thats because the rest of the characters had nothing really to do or say about themselves. paris was a failed cadet/ officer fucked over by wesley becacuse he is a twat. thats all his story is he doesn't really grow aside from redeeming him self as a capable officer but hge does that in the first season. kes I forgot was even in the show, tuvok is boring as hell barely remember anything he does, kim is the stand in for the viewer he has no personality or character because we are supposed to empathize with him. bellaona is a hot head engineer type who honestly i cant remember any growth from her aside from getting pregnant. chakoyta is boring as hell, seven was eye candy and some what interesting, janeway is a war criminal and a shit captain, she loosens up a little as the series goes on but she still is a horrible captain. neeliks the comic relief. the doctor is the only one with growth because he is the only one with space to grow into he is a new born program with no history and massive new tasks infront of him. compare that to everything else
That moment whilst the Doctor and Seven were singing 'You are my Sunshine', and he turned around to look at her, and became speechless. He well and truly exceeded the sum of his programming.
I will admit, I can understand why he felt conflicted in playing the Doctor at first. When you initially think of A.I. Holograms...you think of an entity that has no emotion, no humor, nothing that would warrant any major character development. But, I can say that they made the right choice picking Robert for the role. He breathed a unique form of life into the Doctor. The Doctor would have to be among my top favorites when it came to the Voyager saga.
The TNG episodes with Moriarty showed that a Hologram could be come more than just a collection of photons. The character development of the Doctor was some of the best in Voyager.
Picardo would have been good as Neelix, but Ethan Philips really brought something special to that character. I can't imagine anyone else as the doctor, it had to be a broadway actor
I quite liked the challenge of Neelix. He was from a different world in every sense and meant well. I imagine he'd be perfect for children's television.
Picardo wasn't aware of the long-running "I'm a doctor, not a ..." joke in Trek, because he mentions that if he knew about the joke he wouldn't have used it in his audition. And of course the writers on Voyager (and First Contact) took every opportunity to make that joke because Picardo channeled the same energy De Kelley and later Karl Urban did as Bones. Delivery was different, of course-- instead of an indignant Southern gentleman the EMH was a sardonic, sarcastic hologram.
I do not believe that at all. I am not a Star Trek fan in the first place, although I do enjoy certain episodes from a few series. But even I knew the typical "Bones reply."
I thought it was very ironic, but this character actually ended up being my favorite. Like how Data was the only one trying to show ‘emotion’ in Next Gen, I felt like the Doctor was the most ‘human’. The irony was, nice.
I hope when Voyager finally made it home, that Starfleet would've had the idea to build Soong-type android bodies for EMH and ECH holograms to inhabit in particularly hazardous situations. I mean, it would make sense, since I would imagine it would still be somewhat out of reach for even 25th Century technology to re-create the Voyager EMH's mobile emitter, which is from the 29th Century (stolen by a 20th Century crazy businessman).
I'm not sure the holograms are compatible with Noonien technology, it might like Apple vs Windows. And the Federation seems very reluctant to attempt to create new life, organic or synthetic, since then they have to go through all the work of deciding if they are their own individuals or not. Data was granted autonomy, but the droids they made on his image didn't seem to have his level of cognition and self awareness, probably to avoid that dilema. Even the Persocomps might have been recognized as "sentient beings with independence" according to Lower Decks, and the same is probably what happened to the Doctor, he is shown to be walking freely in some alternate futures, but the rest of the holograms seem to be limited to prevent them from becoming self aware or modify their programming. In short, when a "robot" becomes sentient, the Federation welcomes them, but they try really hard to avoid getting to that point.
@@james13sylar @James Sylar what was unique about data was only his brain, which is basically the one part this suggestion is asking not to have. The EMH is the brain, or at least, the program within the brain that is voyager's computer which by some lucky accident has accomplished the same thing that Soong did(sapience) As for the body, correct me if I'm wrong but a simple humanoid robot to perform basic physical duties seems well within federation capability. In 2021 we could already make a crude maid robot and by 2031 it won't be crude. The hard part is the brain.
The strangth of the EMH and the weakness was that it was a hologram. As we saw with the Prometheus, the Andy Dick EMH, the Doctor can go wherever there are hologram emitters. So assuming a ship is built with emitters all over, the doctor can move from one part of the ship to another at will. Giving him a corporeal body means he becomes time.limited by needing to walk or run to get from A to B. Him being an android limits his movement shipwide.
Don't get me wrong, Voyager was what got me into Trek, but there were only two characters in it that I would say are truly great in the realms of the whole of Star Trek. Seven, and the Doctor.
You might be interested in our sci-fi project featuring Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voayger) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VqI2rm1UpMY.html
Seriously, genius casting. The Doctor is absolutely one of the greatest characters in the whole of this franchise, and while that's in part down to the writing, Picardo was perfect for this part. I really hope we see him back in a future show. I want to see a Seven-led, Captain, with Picardo as part of the crew.
@@odisseusrh Ok, I'm a bit shocked. I've actually wateched all of Stargate, and really enjoyed it, but I don't remember him being in that. It was a long time ago, so maybe I need a rewatch. I guess I might have been on to something regarding seven though!!! Perhaps I ought to stick with guessing the future, rather than recalling the past.
I'm pretty sure if you were to ask someone who their favorite voyager character was, 99% of people would say "The Doctor". He was the breakout character for the entire run time of the show.
Which is kinda funny, because the producers expected Neelix to be the breakout character. Who knows, if Picardo had played him, maybe he would have been.
