“Virtuoso”
Written by Raf Green and Kenneth Biller
Directed by Les Landau
Season 6, Episode 13
Production episode 234
Original air date: January 26, 2000
Stardate: 53556.4
Captain’s log. Voyager has rescued a Qomar ship. The Qomar are technologically more advanced than the Federation, and also spectacularly snotty. They view the EMH as primitive technology and aren’t thrilled with their medical care being entrusted to him.
Then he starts to sing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad.”
The Qomar are utterly captivated. Music is unheard of in their culture, and they suddenly are very interested in the EMH. He sings various songs for them. Where before the Qomar couldn’t wait to be away from Voyager as fast as possible, the xenophobic Qomar now are inviting Voyager to their homeworld. When they arrive, Prelate Koru greets them semi-warmly, and he’s mostly focused on getting to hear more music, especially from the EMH. Janeway offers them a concert in the mess hall.
The EMH performs first, singing opera, then he introduces them to jazz via Kim’s band, Harry Kim and the Kimtones. However, the Qomar are not as captivated by the instrumental work, and don’t become interested until the EMH joins them on vocals. Afterward, the Qomar are only really interested in the EMH, not any of the other musicians. At one point, Paris extols the virtues of rock and roll, but when he says the EMH doesn’t really sing that (because that would require rights payments that are out of the show’s budget, unlike the public domain opera and folk songs he does like), the Qomar loses any interest in that genre. One Qomar, Vinka, approaches Kim, but it’s only in the hopes that he’ll introduce her to the EMH.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Koru invites the EMH to perform on the surface. The doctor defers to Janeway, who agrees to it. The EMH and the Qomar who has been most excited by the discovery of music, Tincoo, work with Torres to modify the lecture hall to make a good theatre. On more than one occasion, the EMH makes disparaging remarks about Torres’s lack of appreciation of music.
Despite some pre-performance jitters, the EMH performs successfully. The Qomar become massively obsessed with the EMH, visiting Voyager in order to do meet-and-greets with him. Tincoo created a small portable hologram projector of the EMH singing as a souvenir for fans. Enough Qomar are visiting the ship that Tuvok finds it a security risk, and he’s getting so much fan mail that Seven thinks the Qomar are trying to sabotage their communications systems.
Janeway interrupts one of his meet-and-greets in the mess hall by reminding him that he also has duties in sickbay that he’s been neglecting. But when he reports to sickbay, the only patients are two Qomar, Vinka and another woman, Azen, who faked a illness in order to get more private face-time with the EMH. The EMH finally deactivates himself to get away from the over-adoration.
Tincoo reveals that she’s composed a song in his honor, and the EMH is greatly flattered. Unfortunately, because he was programmed with the vocal range of a human, he can’t perform the song, as it’s beyond his program’s range. Tincoo offers to help him alter his program, but there may not be time. His final performance is coming up, and then Voyager is leaving. Tincoo invites him to remain on Qomar instead.
The EMH considers, and eventually tenders his resignation to Janeway. She refuses to accept it at first. The EMH argues very passionately for his rights as an individual, pointing out that if Kim fell in love with an alien woman and decided to stay on a planet in the Delta Quadrant for the rest of his life, she’d let him. He also indicates that he has developed feelings for Tincoo. Janeway isn’t happy about it, but as his friend, she feels she can’t do anything else but accept his resignation.
First, he leaves instructions for Paris on how to deal with various medical issues. (How he’ll deal with 90% of the medical issues he’ll have to face without a medical degree is left as an exercise for the viewer.) He says goodbye to Seven, who is almost petulant in her anger at the EMH abandoning them—and her.
And then, when he beams down, he learns that Tincoo—who saw how conflicted he was about leaving Voyager—has created a holographic doppelgänger of the EMH with a much greater vocal range, and who can actually sing the song she wrote. Now he can go off with Voyager and they still have their singer. And this singer is better than him!
The EMH is devastated, and tries to figure out a way to sing Tincoo’s song to prove that he can do it with soul, which her hologram can’t. Instead, he decides to sing a particularly sad ballad, “Rondine al nido,” and then yields the stage to Tincoo’s hologram. Her composition, while mathematically precise, is dull as dishwater—it’s a fancy version of scales, truly.
Voyager leaves Qomar and the EMH asks to be reinstated. Janeway accepts, but won’t let him delete his musical subroutines, as she wants him to resume all his duties, and all his hobbies. She also reminds him that he pissed off a lot of people on board.
One of those people he pissed off is Seven, and she comes to him with one final bit of fan mail, which expresses regret that he can’t pursue his dream on Qomar and that she thinks he is a great singer. It’s signed, “Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One.”
After she leaves, the EMH smiles and starts singing, “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Qomar are massively technologically advanced, to the point where Voyager is a spectator in their own rescue.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway tries very hard to be a diplomatic captain and a good commanding officer, but the Qomar’s arrogance and the EMH’s succumbing to his own ego make that really hard for her.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is not happy about the huge crowds of Qomar on the ship to fangoober the EMH.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH’s singing hobby turns him into a celebrity. He also falls for one of the Qomar, and is devastated to realize that she doesn’t feel the same, but is only interested in him as a singer, and only insofar as he’s unique. The minute he’s not, she’s gone.
