By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 12 seconds ago

For longtime Star Trek fans, one of the best reasons to tune into the upcoming Starfleet Academy show is to see the return of Robert Picardo’s Emergency Medical Hologram from Voyager. However, those same fans know that there are technically two different versions of this character he might be playing: the one who made it back to the Alpha Quadrant with Captain Janeway and the one who ended up in a Delta Quadrant museum, where he was reactivated in the 31st century in “Living Witness.”

Picardo recently confirmed he is playing the original EMH, letting down fans hoping Starfleet Academy would connect to one of Voyager’s best episodes.

Can I Get A Witness?

“Living Witness” was a Season 4 Voyager episode where a backup copy of the EMH is activated by a museum curator hoping to settle a longrunning dispute between two races on his planet; the Doctor is able to settle things and bring peace to the planet, and after helping everyone out for many more years, he eventually hops in a shuttle to return to Earth. Given that this backup EMH was reactivated in the 31st century, many fans had hoped this version of the character might pop up in Starfleet Academy, which is set in the 32nd century. On Threads, however, Robert Picardo confirmed he is playing the original Doctor.

For myself and many other Star Trek fans, this is mixed news…obviously, some see the EMH that made it back home with Janeway as the “real” Doctor, and featuring this character in Starfleet Academy means that he would have access to memories that the backup (who was stolen years earlier) would not. At the same time, though, “Living Witness” was one of Voyager’s greatest episodes, and it would be awesome if the latest Star Trek spinoff effectively continued that episode’s story. After all, fans still have many questions, including how long that backup EMH stayed on that planet and whether he ever made it back home to Earth. 

Holo Pursuits

I can’t help but think that Starfleet Academy missed an opportunity to develop the backup EMH from “Living Witness” into a slightly different character. This is someone who worked for years as a surgical chancellor for two wartorn species that he personally unified, all before spending the better part of a century warping back to Earth. This would be someone with the Doctor’s core personality but with an entire other lifetime of memories and experiences, all of which could make for fun storytelling in Starfleet Academy.

Having the Doctor in Starfleet Academy be the one from “Living Witness” would also help explain any major personality differences between the character from Voyager and the character on the new spinoff. In that awful four-minute preview of the new show, we see the Doctor uttering the line “If we could avoid any more direct hits, that would be super helpful,” and it was downright jarring hearing irony-pilled Millennial speak coming out of Robert Picardo’s septuagenarian mouth. 

Activate The Emergency Dialogue Coach

It doesn’t really make sense for an 800-year-old hologram to talk like a 21st-century e-girl, of course. But having this character spend decades as part of an alien culture and then decades on his own might explain why he talks differently than the Doctor on Voyager. In addition to gently explaining away bad writing, this could also open up storytelling possibilities, like showing the backup getting concerned that Starfleet is becoming too similar to the brutal warlords the Kyrians thought they were back in “Living Witness.”

If nothing else, making the Starfleet Academy Doctor the backup EMH would finally connect a NuTrek show to one of the earlier series’ futuristic misadventures. It always felt weird that Discovery, set in the 32nd century, didn’t really do anything with the Temporal Cold War (beyond retroactively making David Cronenberg’s character into Agent Daniels) or “Living Witness,” both of which took place in the 31st century. Bringing the “Living Witness” Doctor back to life would make plenty of Voyager fans happy while proving that NuTrek writers are still passionate about the golden age of the franchise. 

While this was a missed opportunity for Starfleet Academy, I’m confident that Robert Picardo will do a great job as the original EMH. Given how bad the poster and preview for the new series turned out to be (and how awful Paul Giamatti seems to be as the villain), this returning Voyager actor may be the only real reason for longtime fans to tune in. After rewatching the preview again, I can only hope the actor will do us all a favor and pop into the writers’ room to say the obvious line: “Please state the nature of the screenwriting emergency.”