captain a certain amount of authority over them. A starship captain has to take on more then just the sensibilities or rights of an individual crew member when making decisions.
Yes, Janeway should clearly not justify her decision by calling the EMH a device. But she really shouldn’t have to justify her decisions at all; other than what she did was not only good for the individual (the EMH could/would have been destroyed; equal to death) but also the good of the crew. It’s clear from her pervious actions that she would have made the same decision if the doctor was flesh and blood but about to die if a procedure was not undertaken to save his life.
@13/Austin: “My issue with it was the way it was presented. Janeway just coldly compares him to a broken replicator. Not exactly subtle. Besides, nowhere in all the previous episodes had she ever treated him like anything but a person. So for her to suddenly be like, “Eh, he’s just a broken toaster,” is so left field that it is almost a character assassination.”
Or maybe she’s taking such a hard line because she’s trying to convince herself. It’s easier for her to live with her decision if she casts it in those terms.
Yea, seriously, your plan makes a heck of a lot more sense than what Janeway went with, here. This part of the whole episode does break down when you think about it for more than a minute. Honestly, I find it nearly as disturbing as Janeway deciding to play with the EMH’s brain. Voyager isn’t a very big ship, and the idea that no one is ever, EVER going to mention Ahni again where the EMH might hear them is sort of ridiculous. Heck, what if Harry started suffering from some unforeseen complication from what happened here and needed to be treated for it? I mean, sure, the main cast might not talk about her (although Harry might have found her dying while he nearly died traumatizing and worth talking about), but the other 110 people on Voyager likely would. I mean, she had to have roommates, friends, other people in her department, maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend, right? Even if none of them were upset enough about her death to want to talk to a medical professional about it, the idea that everyone who knew and loved her would just agree to never talk about her for, presumably, the rest of their lives is sort of nuts.
The EMH going through this dilemma makes for great TV, and is very well acted, but the premise requires a lot of “yadda yadda yadda” to get to that point.
@3/kayom: Of course Zimmerman and Starfleet expected triage situations to arise with the EMH. That’s the point of having an Emergency Medical Hologram to begin with. It’s just that they never envisioned a scenario where a single EMH would be loaded into active memory for long enough that its psychological state would actually matter in any meaningful way.
If Janeway could call Starfleet Tech Support about their EMH wigging out due to an ethical dilemma, the helpdesk pro on the other end would suggest the first thing any good helpdesk pro suggests: “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” In this case, the solution would be to shut off the EMH, wipe all of its memory, and reload its default state.
Obviously that isn’t a good solution for Voyager since their EMH is a separate sentient being now, but it’s definitely what Zimmerman & Starfleet would have recommended.
Prejudice isn’t an on-off switch; it’s more complicated than that. You can think you’ve overcome a bias but still have unexamined preconceptions you haven’t recognized, ones that don’t come out until they’re challenged directly. Overcoming it is a process of gradual learning, and the episode got that right.
Oh, my, yes. The problem of racism is very much a piece with this. You think you’ve got it licked, but it always raises its head periodically, because the old habits of prejudice are written deep in our heads and are just as hard to root out.
@3/kayom: Oh, I can’t wait to get to “Ashes to Ashes” to tear into that episode but if I think you’re alluding to what I think you are, then yes, I agree that episode wastes an opportunity by not tying into this one.
One the franchise’s finest hours. Latent Image is to Voyager what Darmok was to TNG. Both Menosky episodes, both made in their respective fifth seasons, and both telling incredibly poignant stories with no easy resolutions.
This is the best EMH story in the entire show. He had to make a near impossible choice, and his programming couldn’t cope with the outcome. It’s both tragic and heartbreaking to witness both his first breakdown and his near second one. Humans and other organic beings have mechanisms to cope with such decisions. The EMH, like other holograms and other artificial life forms in the Trek universe, is unable to process that.
Much like DS9’s 100th episode, The Ship, this episode gets a lot of mileage out of subverting the Red Shirt trope. The EMH choosing Kim over Jetal is a great way to shed a light over the “social inequality” status between main characters and secondary/tertiary crew members.
That the episode puts Janeway to task for making the prior decision of erasing the EMH’s memory, thus violating his basic individual rights, only reinforces just how pivotal this episode is. We don’t often see Janeway regretting her choices or going back on her mandates. Seeing her take this step to rectify the EMH’s existence is one of the show’s best moments. The whole final sequence with her keeping a sleepless watch – while under fever, no less – is even better than the scene where Bashir keeps O’Brien from ending himself on DS9’s Hard Time. A superlative, challenging ending for a great episode. Voyager was a show so used to pat and easy 5th act solutions to stories that seeing this happen at all was an eye-opener. It’s times like these that part of me hoped for a more serialized approach to character development on the show, while still maintaining the episodic plot approach.
While we won’t get instances or callbacks to the EMH’s breakdown, the show thankfully will address the issue of holographic rights in future episodes.
When I saw this, part of me spent some time trying to reconcile Kes’s place in the story given the timeframe of the events. The way I did it was to assume they logged the stardate incorrectly, and that Jetal’s death instead took place around the events of season 3’s Before and After, a period in which Kes would be somewhat out of sorts given her own experience time hopping and dealing with all her memories (and subsequent lack thereof). Because I agree that Kes would have to be very much involved during the EMH/Jetal incident otherwise.
That aside, I have no problem placing Latent Image as a contender for Voyager’s top 5 (and even ranking among the franchise’s very best).
Janeway actively made the decision to mess with the Doctor’s memories in the first place. Why couldn’t she have simply altered the memories to make it appear that Ensign Jetal died because her injuries were beyond the Doctor’s help? In that case, there would have been no AI programming conflict.
@23/Iron Rob: What you’re suggesting is the total antithesis of what this story is about: that the EMH has personhood and isn’t a toaster. The story concludes that it was wrong for Janeway to delete the EMH’s memories. To compound that initial wrong by her doubling down and altering his memories would be repugnant given that the EMH has a “soul” and would be character assassination for Janeway. Yikes.
I’m just going to chime in to echo some of the sentiments here. First, I do think that this episode has an excellent message and is some of the very best of Trek at showing the importance of humanity and individuality. Also, giving Robert Picardo an episode like this to run with is always satisfying.
I’m generally onboard with the idea that Kim being a member of the senior staff / bridge crew is enough of a tie breaker to justify the decision, even if both characters were ensigns. However, it seems clear that the point of the episode is that the Doc knows he made his decision because of friendship and not because of rationale. Trying to justify it shouldn’t make his inner conflict simply resolve itself.