Spock Data and the EMH all had the same template, discovering humanity and emotion. It's what they had in mind for him, he was just unawares. Once he mastered it, he past it on to seven. Same trope used over and over. But picardo was hitting different tho
I think its because with the Doctor it was always in the background and never the focus of an episode the way TNG handled Data's emotional growth. The Doctor just subtly grows and expresses the most human emotion of them all first, irritation, and from their the rest grow like joy "his singing" or habit "they removed the mandate to ask what the emergency was and he decided to say it anyway because it felt right". In contrast Data is very in your face about how he discovers emotions and learns to deal with them in a very child like way. (It makes sense its childish because you learn to understand emotions as a child)
The man is an absolute joy! When he’d sing an aria, I would be brought to tears. I also an Opera singer. The passion and discipline it takes to sing opera is often overlooked and misunderstood by those that don’t enjoy it.
The showrunners went in thinking Neelix was going to be the break out character, and oh how the tables turned. Picardo took this potentially shallow role and gave it the impetus for the writers to explore the potential the EMH had for comedy and drama. Such a wonderful tour de force.
2:50 Disappointed they missed "I'm a doctor, not a doorstop" from First Contact (though I guess, technically speaking, that was a different character).
The video ends right as he’s about to given an example of the suggestions he was allowed to make. I can’t help but feel as though that represents something.
'The Doctor' was the best character throughout the show imo, his constantly sarcastic frustrated demeanour in the early episodes did make me laugh, but Mr Picardo kept Voyager on a trajectory based on quite a weak premise...
The premise was fine, the follow through was not. The question of how does a federation crew stranded from home react and survive is very interesting and freeing of all the samey Federation space politics that have been established over 3 shows and i think around 17 seasons (can't be bothered to look it up). The problem is that they used the wrong story structure. OG star trek is very episodic, TOS is litterally a soap opera in space with plots reminicent of Shakespeare. But in general the episodes are fly to planet, inciting incident, plot, clean resolution, next episode is 3 weeks in universe later after everything gets reset by visiting a shipyard to pick up a new shuttle, top off the torpedoes and antimatter tanks, and get a new coat if paint. Voyager needed story arcs similar to in Enterprise's Xindi war where the ship still had battle damage 5 eps later. The producers could even have kept tabs on how many resources have been expended and recovered, especially with focus on battles where they are out of torpedoes or aiding a planet in barter for goods because they don't have currency. But the best part of Voyager were certain characters, the Doctor being the best. He has a few "solo" episodes like message in a bottle or when his backup file is found on a planet in the far future and the historical timeline is wrong (but evil Janeway was a certain kind of awesome)
@@jasonreed7522 The Janeway from 'Living Witness' was frikkin' badass! Season 4 was my overall favourite, but the whole premise I found problematic from a sustainable logistical side. A Federation ship stranded in a quadrant of space having to find compatible technologies. Voyager's state-of-the-art bio-neural circuitry was more efficient than previous Starships, but Voyager eventually would need to dock at a starbase. My other issue was crew compliment, at least with previous shows crews could be temporary assigned, even killed off, and though unfortunate, replaced easily. Voyager started with a crew of 150, how many crewmembers were actually 'redshirted' over the seven years? Also found it convenient so many of the senior crew died when the ship was found into the Delta Quadrant!
The Doctor is the best thing about Voyager. He started out, as Picardo describes him here, as just a computer program, purely functional, and it would have been entirely realistic to leave him like that but, instead, they let him develop, very slowly. Many other shows would have had some significant event which would have instantly turned him into a fully fleshed out sapient being, but Voyager didn't do that. They let it happen gradually, in a very believable manner. It was excellent science fiction.
His first bit of growth was the emotion/feeling of irritation (at others) when he complains about being used incorrectly, which is perfectly reasonable for a tool. Contrast him with Data who gains emotions in spurts and get while episodes dedicated to understanding them, which sort of happens with 7/9 as she regains her humanity in spurts, litterally having the machines removed from her. I just wish that when they had her learn a leason that the writers would remember she grew a little.
I liked his guest appearance on Deep Space Nine - when the EMH v.1 was activated briefly he was basically the irascible, unreasonable Doctor from the pilot, as opposed to the more nuanced version of the character concurrently appearing on Voyager.
I love how he hated the beginning of the doctor. He thought he was boring. If he had been singing opera right after activation, it would not have worked. He needed to start off that way, and I'm glad he stuck it out. He very well could've quit and been recast. All they had to do was say Kim changed the shell of the program to improve bedside manner and that would've been it.
Every Great actor who's played a great character: Oh i'll just wing it, i don't really want this part anyways. (10 years later : It was an amazing adventure)
It's interesting to hear the background here... Because in the end I kind of found the Doctor's development be quite natural. It wasn't just crammed into the story. I felt he evolved in quite a natural way. Just... I never kind of understood why he was given such an unlikable character to set things off. Unfriendly and impatient. In the very end, I love what they did with the character even if he never quite made it to one of my favorites.
What's amazing is that he thought Neelix was the great character when actually the doctor was the emerging Data type character. Neelix was left by the wayside and the doctor was a main stay that coloured every episode he was in, especially the emergency command hologram version!
Well…… I have a big advantage here being an older actor and Star Trek fan going back to the original series, and I had the pleasure of watching Robert Picardo on China Beach, where his demeanor as a doctor was very similar to the emergency medical hologram….. and I think that those two parallel experiences were both wonderful. I like to believe that the former role prepared Robert well for the latter role.
The doctor character was a great replacement for data's character. Like data, he starts off slow but gets great development and becomes a great exploration of being human and a great place for natural humor.
I've read somewhere that he did, yes. Long time ago; can't remember where. But he knew enough about Star Trek to really want to be on it, as we see from this clip.