Half and half. When the EMH asks Torres to delete his medical database to give him the programming capacity to sing Tincoo’s song, Torres reminds him that doing so would make him someone other than himself.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is the manager of the EMH’s personal appearances, managing the line and keeping the riff raff from getting too close.
Forever an ensign. Apparently Kim has a decent little jazz trio. Too bad the Qomar don’t appreciate them…
Resistance is futile. Seven is not happy about the EMH leaving the ship, then writes him a fan letter in gratitude for his staying.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The EMH falls in love with Tincoo. She doesn’t reciprocate.
Do it. “Doctor, or do you prefer ‘Maestro’?”
“Oh, please, either is acceptable.”
“Well then, let me make it clear to both of you: Maestro, you’re finished for today. Doctor, report to sickbay—now!”
Janeway reading the EMH the riot act.
Welcome aboard. Singer/songwriter Paul Williams plays Koru, an ironic bit of casting, since his character knows nothing about music. Kamala Lopez-Dawson plays Tincoo, Ray Xifo plays Abarca, and the two groupies are played by Marie Caldare and Nina Mangnesson.
Trivial matters: Harry Kim and the Kimtones were sort of also seen in “Course: Oblivion,” as a Kim-led jazz trio played at the Paris-Torres wedding on the fake Voyager in that episode.
In addition to “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” and “Rondine al nido,” the EMH performs “Dio che nell’alma infondere” from Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos and “That Old Black Magic” (backed by Kim and the Kimtones). Robert Picardo did all his own singing except for on “Rondine al nido,” which was dubbed by Agostino Castagnola.
The Qomar city is a reuse of the Zahl colony that was wiped out by Annorax in “Year of Hell.”
Set a course for home. “I’ve been workin’ on the railroad all the live-long day…” I want to like this episode more than I do, and it took me a bit to realize what my biggest problem is: It’s incredibly mean-spirited toward fans which, given Star Trek’s history, is a bold and misguided move.
Trek has had stand-ins for their fans before, in the character of Reg Barclay, but “Hollow Pursuits” portrayed Barclay as a sympathetic, and ultimately heroic character who started to move past his awkwardness, a process that continued through two TV shows.
There’s nothing redeeming about the Qomar. From the minute we first see them as the show opens, they’re obnoxious, condescending, arrogant, high-handed, and insulting. They fulfill many of the most negative stereotypes of science fiction fans, and then they double down on it by throwing in more negative stereotypes, from the hero worship to the tricks to get close to the famous person to the fan mail.
On top of that, the EMH’s journey here, which is very similar to the one Data went on in “The Measure of a Man,” is treated much more cavalierly. The conversation between the doc and Janeway is a good one, but it feels like it should’ve had more weight. I’m reminded of the similar conversation between Picard and Data where the latter rhetorically asks why all humans don’t have their eyes removed and replaced with VISORs, as La Forge’s enhanced eyesight is better than normal sight. That was much more devastating. The conversation here feels like it doesn’t cover enough ground—not the least of which is that the EMH is literally the only physician on board. The hypothetical of losing Kim to an alien romance isn’t quite a one-to-one match, as Kim is replaceable. The EMH really really isn’t, and the decision to let him go has less to do with his status as an artificial life form whose sentience has not always been clearly defined, and more to do with the question of what the hell they do when someone needs surgery.
The limitations on the music to public-domain material is also very limiting, and they limit it further by sticking to some very safe European-American music options. I would have loved to have seen a range of musical styles: non-white American music, Asian music, African music. Plenty of that in the public domain, too…
The episode’s charm derives, as ever, from Robert Picardo, who does a wonderful job with the singing, with the egocentrism, and with the abashed regret at the end. Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan are also superb, the former as a frustrated Janeway, the latter as a Seven who has finally just started the process of working out friendship, only to get an unexpected lesson in what happens when that friendship is sundered. (I totally went, “Aw,” when Seven said who sent the fan letter at the end.)
Warp factor rating: 6
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This is a total sitcom plot.
Pretty sure I found this one mediocre, an obviously contrived attempt to let Picardo show off his singing chops, and not very successful in justifying it. The Qomar are unappealing and silly, and the premise that the Doctor could ever be justified in leaving the ship is implausible. It’s obvious from the start that it’s not going to stick, and his justification for wanting to leave isn’t fully convincing.
I have a very hard time believing that any humanoid civilization would be unfamiliar with music. Music arises from fundamental aspects of human communication and physiology. I’m not sure how true it is, but I’ve seen it suggested that we respond to rhythm because it reminds us of our mothers’ heartbeats in the womb. And variations in pitch, tonality, tempo, etc. are integral parts of spoken language, with music just putting them together in new ways. Music enhances intellectual performance and memory, so it must be intimately intertwined with other facets of our psyche. So I can’t believe a species otherwise like us could exist without any trace of music.
Also, if they didn’t have the capability or inclination to create music themselves, they wouldn’t have the capability to enjoy it either. There would be nothing in their neurology, physiology, or psychology that would resonate with it and enable them to relate to it or take pleasure in it. It would just be meaningless noise to them.