However, personally, I have a really hard time getting past Janeway’s overt disregard for her crew’s ability to make their own decisions. Ignore the comparisons to a replicator; to me, it’s yet another case of her overriding what is essentially a medical decision just like she did in Tuvix and just like she did in Nothing Human. I don’t like it, and no matter how many times it happens, I won’t be okay with it.
Also, an aspect of the ending I forgot to bring up. While the original ending as written would have likely played very well as a symbolic, silent piece, I rather like the final version as rewritten by Braga. Seeing the EMH pull himself together just enough to excuse Janeway and promise her that he’ll pull through this prolonged breakdown is a good way to reaffirm and assert the ending in a more hopeful tone. Trek has always been about emphasizing the notion of hope for the future, and the ending of this episode perfectly encapsulates that philosophy. Plus, it ties into the classic Roddenberry notion of humanity bettering themselves for the greater good.
@25
It’s not a democracy, though. The crew can’t make those decisions on their own because the ship isn’t structured that way. Neither is Starfleet.
@27 Starfleet might not be a democracy, but I’ve yet to see much evidence outside of Voyager that members of Starfleet give up all bodily autonomy on medical issues when they join. Worf got to chose to do a very dicey procedure, and no one seemed to believe that they had the right to deny him euthanasia when he wanted it, even if they weren’t happy about it. Maybe I’m just not remembering it, but forcing competent people to undergo medical procedures they don’t want seems limited to Janeway.
That’s pretty consistent with modern militaries, for what it is worth, too. I might be *required* to get, say, the MMR vaccine, but no one is going to hold me down and forcibly administer it to me. I’d just get punished and/or discharged, but I still have the ability to refuse a medical procedure I don’t want.
@27 Agreed!
Still not getting all the flack Janeway is getting for making medical decisions for the crew. Not trying to White Knight for Janeway (she has and does make some horrible decisions).
TNG established in ‘Thine Own Self’ that any one at lieutenant commander and above has the authority to send a crewmen to their death if it will save lives (or the ship). In fact, apparently it is a requirement of the position. The doctor is the only qualified medical crew member and (being stuck in the Alpha Quadrant) is irreplaceable. He has already saved the lives of a number of crewmembers and will save more in upcoming episodes.
If Starfleet is structured in such a way that a lieutenant commander can order you to your own death if it will save lives; certainly a captain can SAVE your life for the same purpose.
If you don’t like the decisions, don’t blame Janeway, she is doing what she has the authority, indeed, the obligation to do.
@28
Riker wasn’t at all going along with Worf’s euthanasia and found a clever loophole. It was a denial by using his own culture against his rushed decision to end his life.
@28- The most direct comparison, at least to Tuvix, might be Measure of a Man- there seems to be no question there that Riker or Picard would be able to refuse a superior officer’s order to report for disassembly in order to construct more Rikers or Picards- the question is whether Data, as an artificial life form, shares those rights.
@30 Riker didn’t want to *participate*, which is his right. But he acknowledges that if Worf wants Alexander to do it, Riker won’t have any authority to stop it. Yea, it is a loophole, but he isn’t denying that Worf has the right to die, just that he has the right not to be a part of it.
@31 Fair enough. I’m just confused by all the people who think a ship’s Captain has the right to order anyone to undergo any medical treatment that strikes her fancy, when it has always seemed to me that Janeway is a massive outlier, in that area.
@32
It wasn’t just the participation, Riker didn’t want Worf to die because he thought his life wasn’t over. And he was disgusted by that part of Klingon culture.
And I think the Alexander part of it was a bluff on Riker’s part (he is a master at poker). He knew Worf wasn’t going to make his son do that and called him out on it.
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with the assessment of this episode. Picardo does give a great performance here, but it’s elevating a script that’s based on a fundamentally stupid premise. The Emergency Medical Hologram is, as the name suggests, specifically designed for use in emergencies. Emergencies are precisely the kind of situations where it’s plausible the EMH might have to let some crew die to save others. To suggest that’s not covered in the program and would lead to the kind of mental breakdown seen in this episode is simply implausible. This is a single incident, and clearly had an effect on the EMH not long after; had there been a genuine emergency requiring multiple decisions of this nature to be made in short order, it’s inconceivable Starfleet would have allowed the possibility of the EMH suffering this kind of failure to make decisions precisely when it would have been most needed.
The episode would arguably have been better if they’d used a similar premise, but focused on mental anguish rather than inability to function & make decisions. The Doctor could have regained the memories of the incident with Jetal, but still retained the ability to function. The focus could then have been on whether it is better to forget memories that bring you pain (the choice initially made by Janeway on behalf of the Doctor), or to retain them as being essential, formative experiences that make you you, despite being painful.
@33 Yea, I’m not denying that Riker didn’t want Worf to die, but it is pretty clear that if Worf was physically well enough to do it himself, Riker wouldn’t have the authority to stop him. That was the point I was making.
@34- Yes, but the EMH was never supposed to function in the way he does on Voyager. Remember, the ongoing running of his program already forced the crew to invent a workaround to prevent a catastrophic failure once. As far as Zimmerman and whatever committee approved the EMH for deployment would be concerned, “personal attachment to crewmembers in a triage situation,” isn’t a contingency that needed to be accounted for because it should never have occurred.
Now is this an oversight reinforcing the ongoing problem that Starfleet has yet to really reckon meaningfully with the tendency for their starship computers to accidentally produce fully-sentient artificial intelligences? Sure, but this particular case was an unforeseen problem.
@34 – I think you missed the point of the episode. Of course the EMH is programmed to triage. But the issue was that he was presented with equal injuries and therefore the choice to save one person should be random. But since he has been allowed to achieve sentience, i.e. “given a soul,” he chose Kim because he was more attached to him. That was the point of the episode; not that the EMH didn’t know how to triage.
@34: The EMH was designed as a stopgap measure. A backup in the most dire cases. He was never meant to be the ongoing CMO for a full mission spanning years.
Keep in mind that the whole notion of holograms becoming sentient was still fairly new to Starfleet. In 2369, Picard was still grappling with Moriarty’s awareness and couldn’t come up with a solution to give him what he wanted. Holograms asking for equal rights wasn’t in the minds of Starfleet at that point. And this was just over a year before Starfleet even began using the EMH. They couldn’t foresee he’d grow a personality and a soul, which would conflict with his priorities.
@35
That’s just it, I think Riker would have the authority to stop him. Worf is known to make rash decisions; he wasn’t even trying the medical procedures. I think it would be Riker’s call to stop Worf from killing himself, just as he tried to stop him from killing Duras.
For what it’s worth, Janeway will examine the problem (whether to treat holograms as people or as objects, not nonconsenual medical procedures) again in Season Six’s “Fair Haven,” and it’s nice to think her experience her influences her actions in the future.
