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sshbpodcast · 5 months ago

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Character Spotlight: Emergency Medical Hologram

By Ames

Please state the nature of the medical emergency. For a hologram who was never constructed to be left on indefinitely, the Emergency Medical Hologram sure does get a lot of development. He starts off Voyager as an insufferable computer program, grows to learn to fight for his own agency, and ends Voyager as an insufferable computer program of an entirely new ilk! What an arc!

Your hosts here at A Star to Steer Her By are quick to cringe at some of the Doctor’s squickier moments (that are interestingly heavily weighted toward the final seasons of the series), but there’s a lot to champion him for as well! The EMH makes us view artificial lifeforms like him as people, in the same way that Data did on TNG. So make sure your mobile emitter is firmly attached as we dive into the Best and Worst Moments of Voyager’s chief medical hologram below and on this week’s podcast episode (activate at timestamp 1:05:06). Hey, I’m a blogpost writer, not a doctor.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

Inside you there are two Beowulfs For the first chunk of the show, the Doctor is confined to sickbay for the most part due to his holographic nature, so when he gets to do a hologram-appropriate mission in “Heroes and Demons,” it’s an adventure unto itself! He romances the bonny lass Freya. He solves the mystery of the disappearing crewman. He literally lives out an epic tale and it’s so engaging!

Before I met you, I was just a disease If you liked the Doctor’s relationship with Freya, you’re going to love his relationship with Danara Pel in “Lifesigns.” It’s probably the most genuine we’ve seen the Doc so far, as it’s clear he wants to do what’s best for the diseased Vidiian woman who hates her own body. But he urges her to keep fighting and keep healing because he loves her, the real her.

A physician must do no harm Boy, do we love it when our chief medical officers get righteous about their patients. We saw it with McCoy, we saw it with Crusher, and we saw it with Bashir. And now the EMH ends up being the only person on the Voyager to not silently condone splitting Tuvix in half in “Tuvix.” Sure, he doesn’t do anything to stop it either, but he makes it clear that what Janeway is doing is wrong.

You’re too sick to get better We’ve given B’Elanna and Tom some credit for helping the Doctor experience what it’s like to have a family in “Real Life,” but the actual growth we see is all his own. Deciding (with some encouragement from his friends) to be with his holo-daughter Belle as she dies is heart-breaking, but also encouraging for the Doc to treat the situation so realistically.

Two holograms, alone. Romulans on one side, Starfleet on the other. Alarms beeping everywhere. We see time and again the EMH use cleverness to resolve a situation, even when he’s severely out of his depth as he was in “Message in a Bottle.” But that’s where two EMHs are better than one! He and the EMH Mark 2 are able to take control of the Prometheus back from Romulans, keep the ship from exploding, and even reconnect with Starfleet in the Alpha Quadrant!

History is written by the victors Hands down, one of the best episodes of Voyager is “Living Witness,” and the EMH (or his backup program, who is essentially the same guy) really gets to shine throughout. Awoken 700 years in his future, he saves the reputation of the Voyager that the Kyrians and Vaskans have misrepresented, empowers Quarren to think critically, and keeps the two species from civil war.

Luke, I am your father We still can’t get over the fact that, when the Doctor went down to the planet in “Blink of an Eye” to perform some reconnaissance, he comes back claiming that he somehow had progeny. We never learn in what capacity and by what method, but it definitely blows up our skirts to know that the EMH somehow had a son whom he sadly had to disappear on.

You have the audacity to turn a house of worship into a prison? Jake just loves this little moment from “Spirit Folk” to death. It’s just the line delivery of the EMH as Father Mulligan in the Fair Haven holoprogram storming into the church and shouting “Sinners!” at all the Irish townsfolk who’ve taken Harry and Tom prisoner. He does get captured too and his mobile emitter gets swiped, but what a great line delivery from Robert Picardo.

Extremely Marginal Housecalls When the EMH’s creator, Dr. Zimmerman, is terminally ill in “Life Line,” our hero packs his bags for a trip to the Alpha Quadrant to cure him. And it takes a lot of coaxing and even some covert subterfuge to get to two egomaniacs to see eye to eye, even if all of those eyes belong to the same actor. But the Doctor succeeds! Turns out you can teach a Mark One new tricks.

My Treatment Coefficient is one When he’s kidnapped and forced to work on the Dinaali hospital ship in “Critical Care,” the Doctor is quick to observe the unethical medical practices, classism, and hypocrisy in their systems. And not only that, but he finds a clever way to work around their tight regulations to force the medical administration to care for all of its patients, not just the elite.

Hoshi, eat your heart out Though not the linguist that Ensign Sato is on Enterprise, the EMH is able to create a language that Fantome’s people can use to communicate in “The Void.” It’s no surprise that it’s derived from music which both the Doctor and Fantome share an affinity for, but it’s also a great moment of empathy when Doc and Seven determine these alien pests are more than they appear.