Besides, how likely is it that an advanced starfaring civilization has never encountered music before? Okay, they’re xenophobes who keep to themselves, but they still have interstellar travel. They must have had run-ins with other civilizations before. They must have monitored other cultures’ subspace transmissions. And doesn’t their planet have birds that sing, or other animals that do the equivalent? Did no Qomar in the history of the planet ever notice that reeds of different sizes emitted different tones when the wind blew across them, or that wooden blocks of different types sounded different when you struck them? They’ve literally never heard a melody in the entire history of their advanced and ancient civilization, until they meet the EMH? It’s stupid.
I think this was the first Voyager episode I saw when I caught it on broadcast TV by chance. It was good enough to make me want to see the series one day when streaming would be invented.
CLB@2, I took it that they really weren’t enjoying the music as music. The first thing that’s said about them is that they are amazingly good at math. The EMH-copy’s performance sounds like meaningless noise, showing they can’t hear the difference between music and random patterns. They are just in it for the mathematical patterns expressed in sound, which is a novelty.
I never took the comment on fans here to be about SF fans. I took it as just about fame and pop fads.
At the risk of angering fans of The EMH, I love his huge slice of humble pie and his shame after the many times we see his ego and high opinion of himself. But, as with Neelix in “Fair Trade,” I would have been sad to see the EMH unforgiven.
Oh, and that was a fun musical number at the end based on the “intersection of two fractals”
Can someone confirm what I think I see in Tincoo’s reaction before the EMH says “Well, I suppose I’m no longer on the bill tomorrow?” It sure looks like she’s saying “What? You thought I loved you — a hologram?”
I think I would have enjoyed this story more if it were an episode of the Twilight Zone concerning the perils of confusing fame with love. As an episode of Voyager it comes off as remarkably flat. Completely agree that it doesn’t have the weight it needs in order to be entertaining, especially for a story about the Doctor getting his dream come true but possibly abandoning Voyager to do it. This episode was better than I remembered – I always like the EMH singing opera, the twist with the EMH doppelganger, the Doctor asking Torres to change his program – but it still all adds up to a subpar episode. The EMH singing with a miniature version of himself is one of my very favorite Voyager moments though.
I’m very disappointed in the name of Harry’s jazz band. They couldn’t come up with anything better than Harry Kim and the Kimtones?
It never occurred to me that the obsessive fandom of the Qomar could be a knock on Trekkies. I’d like to think that any resemblance was unintentional and it was just about general obsession with what’s trending.
@3/rm: “I took it that they really weren’t enjoying the music as music. The first thing that’s said about them is that they are amazingly good at math.”
That makes it even worse. Music is as intertwined with mathematics as with everything else I mentioned. Again, it’s just absurdly implausible that they could have the ingredients of music but not the thing itself. Human psychology and behavior don’t work that way, with one form of expression being discrete and unconnected to the others. It’s all interconnected.
I mean, if they have math, they have wave equations. Surely they’ve studied acoustics, built oscilloscopes, experimented with equations for generating sound patterns. Surely they know about wave interference and beats and harmonics, and would have explored their variations.
And again, it’s impossible to believe that they’ve never encountered music-like patterns in nature or in their interactions with any other species.
“more to do with the question of what the hell they do when someone needs surgery”
I have to disagree with you here KRAD. They’ve been out for 6 or 7 years, with Paris shadowing the EMH for a good chunk of them. Early on, I would have agreed with this point, but by this time I would think that Paris (or even someone unseen because the producers don’t want to pay for another regular extra) would at a MINIMUM be the equivalent of a highly-skilled paramedic or even a Nurse Practitioner – and with the advancement of medical equipment in that era, that should be sufficient for 99.9% of the medical emergencies they would encounter (and for that .1% they’re probably triaging dead and wounded by that point anyway). So I think EMH is more expendable in a medical capacity than he has been up to now.
It’s apparent that Paul Williams was cast at least partly because of his stature, as the other Qomar are all on the small side. Another Qomar was portrayed by Leonard Crofoot, who played Trent on TNG’s “Angel One,” and was probably cast for the same reason.
I half-expected Tom Paris to introduce Randy Newman’s “Short People” to the Qomar.
And very poorly dubbed, at that. Or maybe my audio sync was off. Can someone else confirm?
I know the aliens are supposed to have a flat, staccato way of talking, but it came off as really hammy acting to me. Especially the Tincoo actress. I was almost cringing at how bad it was.
I usually like the EMH-focused episodes but there are always exceptions like “Darkling” and this one. The Qomar were just too annoying and unlikable to get more enjoyment out of the story even though there were moments here and there that I liked like the Doc’s interactions with Janeway and Seven.
I never took this story as about sci-fans either, but with fame and pop culture phenomena.
I remember reading that the writing of TNG staff tried to put together a story where the Enterprise crew or just the senior staff became celebrities. I think perhaps that concept was modified or repurposed to a degree to come up with this episode which has the same general idea about fame even though none of the Ent-D bridge crew were singers, although technically Data could mimic any famous singer with precision.
Agree with Austin, the actress playing Tincoo was terrible. Her delivery and expressions were flat and toneless. Maybe a directorial choice, but it really hurt the episode.