@40/cuttlefishbenjamin: I’ve been avoiding watching those pair of Fair Haven-themed episodes in the sixth season for decades now. You’re saying they’re actually worth viewing?
@41- I wouldn’t go that far- it’s been a long while since I’ve watched them and I can’t speak to their quality. But they’re thematically relevant.
@1/wildfyrewarning: “In fact, by the time we get to “Good Shepard” Janeway and Co. seem baffled by the idea that anyone in the crew would be less than thrilled to be on a ship chugging along nearly a century away from home, losing friends left, right, and center.”
Yeah, that was not one of Janeway’s better moments, or episodes really. At some point one of the officers she’s trying to bond with says he has no interest in doing so because she basically ruined his life. Dude was a scientist who only joined Voyager for some hands-on experience he would need in the future. He’d planned to spend only a year or so onboard and is now stuck there for what will probably be the rest of his life because she decided to blow up their way home.
And Janeway’s response to this is to literally roll her eyes. (Mind you, given how ridiculously fast the Maquis integrated into Voyager, it’s not surprising she’s unprepared for salt from her crewmen.)
@42: In that case I think I can just wait for the rewatch and subsequent commentary on here before I even make that consideration again. The focus of whole episodes where the main cast have yet another vacation on the holodeck in a long ago quaint Earth setting, and where the holodeck in some manner breaks down yet again is not my idea of worthwhile viewing and makes me shudder in horror at the thought of being forced to watch.
@43/kradeiz: We’re getting ahead of ourselves here but I actually liked “Good Shepherd,” Voyager’s take on TNG’s “Lower Decks” (which is admittedly far superior) and also a better counterpart of the similar “Learning Curve” in Voyager’s first season. My main complaint is that “Good Shepherd” should have taken place far earlier in Voyager‘s run. And that guy snarking Janeway was a major dick so her eye roll seemed an appropriate response.
@43, yeah. And one of them is terrified to go on away missions and this is treated like a hurr-durr laugh at the scaredy cat thing instead of someone being flipping observant of just how deadly Voyager away missions are.
I have limited sympathy for the guy who says Janeway ruined his life, I mean I do have a lot [’cause she did] but with an asterisk that he should have known getting screwed in space was a risk, seeing that the reason his career path is so exclusive that it uses space experience as requirement. If there wasn’t going to be an element of risk handling, then it would say he could have done it in a luxury RV parked in the middle of Vasquez Rocks on Earth. If your career path says “needs Starfleet experience” then it wants people who can cope with an element of risk. Even during the great peace between Star Trek VI and TNG, bad stuff still happened in space. It is like they amped up his grouchyness to try and hide that he had a point and didn’t want too much audience sympathy.
@32/wildfyrewarning: Yes, Janeway is an outlier, because she’s the only Starfleet captain in charge of a ship stranded decades away from the Federation, with no source of support, nowhere for crew members to be rotated off, no possibility of replacement personnel. So it’s not hard to understand why Janeway approaches things differently. It’s not arbitrary, it’s a consequence of their unique situation.
@34/Geekpride: “Emergencies are precisely the kind of situations where it’s plausible the EMH might have to let some crew die to save others. To suggest that’s not covered in the program and would lead to the kind of mental breakdown seen in this episode is simply implausible.”
It was covered in his program, but that’s the whole problem. He was programmed to make such choices dispassionately and without bias. But he fears he made his choice based on personal emotion and is haunted by the guilt of that, precisely because it violates his programmed imperatives.
In other words, his problem is not that he wasn’t programmed to deal with the triage situation, but that he failed to deal with it the way he was programmed to.
@43, @45, @46 Yea, maybe it is just because I am a horribly negative misanthrope myself, but I found the two male crewmembers in “Good Shepard” to be far more relatable than Janeway is in that one. Especially since it is established the the math whiz does his job just fine, he just isn’t happy about being stuck on the ship of the damned decades from home, and it is kind of hard to blame him. And yea, the hypochondriac is treated as being totally unreasonable despite the fact that leaving the ship might, just to pull two random examples, result in turning into a lizard or being combined with another crewman- even if you manage to survive it. Sure, they could have been more like the rest of the happy elves back on Voyager, but their motives and grievances were pretty darn understandable to me.
The female crewman was the only one who seemed to either want or need some extra mentorship to make her a more useful member of the crew. And you have to wonder how necessary the whole pet project was when apparently no one had noticed these 3 were such a problem for 7 whole years. Really, are three mediocre performers in a crew of over 100 really that big a deal? Heck, I’d love it if my unit had a ratio that good!
What made “Lower Decks” interesting (IMHO) is that it was actually *about* those characters, and we got to see things from a new, unique point of view that was different from what we normally saw by being privy to everything that happened on the Bridge and in the Magic Meeting Room. “Good Shepard” is mostly about how those 3 effect *Janeway,* and we still get to see all the meetings and her thought process, which made it less effective for me.
And you gotta wonder if Janeway’s grand day out in GS cured Billy of his terror of everything outside the ship since he went on one away mission, the shuttle crashed into a subspace thingie, he got possessed by an alien and then shot by his own captain. Assuming he actually did survive which the episode unintentionally leaves open ended. Janeway actually confirmed all his fears were valid.
Ah, my favorite episode of Voyager. It’s powerful, thoughtful, and so well performed. Robert Picardo is always great and rises to every challenge, and I think this is his best performance.
It’s got a classically Star Trek dilemma and moral at the core, and it’s good that they didn’t balk at making Janeway the one who was wrong instead of another alien stand-in for humans in general. She made a mistake before based on a prejudice, she gets called on it, she realizes she failed the Doctor and she makes it right.
There are so many terrific scenes. The Doctor walking into the work-friends conversation on the bridge to confront Janeway with cold fury. Seven laying the moral smackdown on Janeway in her quarters. The Doctor’s breakdown in the mess hall, played so, so well; it really feels like a man who’s never had a crisis of conscience before and is casting about trying to find a way to hold himself together until he just bursts. Janeway realizing that she needs to give the Doctor the chance to handle it like a person. The final scene is great too, though I wonder if the original version would have been even better.
The flaws are there of course, the big one being Kes’s absence. Perhaps the episode would have worked better in season three, though then you wouldn’t have Seven there as the one person discovering this alongside the Doctor and enabling the plot. It also does seem like it probably wasn’t necessary to erase a person’s entire existence, when they could have just made up a story about her death.