The holoprograms have nothing to lose but their chains We’ll go off in our next section about how the EMH is kind of a twat when he writes his holonovel, Photons Be Free in “Author, Author.” But on the flipside, his words also prove to be empowering to other sentient holo-people like the obsolete EMH Mark Ones out there. His depiction of subservient life as a holo-person may just start opening minds to their human rights.

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Worst moments

The Strange Case of Dr. Doctor and Mr. Doctor Whoever gave the EMH the power to tinker with his own programming was just asking for trouble. One of the first things he does in “Darkling” is turn himself into a Mr. Hyde who is even more appropriate to the Robert Louis Stevenson novel than Kirk in “The Enemy Within.” And he somehow becomes even grosser around Kes than usual, which is saying something.

You are out. Auf wiedersehen. Fascinatingly, almost all of our Worst Moments take place after Seven of Nine has joined the crew. Maybe it’s because the Doctor starts getting more to do, and that includes more BAD things to do. Maybe it’s because he spends way too much time sexualizing Seven, as he does in “The Gift” by designing for her the ugliest, cringiest, most uncomfortable catsuit we’ve ever seen. Maybe it's something else. Let’s explore this trend…

Now you will cluck like a chicken And we already have a really awful example in “Retrospect” when the EMH peddles really problematic pseudoscience on Seven instead of impartially investigating the circumstances. He’s not even a little bit unbiased when he surveys the Entharan lab for evidence. But what we can’t forgive the Doc for is literally hypnotizing Seven – some mystical claptrap with no science behind it!

Rise and shine! The EMH has always been a bit of a prick, but usually he knows how to compromise for the good of the crew. So it’s actually a big negative to see how selfish and rude he is to Neelix and the other displaced crewmembers in “Demon” when the whole ship is bunking up to save energy. Dude, everyone is being inconvenienced here. The least you can do is let them sleep.

By George, I think she’s got it! Here’s another example of the Doctor treating Seven of Nine like a sex object instead of a peer! We’ve already given Tom grief for this one, but in “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the EMH recasts himself in the role of Henry Higgins to Seven’s Eliza Doolittle, and it’s just upsetting! Why can’t these men let Seven have her own agency without making it all about themselves?

Yep, here’s your problem: someone set this thing to evil It really shouldn’t take just turning off the EMH’s ethical subroutines for him to turn into a psychotic torturer like he does in “Equinox.” Does he not have common sense or the Hippocratic Oath or even anything better to do than torture Seven just because he’s told to? Just because he now CAN do unethical things apparently means he can ONLY do unethical things.

The dream dreams the dreamer… in bed I admit, I can’t judge someone for their private thoughts since no one other than telepaths would even know what they are. But the sheer concentration of the Doctor’s perverse daydreams all through “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy” is a little much. When you can tell that he’s painting Seven in the nude just to titillate the audience, that might be bad writing, Berman.

Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, DOLT There’s something about seasons six and seven that turns the Doctor’s insufferableness up to eleven. When the Qomar inexplicably fawn all over him for his singing ability in “Virtuoso,” the ol’ doc really lets it all go to his head and is ruder to the crew than ever before. He’s even prepared to stay with the tone-deaf aliens because they unconditionally treat him like a celebrity.

This one takes the [cheese]cake Everything from “Body and Soul” paints the Doctor in a really ugly light and, especially in the final season of the show, it makes it hard to come back from the impression of him as unsympathetic, self-centered, and abrasive. So when Seven expresses that he has violated her body while he was possessing her and his response is to blame her, that is starkly unforgivable.

Anything you can do I can do better – I can do anything better than you This is the same as one of the extremely out-of-character moments from Harry Kim’s Worst Moments list from last week, but it warrants repeating. What the hell was the deal with the dick-measuring contest between the ECH and Kim in “Workforce”? For that matter, what is the Doc even doing as the ECH right now? Chakotay is back and in command! Step down already!

Once upon a Seven of Nine We gave the Doctor credit for speaking for holo-people in getting Photons Be Free published in “Author, Author,” but the way he workshopped it left much to be desired. How freakin’ hard would it have been to make the characters in his story more randomized and NOT just exaggerated, cynical versions of the crew? It would’ve been so easy to save face, my dude!

One Po-turd-o, Two Po-turdo-o, Three Po-turd-o, Four! I may be alone in my hatred of the turd people in “Renaissance Man,” but I maintain that the EMH shouldn’t have so eagerly (and boringly!) helped them. But what we can all agree on is that his confession to Seven when he thinks he’s dying is disgusting and a terrible impression for his character to basically go out on:

“You have no idea how difficult it's been, hiding my true feelings all these years, averting my eyes during your regular maintenance exams.”

VOMIT!!!

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Computer, deactivate Emergency Medical Hologram. That’s all from the EMH, until we maybe revisit him when we get around to character spotlights for Prodigy which you are surely watching because it is stunning. For now, we’ve got some more Voyager characters to spotlight here and some more Enterprise to watch for the podcast over on SoundCloud or wherever you listen. You can also give us your medical prognosis over on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe tone down the “I’m a doctor, not a”s a little bit.

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