Virtuoso. Not what I’d call a good episode. While we did get to see glimpses of the EMH’s vocal range before this one, it still feels like one of the episodes where the writers craft a newfound passion for our main character we’ve never heard from before, much like Paris being a lifelong sailor out of nowhere. And it asks me to believe that a character with so many commitments, passions and projects would throw all of it aside, just to become a singer for some tone deaf race and get cozy with a girl he just met??? Needless to say, I don’t buy it.
It isn’t as bad as Kim’s lovelorn tantrums from last season’s The Disease, but Biller seems to be trying for those same beats. Thankfully, Picardo is still a superb actor, able to carry much of this in a convincing manner, and we get two fiery conflicts with both Janeway and Seven. I particularly enjoy how Seven reacts to all of this. That’s what keeps the episode from being a complete disaster.
As for the Qomar as a Delta Quadrant race? A hard pass for me. One note characters with no layers and no development (I have a hard time buying that a race this dense would reach such a high level of technology). I didn’t even realize the unintended parallels to the more idiosyncratic segments of Trek fandom, which only makes the whole concept of them even more flawed for me.
It doesn’t matter how interconnected music and math are if your hearing works differently. I always took the Qomar style of speech to be indicative of hearing issues, that they heard tones differently. It would not occur to them to consider arranging tones in particular ways to produce sounds like they heard from the Doctor. Note, also, that they preferred his singing voice – artificially generated – to both natural singing voices and to instrumental music. Maybe that’s why the ersatz-EMH was a more popular and pleasing choice than even the original.
@11/joyceman: I suppose making the Qomar’s speech a monotone was meant to “explain” why they’d never imagined music, since their speech didn’t vary in pitch, or something. I don’t remember quite how monotonous it was, though.
@13/David H Olivier: I already addressed this. If the Qomar’s hearing or some other factor didn’t allow them to create music, then they shouldn’t have been able to enjoy music either. That’s a contradiction in terms. Human music is created to resonate with human hearing, physiology, brain activity, etc. We make it in a form that appeals to our nature. A species with a radically different nature in any of those ways wouldn’t have the same pleasurable response to our music that we have. They just wouldn’t be wired to respond the same way. Our music would just be meaningless noise to them. Conversely, if they have the physiological and neurological capability to find meaning and pleasure in human music, then they have the ability to create it and surely would have already done so.
With all due respect to The Doctor’s individuality and uniqueness, if the Qomar are so advanced then why not just copy paste the EMH? Unlike Voyager they have no relevant computer memory storage limits, so Copying the EMH into a holomatrix of their own creation so you get all of the personality and Voyager’s EMH can stay with the ship. Especially since they see him as a piece of performance art rather than a performer. I also would’ve been curious to see his outrage at the idea.
@15 – I’m not sure what you mean. That’s exactly what the Qomar did. And the EMH was really hurt by it.
Not my favorite Doctor episode but I really felt for him, because it took me many years to grow up and realize I could not gain love by making art. Your friends will love you regardless. And then the art will always mean something different to the audience than it does to you.
Yea, I had a pretty similar reaction. Its frustrating because up until this point, they’ve actually done quite well (IMHO) at incorporating chances for Jeri Ryan and Bob Picardo to sing into the stories without it seeming like it was just an excuse to do so. The EMH using it as a chance to develop his personality (and later to encourage Seven to do the same), him being a singing sensation in his own fantasies, even the incredibly creepy duet in “Equinox” were all great character moments that felt natural, where this feels gratuitous.
It also annoys me because one of my gripes about Voyager is how rarely anyone ever seems to be *really* off-duty (like, not in their workspaces, not in their uniforms off-duty) outside of “the holodeck is on the fritz” episodes, and I would have much preferred to see the crew get to show off their musical talents in a setting like that, instead of what this episode did. The EMH trying to worm his way into the Kimtones would have been a far more enjoyable episode, at least for me.
@9, @11: I also wasn’t exactly impressed by the actress but I’ve considered that maybe it was an acting choice by the actor or the director to make this alien race seem, well, more “alien” and not exactly expressive, cheery people. But I also agree with you, @11, because her flat affect didn’t make her at all sympathetic and it makes it hard to buy into the fact that the Doctor falls in love with her. It’s like, “what are you thinking!?”
“It makes me feel appreciated, even loved. Not for what I was programmed to do but for who I’ve become.”
Another one I’d file under “Not as bad as is sometimes said”. The high concept of the week, a society that’s never encountered music before, does at least have some intriguing possibilities, even if it’s not the most dramatic idea. The episode focuses on the fleeting nature of fame, with the Doctor getting caught up in his five minutes and forgetting where he’s come from. The Qomar might appreciate him at first but they soon move on. When they produce music of their own, it’s mathematically complex but soulless, sounds without meaning…and they love it.
The problem is that it does feel like a standard character arc transported into the Voyager milieu, which does lead to the episode’s biggest weakness: The Doctor’s decision to leave Voyager. There’s an interesting debate between Janeway and the Doctor about his rights as an individual versus his duty to Voyager: Just how much freedom does someone who was conceived of as part of the ship actually get? But ultimately Janeway makes the decision that’s needed for the rest of the episode to work rather than the one that actually makes sense: Is she really going to leave all Voyager’s medical needs in the hands of Paris, who might be able to handle minor injuries but would be hopelessly out of his depth with anything more serious? Still, it does provide some good scenes of Paris and especially Seven demonstrating how much the Doctor means to them despite them finding him irritating at times: The final scene manages to be both funny and sweet.