But flaws, schmaws. It’s too good for me to care. One thing I really especially appreciate is the way the Doctor’s problem manifests. It’s a problem unique to him, a crisis that any human would have a different approach to because of our emotional nature. The Doctor, though he obviously has emotions, was programmed not to allow those emotions to interfere in his purpose, and now that his purpose has expanded from “emergency surgeon” to “fully-realized person” he has to reckon with his own nature. Being in some ways a five year old, he’s going through growing pains, and like the best Trek usually does that unique, inhuman situation gives us something to ponder about our humanity.
What I don’t fully understand here is this:
The Doctor’s a hologram; that is to say, a creation of the ship’s computer manifested by holoemitters. For situations like this *why in the world* can you not manifest more than one at a time? He was designed as emergency medical support, you could entirely plausibly want a bunch of them operational at the same time. Even if the Doctor proper is unique and making copies of him is implausible for whatever reason, the baseline EMH is clearly mass-productible given there’s copies all over Starfleet (and later, apparently, as miners). So why not call up a few more hands?
I remember watching this one! While Janeway’s solution was obviously wrong by God I could understand the temptation to just make it better. The Doctor’s breakdown was scary! And he’s suffering.
@51/foamy: Voyager‘s EMH was a prototype to begin with, and the sickbay emitters might not have the capacity to manifest more than one at a time. After all, it was expected that the EMH would be a supplement when the regular medical staff was overloaded, not a replacement for the entire medical staff.
@53: They have an entire holodeck capable of recreating anything they need in apparent perfect fidelity, up to and including *actual functional lungs inside someone’s body*. Holodeck up your sickbay and as many EMHs as you need.
Since we sometimes have to perform operations on human people who may not be competent that cause them to lose memories (removal of brain tumors) to save their lives why is it so unethical to do the same for the EMH? They didn’t know “talking therapy” and the support of friends would work with an AI that was only designed to be used in emergencies for a relatively short amount of time.
Which leads to my question: why didn’t they make a copy of the EMH so they have more than one doctor?
@54/foamy: A holodeck can create the surface appearance of anything, sure, but what defines the EMH isn’t his physical form, it’s his knowledge, technique, and judgment. That’s what takes all the processing power.
@55/C Oppenheimer: See my answer in comment 53.
The Doctor’s entire processing requirements and memory can fit inside a sort of football-looking shaped thing, and Voyager’s computer is really huge, and not noticeably impaired in running the Doctor vs. not. It can in fact run the Doctor *and* another top-flight one at the same time and get *improved* medical performance outta the Doctor from doing so as we saw a few episodes ago.
Moreover, random mines are using EMH copies as labour, which would suggest that they’re not actually particularly complicated for Federation computers to run.
@57/foamy: “The Doctor’s entire processing requirements and memory can fit inside a sort of football-looking shaped thing[/quote]
If you mean the mobile emitter, remember that that’s 29th-century technology.
“and Voyager’s computer is really huge, and not noticeably impaired in running the Doctor vs. not.”
Obviously, it was designed to run one EMH alongside normal ship functions. That’s my point — that it wasn’t designed to run more than one.
“It can in fact run the Doctor *and* another top-flight one at the same time and get *improved* medical performance outta the Doctor from doing so as we saw a few episodes ago.”
Crell Moset was not a sentient EMH based on the entire collected medical expertise of the Federation, just an expert program modeled on one specific person’s documented writings and personality. The program would have been far simpler.
“Moreover, random mines are using EMH copies as labour, which would suggest that they’re not actually particularly complicated for Federation computers to run.”
As I said, the EMH was a prototype when Voyager was launched in 2371. You’re talking about the status 5-6 years later, when the technology has become more advanced and widespread. Maybe a starship built or refitted in 2376 would have the capacity to run more than one EMH; indeed, we know that the Prometheus could do so in 2374. But Voyager could not, because the tech was only in the prototype stage when it was launched, and it hasn’t been able to swing by a Starfleet spacedock for an upgrade.
Besides, that scene was idiotic and I prefer to ignore that it ever happened.
“We gave him a soul, B’Elanna. Do we have the right to take it away now?”
And we’re back to Janeway’s appalling track record of trampling over the rights of sentient beings. But at least this one seemed to acknowledge it. Whereas “Nothing Human” seemed to end up deciding that Janeway was right and Torres needed to get over it (the Doctor comparing his experience to being operated on without consent is very ironic), here Janeway has to face the consequences of her decision and serve her penance. As in “Night”, she’s faced with reliving a past decision that’s haunted her and decides she can’t do the same thing again. And this time there’s no way to have her cake and eat it: She has to do it the hard way and help the Doctor through his trauma like she would any other crewmember. It’s telling that the first third is written as though there’s an alien menace onboard messing with everyone’s memories…only for the Doctor to discover that the menace is Janeway.
Never quite sure about that ending. There’s a bit of a feeling of “That’s it?” I’ve seen reviews that praise it for trusting the audience to complete the Doctor’s emotional journey themselves rather than needing to show it. And it’s definitely a quietly powerful moment. But as usual, there’s no follow-through and it’s business as usual next week.
And yes, the elephant in the room: Where the hell is Kes? The Doctor says the incident happened before Seven came aboard, and the stardate given places it in late Season 3, so she should still be the Doctor’s assistant, yet instead Paris, who we never saw working in Sickbay once in Season 3, is helping hm. After a couple of references to her in Season 4 (although “Year of Hell” seemed to try and erase one of her biggest episodes from continuity), we seem to be pretending she never existed now. Why couldn’t they have brought Jennifer Lien back for this one and not “Fury”? (Also, Tuvok has the wrong rank pips, since he should still be a lieutenant, and there’s no attempt to disguise the fact people have had haircuts since then. Did they even look up what the show was like then? It’s a wonder they remembered Paris was demoted two episodes ago and gave him the right pips for the period…)
Interesting that, while he agrees with Janeway’s decision, Paris is the first person to talk to the Doctor like he’s a person, not a problem to be solved. I’m surprised at how little I’ve mentioned Seven but yes, she’s there, taking on the role of Janeway’s conscience that she doesn’t want but does need.
I actually don’t find anything out of character in Janeway’s attitude. Whilst it didn’t happen to this Janeway, she’s still the same woman who threatened to delete him when he contradicted her back in “Year of Hell”. There’s obviously something bubbling under that apparently inclusive surface.
@59: Bringing Jennifer Lien back for this episode would just have amounted to essentially a quick cameo but at least she’d be associated with this excellent episode instead of the atrocity that is “Fury.” She could also have been brought back to effective and fun use in “Relativity” and “Shattered” for instance.
58: I was thinking of Living Witness, although checking on M-A shows I thought it was in fact *smaller* than I recall. I do not buy that the Doctor, entire, can fit in the palm of someone’s hand, but that Voyager’s computer cannot, in fact, run two of them.
