Posted:
19:32:56 on April 19 2001
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: Reviews - Voyager
Reviews Ex Deus
"Author, Author"
Written for TrekWeb by O. Deus
Summary: A strong episode that addresses some
important issues but its reach far exceeds its grasp.
The issue of the Doctor's holographic rights has been
Voyager's most consistent and longest running arc and
now finally seems to be at a close at about the same
that Voyager itself is ending. Unfortunately the
deadline seems to have caused the writers to try and
do too much in too little time. Like the Void, another
strong recent Voyager episode, Author Author is at
times clever, imaginative, and finally, addresses the
substantive issues but it is overstuffed with material
that far outstrips the forty minutes available to deal with it.
While Voyager early on displayed great facility with
the Kazon arc, running it as a B-story in unrelated
episodes very effectively, the later Voyager seems to
prefer stuffing its return-to-Earth arc into large
single pieces placed throughout individual episodes. So Author,
Author has to spend time dealing with Voyager's first
regular connection to Earth AND the issue of the
Doctor's holographic rights brought to contest AND the
issue of the Doctor's relations with the Voyager crew.
Each of these would have made a good episode. Together
stuffed into one single episode, none of them has the
time to be fully developed into a natural storyline.
And so, The Doctor's humanity arguments are reduced to
a several-minute footnote towards the end of the
episode. The Voyager crew's phone-calls are well handled
but this sort of thing should have been shown to have
more impact on the crew than a few quickly edited
scenes of 'phoning home'. It's odd that at a time when the
Voyager crew have the first semi-permanent connection
to their families, the main topic of conversation
is The Doctor's insulting holo-program. This should
have really changed things, followed up on the promise
of scenes like Barclay's "gift" of the live shot of
Earth. After all, this is what Voyager has been working
for all these years; it should have meant and mattered more.
For once, Seven's family scenes were tastefully and
very effectively handled with the stimulus towards
change coming more from her, than from scenes with
Janeway or The Doctor lecturing her on getting to know
her family. Having Seven come towards the incentive
to "phone home" by acting as a silent observer while
Kim and Torres get in touch with their families is the
kind of subtlety that the Seven arc could've used more
of. Kim's scenes are used for their comic potential
but Wang underplays the material so that it works,
instead of being an over-the-top Asian family joke as it
was written. Torres's scenes with her father also
do a good job of following up on prior material--continunity is one thing Author, Author demonstrates abundantly.
The entire holonovel material, though, feels unnecessary.
Instead of the entire circus of alternate universe
doubles, we could simply have had the crew read off a
few of the same lines from a PADD and spend the time
on the arguments over the EMH's humanity or the actual
issues involved. After all, the comic potential and the
whole concept of distorted perception\mirror universe
Voyager crew members was handled far better in Living
Witness. There was no real need to do it again except
as an attempt at a gag, which only distracted from the
actual issue of the Doctor's political advocacy and
feelings.
It would've been far more effective, however, if The Doctor
had made the Voyager crewmembers more true to life,
but distorted in subtle ways so as to put a negative
spin on their actual conduct and behavior. This would
have brought home the notion that The Doctor might
view the crew's behavior differently than they
themselves or the viewer do. Instead, The Doctor
produces ridiculous caricatures that make him look
ridiculous and the crew look petty for taking offense
at such ridiculous and patently unrealistic distortions.
Certainly, literary works of political advocacy don't
tend to be very subtle and with The Doctor drafting
his own Uncle Tom's Cabin, he couldn't have likely
produced a quiet masterpiece. Still, the problem
remains that most of the Voyager crew's carciatures
are excessively and inhumanly psychotic and evil while
works of political commentary are more effective if they
address actual, everyday evils as they appear.
Political advocacy of evils as practiced by demented
cartoon characters doesn't make people re-examine
their own behaviors and participate with their victims
in the healing process; it just distances the problem
and makes it seem unrealistic. More so, a lot of the
Voyager "evil crew" are evil in ways that have nothing to
do with holographic rights. They're simply crazed and
demented. Janeway phasering a wounded crewmember has
nothing to do with holographic rights. Her treatment of the EMH by contrast seems almost merciful.
The plot twist of having the publisher of the EMH's
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" work exploit him as a hologram
with no rights is smart and politically sophisticated, while being quite true to life. Having the test of the EMH's
humanity be copyright law is also ingenuious and
unexpected, even though the publisher has no chance
of victory. If the EMH were a thing rather
than a person, than he and all his works are property
of Starfleet, which has sole authority over them. The
problem is that much of this comes as an afterthought.
In TNG's Measure of a Man, the arguments over Data's
humanity forced the crew to really reconsider their
feelings about Data, the arguments hit home and the
answer was in actual doubt. Picard had a point but so
did Riker. Here there is zero doubt.
The crew has fully acknolweged the EMH's humanity and
they're ready to tell stories about it all day and all
night. The use of The Doctor's betrayal of Voyager as
a point in favor of his humanity is a smart touch of continuity. But there is no real challenge
anymore. Only the Federation doubts the EMH's
humanity and the Federation isn't actually here,
they're far away listening-in. The final scene of the
holograms breaking the proverbial rock in the
dilithium mines, spreading the word about freedom, is a
wonderfully inspirational final thought and the episode is full
of so many similar nice moments. Unfortunately, this episode could
have been put to better use if it had done a better
job of connecting all these instances into a more seamless, cohesive story.