The Doctor responding to Timcoo patronising him by talking to her the same way is quite amusing, although it gets a bit awkward when it seems that’s just how she talks. Janeway just decides to go with the flow and agree with how superior the Qomar are. Torres gets in some decent cynicism. The Doctor performing a duet with a mini-hologram of himself is hilarious. The Qomar applauding as though they’ve never done it before is a nice touch, although it’s only the speaking actors and they seem to get the hang of it rather quickly. Rounding dates up again: Paris says he’s been assisting the Doctor for three years, when it seems to be only about two and a half since he was made the Doctor’s assistant in “Revulsion”.
critter42: I disagree loudly. They’re tens of thousands of light-years from familiar territory and they have already encountered numerous viruses and weapons they’ve never seen before. The last 15 months have shown us how important trained medical professionals are when you’re dealing with previously unknown viruses and diseases……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The question of how Paris could possibly take over from the EMH on a permanent basis raises a question in my mind: why, in six years in the Delta Quadrant with an indeterminate number of years still ahead of them, did we never see them try to recruit medical personnel from one of the many civilizations they’ve encountered? Surely one of their friendly encounters with a space-faring civilization would have given them the opportunity.
Even if they were never successful in recruiting someone, they should have at least tried. But we never saw it happen.
@22: Voyager rarely if ever addressed practical concerns during the course of the series. Issues like dwindling supplies and crew compliment, and the need to procreate if they were to be a generational ship, only ever got cursory mentions. I think such concerns were on the mind of creator/showrunner Michael Piller but then he left after the second season. And the network and later showrunner Brannon Braga were more invested in stand-alone, episodic stories, and of action-adventure and high-concept nature.
You’d have to watch the reboot of Battlestar Galactica if you wanted a sci-fi series with more of a sense of realism and on-going serialized issues being played out. The episodes even began with an updated count of how many human survivors there were in the fleet which often fluctuated, usually downward, from episode to episode. Clearly Ron Moore saw his show as the anti-Voyager.
Nice little episode. I also Awwed at the end when Seven revealed she is the author of the fan letter.
The only thing that annoyed me is that the EMH used Harry of all people in his “what if” speech in front of Janeway, because back in the Desease this is exactly what happened: Kim fell hard for an alien girl, but he never even considered leaving Voyager for her (which at the time I found stupid, but anyway). So to make this example is quite shortsighted on the EMH’s part.
@24/salix: Well, you can’t expect the characters on this show to remember anything that happened in a previous episode, can you? ;)
Anyway, we’re definitely into the doldrums now. Looking at the list of the next few episodes is not encouraging.
@22 – It would make sense to pass on the generation ship idea if they went all in on getting home in their lifetimes. Of course, why they blindly fly toward the Alpha Quadrant instead of staying in place and trying to find a solution, possibly with the help of DQ species, is an exercise left to the viewer.
@26/Austin:
But even that doesn’t make sense… if they really were thinking it would take them the full 75 years to get back to the Federation, that means the youngest of the crew (Kim) is at least in his mid-90s by the time they get back. Yes, 24th-century medicine gives humans longer lifespans, but a crew of geriatrics isn’t going to be anywhere near as able to respond to threats, deal with intruders, barter for supplies, or even keep up the day-to-day operations of the ship as fatigue, the chronic health problems that come with age, and attrition set in. They’d need younger people just to keep the ship running.
They’ve already been out there for five years… why wasn’t the Doctor (who could run 24/7) running basically a mini med-school to cross-train multiple crewmembers in medicine during their off-shift hours, just in case something happened to him? (The answer is obviously because Voyager never really bothered to develop any character outside the main cast except for Naomi Wildman.)
@27 – Sorry, I guess I should have specified. I meant, if they were to go all-in on getting home quickly, rather than flying 70 years. But that would have required them to stay in place and figure out a solution.
How many “the doctor is a narcissist” stories can they come up with? I know we’re in for a couple more still. It seems like another case where they’ve ignored character progress in order to tell the same story about the character again.
I did appreciate other aspects of the episode, they put some effort into making the Qomar more alien like, with the not knowing how to applaud, them all being noticeably smaller. The idea that the doctor might be more proud of a skill he developed entirely through his own self determination rather than something he was programmed to do is a compelling one.
At least with Kes, you had a member of the crew who was being trained to be a competent medical professional in her own right. If she had stayed with the ship I can easily imagine a story in which she was forced to do a complicated medical procedure that was a life and death situation for another individual. The EMH would be offline or otherwise off the ship and unable to return in time and Paris would be Kes’ medical assistant.