Particularly as all the data and so on wouldn’t need to be duplicated. The Doctor is a personality shell overlaying a database access and some manipulatory appendages and we know the holodeck can create dozens of those at a time, including ones far more complex than the Doctor in terms of their presumed processing requirements (e.g. Moriarty).
The handwaving about him being so complex and a prototype really doesn’t hold water. Voyager should have the EMH.doc, EMH 1.doc, EMH 1a.doc, EMH 1.12.doc, EMH 1 – final.doc, EMH really final.doc, Untitled EMH.doc, and so on lurking in its file system somewhere, because that’s how software prototyping works. Or maybe Space Github, although if they had to deal with Space Github maybe that explains why backups and/or forks were so uncommon.
This episode was used in a parody of Voyager on Tumblr:‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Gothic – Frenzied Flitting From Topic To Topic (tumblr.com)
The particular section is
The Captain takes you aside one day and specifically instructs you not to mention Ensign Jetal to the Doctor. She says that she knows that this will be difficult, given how close we all were to her (and you in particular), but that for the greater good of the crew, you need to act like Ensign Jetal never existed. You solemnly nod your head and consent, and she gives you a comradely pat on the shoulder and leaves the room.
You have absolutely no idea who Ensign Jetal is.
Yes, it’s kind of a cheap shot in that Jetal would always have to be a guest star, but it’s still funny.
@61: So, first, speaking as someone with a couple decades of programming experience, it’s pretty obvious that the software development paradigm, and even basic programming methods, in Star Trek aren’t identical to what they are IRL today, given how people talk about programming in basically every series. The way it’s all presented, it really doesn’t seem like designing software works anything like it does nowadays, but is more like piping together prewritten black box components with adjustable parameters or something. Especially holoprograms. Honestly, given subspace junk and whatever, I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t cracked hypercomputing.
And second, what on earth are you talking about? Even with my first point aside, even assuming that coding does work exactly the way it does nowadays (though since it doesn’t even work the same now as it did 60 or 70 years ago, I’d be shocked), why would Voyager’s system look like that? The development environment might be that messy, but the EMH’s development environment was back at Jupiter Station; that’s what Zimmerman’s system would look like if anything. Voyager is a production environment for a prototype of a new piece of software being tested in the field. There wouldn’t be any reason to push earlier versions onto Voyager’s system. It’s not even a beta test, it’s a practical prerelease test in advance of fleet-wide implementation.
If Voyager had all those files for the Doctor program, then the producers would have to admit that he is in actual fact an appliance. Which he is. That is not to say he cannot also be a valued part of the crew, take Red Dwarf’s Holly and Kryten[1] or any number of trad-Star Wars droids, they are appliances and they admit they are appliances and that all their responses are just coded programming to put the organics at ease, and they are still valid characters. They are just really advanced toasters though, which is all the Doctor is. Voyager doesn’t want to admit though, Star Trek in general doesn’t want to admit their holograms are just really sophisticated versions of Alexa and Siri. If there was anything truly sapient about them, it would be the ship’s central computer and then we’d have Knight Rider but in SPACE. Which I would watch, btw, but Trek doesn’t want to have to admit they might have a sapient spaceship that they are all tooling around in.
[1] And the latest Red Dwarf special even broached the idea that Rimmer, being just a hologram replica of the deceased original, is not truly sapient either; although in typical Red Dwarf fashion they immediately glossed over the implications of it. So, Red Dwarf is still leading Trek in asking the hard questions about computer sapience and not going all wibbly and sentimental over them.
“Kim shouldn’t matter more than Jetal.”
but that’s just it, he does; and it shouldn’t have created a moral and existential crisis for the Doctor.
Kim is a member of the bridge crew, is considered ”senior staff”, and interacts with personnel in other divisions; he plays a significant role in the functioning of the ship. The fact that no one ever mentions, seems to miss, or reminisces fondly about Jatel and that her loss didn’t create any further hardships or difficulties in Voyager’s operations seem to indicate that she wasn’t an important part of the crew nor had any necessary skill sets.
As far as the EMH (and Janeway, etc al) is concerned Kim is more vital to the ship and the success of their mission so Kim is the one who is saved.
@64/Kayom:
You’ve just described Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda (2000-2005), developed by Robert Hewitt Wolfe (five-year veteran of DS9), which treats shipboard AI quite differently than Trek. High Guard ship-minds (which had been in use for, presumably, centuries — so, quite unlike VGR’s prototype EMH) are considered fully sentient and officers; the titular warship Andromeda Ascendant can (and frequently does) simultaneously manifest in three places (onscreen, holo, android) to debate herself. (I don’t specifically recall if human captain Dylan Hunt ever dresses down Rommie for unbecoming conduct, but it’s the sort of this-show’s-premise-encourages-friction thing that would happen.)
Keith and Dave Mack had a relevant bit of banter during their “Why Does Star Trek Thrive” panel (with Derek Tyler Attico) at the virtual Farpoint convention this weekend. They pointed out that Janeway was a huge leap forward in representation in Trek: from Janice Lester saying “Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women” in “Turnabout Intruder” to a woman in charge in roughly 30 years. Voyager aired while I was ages 14-20, and it meant something to a teenage geek girl to have a woman in the captain’s chair. (See also Sara Eileen Hames’s essay “Janeway Doesn’t Deserve This Shit” right here on Tor.com.)
I bring this up to point out that Janeway has to be flawed to be believable. If we avoid the supposed “character assassination,” that means she could never learn anything, because she was already perfect to start with. If she never changes her viewpoint on anything – in any direction – she isn’t going to grow as a person. We need to see that. We need to see her make mistakes and fix them, in order to live with our own errors. This is the best way for teenage geek girls to learn: watch our heroes make mistakes.
Dave Mack made another point in the panel: Just as geek girls grew up on Janeway in the 90s, they will again in the upcoming years, as she’s going to appear in Star Trek: Prodigy on Nickelodeon. I hope she is just as flawed there (if perhaps a bit less philosophical – it is a kids’ show) so more geek girls can learn what it means to be a real-life leader.
@49/Kayom:
That’s exactly the sort of misadventure that inspired Lower Decks, I guess — part of the crew is “genre aware” (to borrow a TV Tropes term) and notices that Starfleet service can be really dangerous except for a half-dozen crew (usually senior officers) who have “plot armor.” (Not that they’d describe it that way, in story-centric terms — or would they? To adapt a phrase, it’s not paranoia if you’re actually trapped in a super-civilization’s zoo-simulation which favors select players.)
The John Scalzi novel Redshirts (2012) goes in the same direction.
