Requiem For Methuselah and La Vita Nuova
"Latent Image" Plot Summary:
The Doctor is taking holographic scans of the crew in order to have a complete health record. While examining Harry Kim, he realizes that the ensign had brain surgery performed 18 months ago...and that the Doctor himself must have performed the surgery, since he invented the technique. Visiting a cranky Janeway who has been avoiding her physical examination, the Doctor asks about Harry's surgery; she says she doesn't remember it either. Enlisting Seven of Nine's assistance for a self-diagnostic, he awaits her in sickbay. But when she arrives, the EMH program has been deactivated, and he does not remember requesting her help.
Seven discovers not only that Kim's holographic scan has been deleted, but that the Doctor's short-term memory has been erased as well. When she tries to recreate scans from eighteen months ago on the holodeck, Seven uncovers several images of an Ensign Jetal whom the Doctor does not remember. She also uncovers images of an apparent battle on a shuttle mission with Kim and the ensign. When the ex-Borg retrieves memory engrams to which the Doctor has been denied access, he receives random memories of attending a birthday party for the ensign and of her blood on his hands. The Doctor notifies the captain, but she denies recognizing the alien species which he says attacked them, and she and Tuvok both fail to recognize Ensign Jetal. Janeway agrees to search for intruders, asking the Doctor to return to Sickbay and shut down his program so that they can protect it from further tampering. The nervous Doctor asks the computer to back up the day's files and take scans of anyone using his terminal before he complies with the order to go offline.
Someone enters sickbay to delete files from the Doctor's system. When he reactivates, the computer restores the backup he made and shows him the scan of the intruder. It's Captain Janeway. Striding to the bridge, the Doctor accuses the captain of tampering with his program, but the rest of the crew appears sympathetic to her and she orders the EMH into her ready room, where she tells him that she modified his program after he was damaged by the events 18 months earlier. Because she fears that explaining the circumstances will trigger the conflict in his ethical subroutine which caused the breakdown, she tells him that he will simply have to accept reprogramming, adding that she would accept his performing surgery on her without her consent if it would save her life. In sickbay, Paris tells the Doctor that he concurs with the captain's decision to modify the EMH program because he witnessed what happened when the Doctor stopped functioning previously.
Seven, however, is troubled, and drops by Janeway's quarters in the middle of the night to announce that she is having trouble with the nature of individuality. Janeway says that it's much too late at night for a philosophical discussion, but her protegee presses: Is the Doctor not an individual? Why is he held to a double standard because he's a hologram? Janeway cites her responsibility to protect her crew and says she wouldn't let anyone put a phaser to his own head either. She claims that the Doctor is more like the computer than a human being, and they are repairing him as such. But Seven snaps that her own Borg hardware makes her as much like a replicator as the Doctor is like the computer, and demands to know whether Janeway - who has always been her guide - would reject Seven's individuality like the Doctor's. The captain goes to sickbay to tell the Doctor that she will let him judge her actions for himself: she will tell him what happened eighteen months before.
On the holodeck, the Doctor relives Ensign Jetal's birthday party and the subsequent shuttle mission in which the two of them and Kim were attacked by unknown aliens. The ensigns were shot by a weapon which began to degrade their spinal cords, leading to brain damage. The Doctor came up with a quick plan to isolate the brain functions, but only had time to operate on one patient before the damage became too extensive to repair; he chose to save Kim, and Jetal died. After the funeral, a question by Neelix about a nutritional decision set up a chain reaction in which the Doctor became obsessed with the process of decisionmaking, culminating in rage at his own program for its calculated choice to let Jetal die. When he smashed fruit and advanced upon crewmembers, Neelix called security, but the Doctor insisted that he didn't choose to return to sickbay. His cognitive and ethical subroutines were trapped in an incompatible feedback loop. "It got worse from there," Janeway tells the Doctor after the recreation stops.
The Doctor tells Janeway that she was right to shut down his program, and insists that she should do so again: he has no right to practice medicine because he chose to save his friend rather than Ensign Jetal even though they had equal chances of survival. Janeway shuts him down, sighing that because they let him evolve, the crew is responsible for the conflict between his programs. She says they gave the Doctor a soul. Torres counters that they gave him personality subroutines, but she would hardly call that a soul.