@30 – I wonder how much of the show’s trajectory was changed by that People magazine’s spotlight on Garrett Wang…
@31: We’re midway through the 3rd season on Voyager on Garrett Wang’s Voyager rewatch podcast and he previously alluded to discussing his rumored potential firing when it gets to that point in the chronology of the series recap when the alleged events went down. But he also alluded that the rumors of the magazine article saving him weren’t true even though he previously said that was the case. So I guess we’ll see what he has to say about it this time. I do think though that maybe when it came down to it, that Berman/Braga and UPN went with eliminating Kes as she was hardest for the writers to get a grasp on and there could have been some (silly) dictate that you couldn’t have more than 3 women in the cast or everything is thrown off-balance and the universe would implode.
Maybe the rule was that the number of women in the main cast couldn’t be greater than the number of men named “Robert” in the main cast.
@33: BWAHAHAHA!!!
@32/garreth: I never understood why the writers had such a hard time getting a handle on Kes. I mean, the handle was obvious. Here was someone with only seven or eight years to live, recently rescued from an enclosed, insular environment and craving to expand beyond it. It was all right there on day one. She should’ve been defined by a hunger for life and learning and experience, driven to live fast and discover everything and try new things while she could, to throw herself fully into every relationship and every undertaking. It could’ve been beautiful and dynamic and poignant and fun. But instead they just stuck her in sickbay and let her sit there for the better part of three years.
@35/CLB: You should have been on the writing staff.
@36/garreth: I tried. Sort of. But my three pitches to DS9 and VGR were enough to convince me I didn’t want to work in TV.
Not related to this episode, but I was just looking up something on Voyager’s IMDB page and really noticed for the first time that the security guy that hovers in the background was credited for 121 episodes! He’s listed right there with the main cast members. That seems really odd to me.
Probably would’ve been more believable had the aliens come from a society where music had been banned. Call them the Footlooseians.
@38: Well, he has a prominent placement in that cast list on IMDB just because he was in so many episodes. And though he was basically an extra, he was a prominent extra and with an actual character name, and he even got lines in a couple of episodes: “Fury” coming up, and “Renaissance Man” (second to last episode of the series) where his scene was front and center – I think that was a nod to his seven years of service on the show.
@35/Christopher: I think part of that difficulty stems from the fact that the writing staff was still mainly comprised of men – even though Voyager had Jeri Taylor and Lisa Klink to balance it out somewhat. For them, it would be much easier to write Harry Kim scenes than Kes, who happened to be a woman, and a very distinct type of alien. Suffice to say, the 80s and 90s were still far away from today’s diversity in terms of filmmakers.
And I think it’s also similar to the issues faced by early TNG when their mostly male staff (Fontana, Shearer and Snodgrass aside) had immense difficulty crafting Deanna Troi stories. In fact, we know she was almost axed instead of Yar (who didn’t get a fair treatment in stories either). Crusher had the benefit of being Wesley’s mother as well as being the ship’s doctor, making it easier for them to come up with stories for her. But a female empath? That had to have been challenging. With Pulaski, they just went the McCoy route with no changes, and Guinan was Guinan.
A character like Kes would have likely fared much better under the current staff on Discovery.
@38/Austin: As garreth said, IMDb lists series cast members in order of how many episodes they were in, rather than how prominent they were.
@41/Eduardo: I agree that it was sexism that led them to marginalize so many female characters, but I don’t even see why that should be an issue in terms of understanding how to use Kes. I mean, a super-enthusiastic young woman who’s hungry for life and experience and has an undercurrent of looming tragedy is in your classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl wheelhouse, so even writers with conventional views of gender roles should’ve been able to hit upon that angle. It’s just so strange to me that they couldn’t see the potential built into the premise of the character.
In fairness, the writers had a hard time understanding the potential of *a lot* of their characters, not just the female ones. I always thought Chakotay had tons of potential that they just completely wasted. He was this angry young man, so desperate to get away from his father and the traditions he found stifling that he ran away to join Starfleet, only to eventually defect from them to become a terrorist leader, who is then forced by circumstances beyond his control to work with the same organization he turned his back on. There is tons of potential there for interesting stories, and the better episodes he gets proves Beltran had the chops to do it justice. Instead we got three seasons of him spouting “Native American” wisdom that was borderline offense, and another four of him standing one step behind Janeway repeating technobabble.
That’s not to say sexism wasn’t at play in Voyager, because I think it was, but I think there was wasted opportunities with a lot of the cast. Tom Paris, the EMH, Seven, and to a much lesser extent B’Elanna are the ones who got the lionshare of the character development, and that’s only about half the main cast (including Kes). Tuvok got “Vulcan loses control” and “Neelix is annoying” episodes, Kim just was a butt monkey most of the time, Neelix was… well you know, I think the writers were often too afraid of undermining the Strong Female Captain to give Janeway much growth or change, and others like Chris Bennet have highlighted how little they knew what to do with Kes. Even B’Elanna was mostly just “Klingon is angry!” or “Half Klingon is senstive about being half Klingon,” although I think they did a little better with because her relationship with Tom at least provided a backdrop on which to tease something out of those two plotlines.
@43 – I think the huge misstep with the premise of the show doomed any type of interesting character work. Instead of “Starfleet vs Maquis in the Delta Quadrant!” that the show was billed as, we got something completely different. All the Maquis instantly became good Starfleet personnel and the show quickly became episodic adventures in the Delta Quadrant. Interesting backgrounds went out the window. So characters like Chakotay largely became a standard-issued Starfleet commander. His character is just wallpaper in episodes that don’t feature him.