@64 – It’s always baffled me that Trek treats the computer like we do with Alexa nowadays. The computers depicted in Trek are so ridiculously advanced that it’s not even funny. And yet nobody even bothers to ask the computer to calculate something or provide an answer to a dilemma. I raised the question a while back about why there are even pilots. What can a human pilot do that the computer couldn’t?
@69- Survive a conversation with James T Kirk?
@68/phillip_thorne: “That’s exactly the sort of misadventure that inspired Lower Decks, I guess — part of the crew is “genre aware” (to borrow a TV Tropes term) and notices that Starfleet service can be really dangerous except for a half-dozen crew (usually senior officers) who have “plot armor.””
I’d say the Lower Decks season finale pretty decisively disproved the “plot armor” idea.
@69/Austin:
Because, for the 24th-century UFP and Starfleet, it’s not about efficiency, but about helping humans to explore: all the technology is a tool, not a substitute (which is a commonly-stated stance of the writers, and not accidentally useful for making video dramas with human actors for a human audience).
Some significant fraction of humans (and maybe other species) have enough wanderlust to join Starfleet, despite its hazards. (In one of their Trek novels, the Reeves-Stevens coin the term “la reve d’etoile,” “the dream of the stars.”) Looked at cynically, it’s a relief valve. UFP automation couldn’t substitute for organics until the late 24th century, and by that point it may’ve been cultural habit — Starfleet as the unifying symbol of the Federation (I suppose it must have other institutions, not that we see them).
By way of thematic contrast, our human-majority crews sometimes encounter other civilizations with comparable tech but very different philosophy vis-a-vis exploration: the isolationist Paxans (TNG “Clues”), the bring-visitors-to-them Cytherians (TNG “The Nth Degree”), everyone who’s out for conquest.
@Idran: Precisely my point. The Doctor isn’t a <i>prototype</i> as such, because if he was a prototype there would be a million backups of him around for version control (even Voyager tried to do this, depending on the needs of the plot). He’s a full-fledged release EMH that Voyager, as a brand new ship, is one of the first to receive. I flat refuse to swallow that Starfleet would’ve approved that deployment if an EMH occupies 51%+ of the computing power available to a starship.
This is particularly so inasmuch as in an emergency, the actual intended use for the EMH to begin with, ship damage (including to the computing facilities and/or sickbay) is a very real possibility. We also know that the EMH is capable of functioning even if nearly every other system on the ship is shut down, which suggests he is fairly power efficient and which <i>also</i> argues against the he’s-too-complex-to-have-two-of idea, since there are relations in information theory between energy and computing power.
Further, Star Trek is and always has been presented as a place where computing power and memory is intended to be functionally unlimited and the primary challenge is in applying it. This goes back to the original series, which claimed its computers were incapable of error. Since then they’ve been used as magic oracles to do things like simulate tens of millions of years of evolution in Voyager, or M5, which was nuts but completely capable of handling every single command duty on a starship solo. Each ship has a database of absurd breadth and depth, including on medicine to help out its usual doctors, and so on and so forth.
The EMH having a tiny <i>subset</i> of that database directly accessible to a simulated avatar is not going to strain that in any kind of logical way.
The real reason, of course, is that double-filming an actor is a pain and they didn’t bother with it, but that’s boring.
@66
I’ll catch it again next season on Star Trek Discovery then, I guess, when they recycle that part too.
@68
Never heard of it, doesn’t exist, bloody Rick and Morty spin off anyway even if it did.
@73/foamy: “I flat refuse to swallow that Starfleet would’ve approved that deployment if an EMH occupies 51%+ of the computing power available to a starship.”
That is a straw man and is not at all what I meant. The ship’s systems are not a single undifferentiated mass. It’s made up of different subsystems with their own abilities and capacities. The computer as a whole does not create the EMH, any more than your body as a whole does the job of the stomach or the liver. The sickbay holosystems create the EMH, and they were built with a certain capacity in mind. The rest of the ship’s computer systems can’t magically make the sickbay holoemitters more numerous or powerful, any more than they can magically increase the number of warp coils in the nacelles or the range of the transporter emitters. The ship was built to work a certain way and its individual systems have their limits.
“We also know that the EMH is capable of functioning even if nearly every other system on the ship is shut down”
You’re making my case for me. He’s able to do that because he’s a distinct, independent subsystem specific to sickbay, just as sickbay has its own independent power so it can stay functioning when the rest of the ship is damaged. It’s not an undifferentiated mass.
Seeing as Kes was the closest one to the EMH and an advocate for him, I’d imagine that Kes objected to Janeway’s solution and Kes was banned from sickbay and perhaps even locked in her quarters while the procedure was carried out.
@73: The EMH can and has been trivially transferred from sickbay to the holodeck and back again as far back as S1, even when they couldn’t do anything else. It’s still the ship’s computer running him when he’s not using the mobile emitter, in sickbay or on the holodeck.
Still don’t buy the handwaving. Even if I accepted the basic premise, which I don’t because the Doctor can be run elsewhere so he’s not sickbay-emitter-specific or anything, we know the sickbay emitters can make full on, high-fidelity lungs *inside someone’s body*, which is a far more complicated task than it’s been given proper credit for here. It’s significantly more so than the Doctor is at the physical level, because for a lung to work it has to be physically accurate down to molecular precision or else the gas exchange it needs to make happen won’t be correct, and it has to be so continuously and in three dimensions. It’s one of the most impressive things we’ve ever seen holotech do.
It is also a true, proven proposition in CS that *any* Turing-complete machine can perform the same operations as any other Turing-complete machine. With enough horsepower — which the ship’s main computer certainly has and which would dwarf some theoretical sickbay-only system — you could emulate dozens of them at once. Hell, the ship’s computer has the ability to *simulate itself* as we see in the Moriarty episodes.
I think the only time in all the filmed canon where we see a Starfleet computer actually hit a computational limit of any kind is when it was deliberately engineered in order to imprison the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Could be missing some, of course. Otherwise, it’s just cases of missing and/or tampered-with data.
@77/foamy: I’m tired of debating this. This is fiction. The tech serves the plot, not the other way around. The premise of this show has always been that the EMH is unique aboard Voyager and cannot be duplicated. Does that make perfect sense? Maybe not, but neither do transporters or artificial gravity or universal translators or humanoid aliens or telepathic powers or incorporeal superbeings or any of a thousand other things in Trek. We can acknowledge the implausibilities, but these decades-old stories are not going to rewrite themselves to make more sense. The tech is there to support the story and character elements, and it works in whatever way best serves those, even if that places implausible limits upon it.
@CLB: You have complained about nonsensical tech and/or science (to which exactly the same issue applies) all *sorts* of times throughout the rewatch sequence. Time travel stories, in particular, I seem to recall being a bit of a bugbear of yours.