Troubled, Janeway goes to Seven of Nine and wakes her from regeneration, telling the younger woman that she's having trouble with the nature of individuality. The captain asks whether the difficult process of being freed from the Collective and humanized was worth it. Seven says that she would not change what Janeway did to her. Determined to help the Doctor through his dilemma rather than erasing a piece of his life, the captain puts the Doctor on a 24-hour watch for two weeks, and sits with him for more than sixteen hours herself. She's reading a book of poetry - La Vita Nuova - which the Doctor finds ironic since Jetal will never have new life. As he ponders the probabilities which create more pathways than his program can follow, the exhausted captain falls asleep. The Doctor snaps into medical mode, insisting that she needs rest and attention, but Janeway says she's busy helping a friend. Calming, he tells her to get some rest, then picks up the book she is reading, reflecting upon Dante's words about memory and rebirth.
Analysis:
Like "Nothing Human," this season's previous excellent Doctor episode, "Latent Image" had a number of structural problems, but the drama and pathos of the situation made them seem irrelevant. This episode provides an interesting counterpoint to Classic Trek's "Requiem For Methuselah," in which Captain Kirk was devastated by a guilty memory until Spock used a Vulcan mind meld to make him forget; Janeway made precisely the opposite decision for the Doctor, though her instincts as well were to choose blessed oblivion for her friend and for the good of the crew. It's difficult to fault her logic, since the Doctor became non-functional twice after having to deal with the ethical conflict. I am sure that by next week he will be back to normal with no more memory of this dilemma than Janeway had this week of her similar decision to override Torres' ethical refusal of medical treatment in "Nothing Human." The denouement seemed incomplete, but it was also far more satisfying than a deletion command would have been.
"Latent Image" is an inverse of sorts of the TNG episode "Clues," in which Data alone possessed a memory which had been wiped from the minds of all the organic crewmembers. In Voyager's case, because the entire crew was in on the conspiracy to keep the artificial crewmember in the dark, it was a bit easier to believe that the secret could be kept. But how in heck did they wipe Ensign Jetal out of every file in the computer that the Doctor might access? Did they replace Jetal's name with Megan Delaney's in every single report concerning a ship's function in which Jetal participated, or did she simply never do anything of note before that fateful shuttle trip? It doesn't make much sense that they would try to wipe her entire history out of the ship's databases, or to restrict the Doctor's access to most of the mission logs. One would think he would remember the woman, just not the birthday party or the other events of the day she died.
The Doctor was stunning in this episode, both in his conviction that he could handle whatever they were hiding from him and in his subsequent breakdown (both in flashback and in series time). Robert Picardo is just about the only actor on this series who can play an emotionally over-the-top scene without ever getting out of character; given the number of unemotional people on Voyager (Tuvok, Seven, often Chakotay), that's a wonderful thing, and it's no wonder the writers keep coming up with great Doctor stories. (One would think they would also remember that Janeway had long hair for several weeks after Seven came on board, but that's neither here nor there.) I'm more ambivalent on Janeway's actions in this episode, in part because once again she came across as authoritarian, though we are led to believe by the crew's complicity that they concurred with her decision...all except Seven, whose confrontation with the captain was annoying as usual but made a lot of sense here considering the similarities between the Doctor's situation and the ex-Borg's.
If anyone on the writing staff had bothered to remember Mosaic, which detailed the deaths of Janeway's father and fiance also mentioned in "Coda," they could have had a powerful moment for the captain in which she explained that she chose as she did for the Doctor because of her own experiences making such a terrible decision. But these writers don't seem to remember three episodes back, let alone two seasons' worth. Becuase it never came up as a matter for discussion and because Torres herself argued that the Doctor was non-sentient, it seems unfair to Torres that Janeway refused to let her make her own decisions in "Nothing Human" but granted the Doctor that right here, on the grounds that she didn't want to be seen as discriminating against a hologram. If it's the captain's prerogative to make decisions for the good of the entire crew by choosing to keep the chief engineer or the Doctor functioning even if doing so meant violating their own desires, I'm not clear on why Seven's challenge gave her an ethical dilemma in this case. Maybe Seven would have had the same effect had she argued so passionately for Torres' rights as an individual. Or maybe Janeway feels more maternally about Torres than she does about the Doctor. I don't like the double standard, nor the inconsistency in the captain, but I am glad Janeway chose as she did: maybe she's learning.
One thing I did have to laugh about when the scans started resolving from the skeleton through the muscle layer to the flesh and then the uniform: Harry has no genitalia! Well, neither does Janeway, but that's less of a surprise. I'm not even going to talk about what the Doc could do with those intimate scans of crewmembers if his mind were as unscrupulous as, say, Quark's. Let's just say that if he could get them to a Star Trek convention and sell them, he could retire a rich hologram. And hey, Janeway reads antique paper books, just like Kirk with Moby Dick. I liked the way La Vita Nuova was used thematically through this episode, though I raise an eyebrow at her choice of material: Dante's chronicle of the only love affair in history more chaste than Janeway and Chakotay's. Heh heh heh.