@16/Austin
She copied his appearance and singing, but not him which is why he tried to prove he could sing with soul. But ultimately they didn’t care about soul.
That said, I’m also curious why the Doctor was the only thing they were interested in. The Holodeck database must be chock full of glorious operatic performances from actual professional singers.
@41 — “and Guinan was Guinan”.
You just made my whole day!
“A character like Kes would have likely fared much better under the current staff on Discovery.”
Oh sure, just what we need; Kes exclaiming “fuck yeah, the Delta Quadrant!” :-)
One thing the episode doesn’t make clear is why there’s no interest in hearing Seven sing. We, the audience, know she’s a talented singer who can match the Doctor, and a duet would add yet more variety to the music. She might refuse to perform as “music is irrelevant”, but it should at least be mentioned.
The other issue is that it’s not clear what Janeway and the rest of the Voyager get out of the extended stay to allow the Doctor to perform. Janeway should be trying to negotiate for some of the advanced technology here to shorten their voyage home, or at the very least should be ensuring an exchange of cultural databases, but again, this isn’t mentioned.
The two parts I did like about this were Seven mistaking the fan mail for a DDoS attack, and the contrast between the two holographic performers at the end. The pure, but empty, mathematical brilliance of the new hologram is appreciated more than the soul in the Doctor’s performance, ultimately showing that the Qomar, for all their fangoobering, don’t actually understand or appreciate music. It’s about far more than technical perfection.
I keep finding it very annoying that VGR treats memory space as something quite mysterious. They have all the data for Earth’s history and info for everybody who is at least a little famous + such data for all the Federation planets + all the digital data that is needed to run the ship and they tell me they can’t copy the Doctor in case he decides to run away an that is because of memory limitations! Especially when he can fit in a 2 inch mobile emitter. ( albeit from the 29th century because if they can copy him to the emitter , then the technology is compatible and well understood).
I know the show is a 90’s one targeting people who have no understanding of digital data but still even then. People can use logic. And logic says the Doctor is a managaeble program they can copy and also, very impprtantly, have a backup of!
@49 Not only does logic dictate that, but we know it is true in-universe, because a copy of the EHM is shown to exist and be fully functioning in “Living Witness.” Since the “duplicate” EMH that was left on the alien planet went on to become their version of Surgeon General, it seems he was just as able to perform medical functions as his “original” counterpart that continued on with Voyager.
@49: it’s because the Doctor’s program was hard-coded to C:/Program Files/.
Voyager’s system can’t handle running side-by-side copies. Sloppy, sloppy.
The inability to copy the Doctor is especially crazy when you consider “Nothing Human,” although that episode introduces enough problems maybe it should just be considered non-canon. So the computer can create a holographic version of a Cardassian doctor based off his log entries/public records and that Doctor actually gets results. For that matter, they toyed with the idea of keeping him around and only deactivated him because he turned out to be a war criminal. But that same computer can’t create a second copy of the Doctor?
Well, okay, fine, just have the computer create a version of Doctor McCoy or Crusher in their respective primes. Surely there’s enough log entries to make this work, and that has got to be better than trusting your care to… Tom Paris???
[Also issuing a hard pass on the idea that Paris is actually qualified for this job. He’s part-time and even in his part time capacity has spent less time as a sickbay assistant than real doctors do in a residency. To say nothing of the inability to treat and diagnose himself. Had the Doctor really left, Tom Paris would have had medical issues in the very next episode with nobody to treat him…]
@52/dunsel: The difference between the Doctor and the Moset hologram is that “Moset” was not a fully sentient being capable of conscious thought, just a simulation based on the medical database and the recorded writings and documentation about Moset. Like the holo-Leah Brahms in “Booby Trap,” it was an expert program created to offer advice on a specific problem, and to emulate the personality and responses of the expert it was based on as a convenient user interface, but it wasn’t actually an intelligent, imaginative, adaptive being like the EMH.
It’s a fair point, though, that other such simulations could do a reasonable amount of medical work on their own. They might not have the versatility and creative problem-solving skills of the EMH, but they’d be good for most ordinary medical problems, or for cases that fell under their specific areas of expertise.
Heck, now that I think about it again, the writers could have chosen to have Janeway say something like: ” Ok, Doctor, you can leave since you want it that hard. Don’t worry about us, we will copy your program and have a substitute for you. Surely he will not sing operas ( not initially) but we will be covered medically.”
This alone could have made the doctor stay when he realised how expendable he was so he could try and be more humble and try to connect with the crew better. This way the whole conflict could have stayed inside Voyager and the aliens would have been just the catalyst for an imminent fallout stemming from the doctor’s ego-centric mania.
The Doctor is just a hologram; a projection of light and force fields. It boggles the mind that the show treated it as though he would be taking his program with him. What, is he going to yank the computer system out of Voyager and take it with him? I’m assuming the mobile emitter contains the entirety of his program (are we ever told this? Or is it just a link to the actual computer on Voyager?). There’s nothing stopping Janeway from having a backup created.