Seems a bit weird to suddenly plant your flag on the ground of “it’s fictional, so they can do whatever’s needed to serve the plot”. S’true, in one sense, but if you take that as both granted and sufficient then why even bother trying to defend (as here) or complain about (as elsewhere) how tech and science are used in the first place?
Like, even here, your first arguments weren’t, “it’s just a story”, they were “this makes sense“. It doesn’t track.
@78/79/All: “I’m tired of debating this”–
Now seems like a good time for a general reminder about the importance of tone in the comment sections. We ask that you all keep the discussion civil, and that includes an understanding that it’s not necessary to try to win every argument by buffeting folks who disagree with you into submission. We genuinely appreciate the insights and level of investment that you all bring to the table, but not everything needs to be a heated debate. This seems to be happening more and more often as the Voyager Rewatch progresses, for whatever reason, and it needs to stop (this applies to everyone, not just the most recent iteration).
So please–keep things civil, keep disagreements in perspective, and just agree to disagree and/or simply move on. Some level of exasperation and bickering might be inevitable in fandom, but it shouldn’t be where we end up in every single thread.
One can only wonder what name the EMH shared with Ensign Jetal before her tragic demise; out of curiosity, has the EMH been show ruminating over what he ought to call himself in addition to ‘Doctor’ in recent episodes or has he finally gotten the hint that for him to summon up a name risks calling up the Dark Forces of the STAR TREK universe?
Just came here to say that I love this.
Oh, and I’m totally with you that it’s terrible and annoying that main characters’ deaths are treated differently than everyone else’s deaths. That bugs the heck out of me.
I can’t help but notice that the sole comment by a woman, about a woman being a woman, has been completely ignored. I’m not saying “wah, nobody answered me” from a personal perspective, just noting that it is very telling that the guys kept talking to each other and ignored the girl. Sci-fi fandom still hasn’t progressed from the bad old days, I guess. At least Dr. Asimov isn’t stalking the elevators of conventions anymore.
@74 – You don’t have to like it, but Lower Decks is part of Star Trek, and belongs in a conversation about Star Trek.
@81 I think the closest we got was in “Nothing Human” when he said he was “between names”.
@83/MeredithP: I didn’t respond to your post because I thought you summed it up well and nothing needed to be added.
Still, I’m not sure if Janeway’s characterization at this point was defined more by the character’s flaws or by the flaws in the way the mostly (entirely?) male writing staff at this stage approached her. I liked the writing of the character better when Jeri Taylor was in charge, and I never felt Braga quite got it in the same way.
Persuant to Meredith’s point about Janeway’s alleged character flaws, it’s telling that when Picard condemned a civilization to death because of an idiotic interpretation of the Prime Directive in “Homeward,” the talk was less about Picard’s character flaws, and more about how it was bad writing. There is, perhaps, a lesson in that.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@67 I really like your comment about Janeway needing to be flawed in order to be believable. I sometimes take issues with how those flaws are presented, as sometimes it makes her character feel inconsistent or even negligent, but it’s easy as a viewer to expect perfection and forget the real stress that must burden these decisions every day. It gives me some food for thought, anyway.
@83: I didn’t reply to your comment because I thought while it was nice, I didn’t have anything to add as there was no question posed and I didn’t see anything that seemed like a point of debate.
Also, there could be other commenters on here that are women, just not obviously so.
@87/krad: Are you implying sexism is at play regarding the difference in response to the two characters? Personally, I love the character of Picard so I’d rather not believe he has an irredeemable character flaw as condemning a whole civilization to death and would rather just blame bad writing. But what Janeway does in this episode doesn’t rise to the same level of offense as what Picard did plus she changes her way of thinking and evolves so I’m content with calling her previous actions/beliefs a character flaw.
@92/garreth: I agree. I should clarify that my comment about flaws in the writing of Janeway was about the later seasons in general, not about this specific episode; as I’ve said, I think it was actually good to show that she hadn’t entirely overcome her prejudice about the Doctor, that overcoming a prejudice is a journey rather than a single step.
@93/CLB: Yes. Star Trek is a meditation on the human condition and showing how humans learn to accept the equality and rights of other beings whether they be sentient androids, holograms, liberated Borg drones, etc. reflects how we are evolving as a species. Janeway in this episode is a reflection of us in our ability to grow and change.
My take, maybe wrong:
The Doctor’s problem isn’t really that he saved a friend over not-so-much-a-friend (whose birthday party he attended, and it must be someone’s birthday most days), but that medically he had two patients to save and no basis to prefer one to the other. Two redshirt patients would give him the same trouble.
His mental breakdown is different from a human condition because he isn’t human. I’d suppose that he has a live self-diagnostic function that examines and checks his treatment decisions for errors. If his treatments are wrong then he shouldn’t be treating patients. In this case, his decision was neither right nor wrong. His higher mental processes, which a a new EMH basically doesn’t have, also are involved.
Janeway’s first treatment of his problem was to exclude the data that his program wasn’t digesting.
To choose to treat a friend, for being a friend, probably would be considered an error by the diagnostic. I think if he was ordered to treat Kim or to treat Jetal, he would not have a problem with the order or the outcome. It is also because he made the decision himself.
What I think we are shown at the end, and of alternate scenes I prefer the one that we saw, is that he is allowed enough time to… process the experience, and he comes out of it by Captain Janeway’s health catching his attention when she’s taking her turn to sit with him. She’s just tired… but he returns to functioning as the doctor again. He is able to do that.
A somewhat similar episode happens in scifi novel “Heechee Rendezvous”, I think, where the protagonist’s holographic friend, a simulated Albert Einstein, crashes when this is seriously inconvenient: he’s the spaceship pilot. The ship is in flight and not really going anywhere… The eventual fix is to call on his insensitively branded psychiatrist sub-program “Sigrid von Shrink” and delicately explore Albert’s dilemma: they have encountered something that can only be explained in quantum mechanics – and Albert Einstein really doesn’t like quantum mechanics.
As for not having six EMHs to treat every bed in Sickbay, that just doesn’t happen because reasons. He isn’t designed to have more than one body or more than one patient at a time. When you do get two EMHs active…at least on Voyager… they aren’t treating patients, so I claim they can’t.
Quoth garreth: “Are you implying sexism is at play regarding the difference in response to the two characters?”
No, I’m coming right out and saying that sexism is at play.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@96/Robert Carnegie: I have to point out that your take is wrong regarding the EMH having the very same problem if he treated one red shirt over another because that isn’t supported by the dialogue in this episode. The EMH outright says that he chose to treat his friend over someone he didn’t know as well but had the exact same injury and it’s this explicit preference of his, which he clearly recognizes, disturbs him such that it sends him down a self-destructive spiral.
@96/Robert Carnegie: “it must be someone’s birthday most days”
Well, with a current crew complement around 130-ish, that would average out to roughly one birthday every two days. Assuming there are no overlapping birthdays besides the Delaney sisters.
@99- Well now you’ve got me thinking about calendars and birthdays in Star Trek. Is it your birthday when right digit has advanced by one in the Stardate? When your birth planet has gone around its sun once? When your species’ home planet has? Does everyone in the Federation just count their age in Earth years, for the same reason that the Federation President and Starfleet Academy are quartered there? One could imagine a crewmember whose birthday came up about once a week, or another one who never expected to live to see their first.
Of course, the probability that more than one person on Voyager shares a birthday (ignoring the Delaney sisters) is far higher than that no one does.
@67 MeredithP: Sorry, I wasn’t sure how to respond to you. I haven’t watched “Turnabout Intruder” for a while and I’m not sure whether Janice Lester was excluded from command roles in Starfleet because she’s a woman or because she’s a socio-psychopath and not the good managerial kind, which is a fair decision. (You also get the bad managerial kind.) I think later, in the first or fourth movie or its novelisation, a Starfleet ship that is knocked out of service when the big bad thing passes by has a female commander, Saavik is in command on the bridge when Spock gets killed, and a fair number of alien ships or societies in the old series had an apparent female in charge, or an entire female fighting force. But I won’t argue that 1960s Trek didn’t have a blind spot or rather a male gaze for female casting and costuming, and I don’t recall a female human in a senior role above Uhura, who is retconned at least to have some people who work for her. Hmm, Edith Keeler counts perhaps, she has a small army to command of unemployed males and she ends up moving nations, or preventing them from moving…
Is it fair to say that fallibility is exactly as useful in male and female command characters? Psychologically realistic characters won’t be perfect. Captain Kirk made some mistakes when he was angry, or while he was male gazing. But I’d expect commanders to be selected for their relative infallibility. At the same time, it’s desirable for bosses and subordinates to be open to the concept that the boss may be committing a goof… unless you are the boss. :-) So, that gets to happen some times.
And then there’s “fans” who argue that the entire series of Voyager is Captain Janeway’s fault due to her decisions in “Caretaker”.
@99, 100, 101, etc: Also “sorry” for dropping the Birthday Paradox and the Stardate Question into the comments without explanation. I’ll be honest, I knew what I was doing, and I did it anyway. I think none of you know my home address. :-)
@102/Robert Carnegie: The line in “Turnabout Intruder” implies that Starfleet doesn’t allow female captains, and that was probably Roddenberry’s intent, but it’s left vague enough that it’s easy to assume that Lester was excluded for mental instability and only blamed it on her gender. And of course the rest of the franchise ignored that implication.
Or that Lester thought that Kirk, fan reputation to one side, wasn’t a relationship first kind of guy and his “world of starship captains” was totally a career first guy. Carol Marcus had similar thoughts, expressed in a more rational manner, in WoK that Kirk had his world and she had hers. Rodenberry had cast Majel Barret as XO in The Cage, so, and assuming I haven’t missed an interview-which is very possible, I don’t think we can say he ruled out the idea of female Starship Captains. The network,, on the other hand, probably had thoughts.
@105/kayom: Yes, the implicit assumption in “Turnabout” is hard to reconcile with other things in Roddenberry’s work, but he was… inconsistent… when it came to his views of women. He had a reputation as a feminist, but he was probably a serial sexual exploiter (though I think Hollywood producers at the time were expected to be as an automatic perk of the job). And there’s some startling misogyny in his writings, like the opening speech in the unsold detective pilot he did with DeForest Kelley in the early ’60s, 333 Montgomery Street, about how women are devious temptresses that drag men to their doom if they’re not careful (an idea reflected in his later portrayal of Orion women). I think he talked the talk but didn’t really walk the walk.
As for the network, Roddenberry liked to cast them as the traditionalist enemy of his progressivism, but that was just his attempt to make himself sound good. Really, the network execs at the time encouraged diversity and inclusion in their shows, because they’d realized it was good for profits to attract a more diverse audience. IIRC, according to Inside Star Trek, NBC execs loved the idea of a female first officer; they just objected to Roddenberry casting his mistress in the role rather than a more accomplished actress with less scandal potential (reportedly Lee Meriwether was considered). But rather than admit that and recast the role, he dropped the character entirely and pretended it was because of network sexism.
The Kes situation could have been cleared up with a simple line of dialogue that she and Neelix were visiting a planet with Lieutenant thingy and Ensign whatsit to collect food supplies, this would have meant Neelix not appearing in the flashbacks but I think we could all have managed to live with that.
If they had a backup of the Doctor, which they’ve apparently had at some point as explained in Living Witness, they could pull out the backup Doctor whenever they had 2 patients that needed surgery simultaneously.
I’m not sure how much interest this will be to anyone, but since KRAD is a martial artist I guess he might care. I’d like to make a couple comments about the conversation about sumo in this episode.
First, Tuvok refers to having “studied many forms of martial art, including the Sumo of Earth.” It’s possible “the Sumo” refers to the sport itself, although the definite article makes it unlikely (you wouldn’t say “I studied the karate”), but he seems to be referring to the competitors. That’s incorrect—they’re properly called rikishi, or less commonly sumotori.
Second, the conversation is about the “77th Emperor’s Cup”. The Emperor’s Cup has been awarded since 1925, and there are six sumo tournaments a year, so you do the math. Suffice it to say that they should be well past the 77th Emperor’s Cup in the 24th century.
Finally, one of the rikishi they’re discussing is named “Kar-pek”, which is obviously not a Japanese name. Now, there are non-Japanese rikishi (Mongolians in particular have dominated the sport for a while), but almost all of them, and definitely the non-Japanese ones, take a Japanese language ring name or shikona.
Why couldn’t the Doctor have put Jetal in medical stasis (as Ogawa did with Crusher in TNG) until she could be treated?
A really good episode and one that hits a big obsession of mine: How do we make choices? Do we even make choices? It’s interesting to encounter a being who has never considered this before. It’s a stage of development, and it makes total sense here.
I’m not bothered that Janeaway treats him like a “broken toaster” in this instance. I’m in agreement with others who say it’s rationalization. I think many of us are inconsistent with the humans in our lives, conceiving them one way, but when we have to rationalize a certain action we take, conceiving of them in another.
There was a nice bit of continuity here with the discussion about medical procedures performed without consent. Because that’s exactly what happened to Tores a bit ago. So, Janeaway was consistent there. And this episode shows the problems with doing exactly that.