@55/Austin: Aside from “Living Witness,” the show always took the stance that the Doctor couldn’t be backed up, that his program could only be transferred, not replicated. As I’ve mentioned before, that might be justifiable if he’s a quantum computer program, since quantum information follows conservation laws and can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred. Reading quantum-level data in subatomic particles requires affecting the particles enough to alter that data, so you can’t create a copy without destroying the original in the process. This is basically what quantum “teleportation” is.
@56 – OK, good point. What about his mobile emitter? How does that work in relation to his program on the ship?
@57/Austin: As I said, a quantum AI could be copied from place to place, with the original being deleted (and the quantum entanglement would ensure that the “copy” effectively is the same continuous entity as the original, as I posited in my blog article on quantum teleportation some years back). The whole idea of the mobile emitter is that it can contain his program and generate a holographic body for him independently of the ship’s systems. As the show portrayed it, when he’s “in” the mobile emitter, or otherwise transferred off the ship as in “Message in a Bottle,” he’s no longer present in the ship’s computer. That’s explicit in the show itself. I’m just offering a scientific rationale for it.
A bit late to the comment section, but it feels like a wasted opportunity that they didn’t give the singing replacement to EMH a full head of hair to add to the jealousy!
This may not have been Voyager‘s worst episode, but it for sure was my least favorite. I remember it as the point where I finally gave up on the show. I saw episodes afterward, but never again with the weekly regularity that I had long watched.
The guest actors were terrible, and Janeway’s decision to allow the Doctor to leave – leaving the health and welfare of Voyager‘s entire crew in the hands of… Tom Paris? – was ridiculous. I recently re-watched this episode for the first time in a long time and found that it hadn’t gotten any better.
So the Quomar were able to create a replica of the Doctor, without needing a mobile emitter (or maybe they made another one of them too). Their duplicate was for advanced singing, but if Janeway had been asking for anything, maybe she could’ve had them make Voyager a copy or ten of Doctors with at least the same level of medical expertise that the original had, so they could staff their sick bay with, since Voyager doesn’t seem to be able to make a copy of him.
@61/Quasarmodo: A duplicate programmed just for singing probably isn’t complex enough to handle the intricate and varied medical needs an EMH is meant for. The surface hologram is the easy part; you could easily order any holodeck to create a duplicate image of the Doctor and animate it like any other holo-NPC, and load it with a generic musician persona or other stock character. So it’s hardly impressive that the Qomar were able to do that. It’s not the same as replicating the complex AI software that gives the EMH his expertise and personality.
My first thought on viewing the Qomar and that distinctive concavity on their foreheads was, “I hope their world has invented Q-tips, at least.”
Since this thread has become more generally about the nature of the EMH, are we ever given a good explanation of where his sensors reside?
The show acts like he sees with his apparent eyes and hears with his apparent ears (and “Message In A Bottle” even implied that he can feel another EMH’s “breath” on the back of his neck), but surely that’s not true; there’s no reason why the holoemitters would make them with such fidelity to the real thing, since his whole body is just an input/output device for interacting with the crew.
When he’s in sickbay, I try to assume there are just cameras and microphones all over the place, and give them a pass when he appears to look into a microscope (for example).
But the mobile emitter doesn’t appear to have any such accessories. How does the EMH see and hear when he’s in the rest of the ship, or on an away mission?
It’s a ridiculous premise, as CLB rightly notes. Maybe music is so central to the human experience that I just can’t conceive of a vocal species which has never sung a note, but I just can’t. The only good thing about this episode is the Doctor’s performance, as usual.
The part that I couldn’t buy was that adding the ability to sing a wider range to the EMH’s program could possibly require as much memory as his medical database, though I agree that the idea of a civilization that has no concept of music whatsoever and yet is still equipped to appreciate it also seems suspect. Aside from the premise, I quite like this episode; the Qomar seem prickish, but it comes across more as them not sharing human social niceties, and Voyager still manages to have a much more productive contact with them than they do with most Delta Quadrant species. And Seven’s fan letter makes me happy.
@37 / ChristopherLBennett: pity. Based on your comments on this site, i’d love to watch Star Trek episodes written by you…also from @krad if i think about it…
@66/th1_: I’m not interested in writing for TV (certainly not under the current abusive system that the writers are striking to change), but both Keith and I have plenty of Star Trek novels and short fiction to our names, as well as fiction in our own original universes (and countless other tie-in franchises in Keith’s case).
@67. ChristopherLBennett: yeah, i don’t know too much about it here from the distance, but I hear you and understand and hope it will change for the better.
I’m aware of the books and i’m planning to check out some sooner or later once i can get there with my reading list.
cap-mjb shared this quote:
“It makes me feel appreciated, even loved. Not for what I was programmed to do but for who I’ve become.”
That really was a good moment for me. And as cliche as it is, I liked ending with Seven’s fan letter, though I saw it coming the moment she began. It was a fairly strong first draft with some good ideas but could have used some punching up. It wouldn’t be that hard to reconcile the nonsensical parts.
But anyway, that one quote there, that’s so deeply true to The Doctor’s character, and it makes so much sense out of his bizarre choices. He really, truly wants to feel loved for who he is now, not what he was originally programmed for. Who doesn’t get that? This could have been quite a good episode with that kind of lightning caught in a Leyden jar of words so well.