Predictable two-parter that didn’t need to be. Janeway shows her biases against holographics again and in order for the show to prove that she was right, they turned the holographics evil. The episode could have been much better had the holographics been truly on a mission to find a home and love there.
Janeways doesn’t take blame everyone is mad. Janeway takes blame and everyone is still mad lol Sure she gave them the technology with good intention and it backfired but that’s literally life.
The only fault of this episode is that the doctor continues choosing people over voyager then realizing he was wrong the entire time. We’re trying to see the doctor as something more than a hologram but he can’t even learn the lessons he’s taught like an actual program.
The scene with Voyager behind the Hirogen vessel coming out of a dense part of the Nebula was very beautifully done.
COPIED FROM PART 1
The inevitable "holograms become self-aware, sentient and now endanger Voyager episode". Speaking of recurring patterns: Shmullus is abducted once again. And once again Shmullus explores the possibility of picking the big carrot that is dangled before him.
Not sure if that's how holograms work though. The doctor and maybe Vic Fontaine should be an exception - strictly for the sake of entertainment. It's sci-FICTION. But to my liking this happens far too often in this show: let a holo program run for more than 24 hours (or like in this case tinker with the Holo technology) and boom: a new sentient being is created. In this episode, one of the holograms turns out to be a cruel megalomaniac (we had a murder hologram before). Hmmm .... Things are getting out of hand.
And when this happens the show virtually always tells the same story: the possibility of artificial life forms and their rights vs. the dangers to Voyager. At this point, this philosophical topic has become boring. And so is the whole episode. In season 2 or so that would have been a decent episode, but now it's too late. (Meeting the Hirogen "engineer", I even believe that the Hirogen could have been a formidable and interesting major foe for Voyager over the course of the whole show, but they never invested enough effort into this race and thus they'll always stay this stupid, one-dimensional hunting people). This back-to-back episode maybe still works as an action story but it's certainly not awesome. It's core could have been told in one episode.
PS: Will they ever stop to misuse their pilot as a nurse?
Janeway: I should have seen this coming.
You never should have taken the actions you did to create the situation in the first place, dumbass.
We see yet again how unfit Janeway is to be Captain. Her continued bias again some forms of life, including holograms, makes her unfit to wear that uniform.
After seeing how she continues to treat The Doctor, I certainly would want to be part of Janeway's family.
We also get to see how short sighted Janeway is. She is worried about all the Hirogen that does because she shared the holographic systems. She is so fixated on it, it does occur to her that she has probably saved more lives that the Hirogen would have hunted and killed instead of the holograms.
Review by FinFanBlockedParentSpoilers2021-04-11T16:45:34Z
I am really rather tired of sentient holograms and this whole oppression thing. And the Doctor always in the middle, taking sides, than seeing how he was wrong.
First off, when they created Moriaty it was a "technical glitch" caused by a slip of the tongue. You could already argue how the Enterprise computer created a sentient, self-aware hologramm. But it's scifi so you let it stand.
Than they created the EMH, which makes sense. A computer programm, meant to do certain tasks, put into a holo matrix. But, you just leave it running long enough, give it some subroutines and memory, and it magically develops a personality. And now we discover sentient or self aware hologramms everywhere.
With the Doctor it is the quest to find humanity, much like they did with Data. I can get behind that. The rest is just ridiculous and serves no real purpose. And a religious, fanatic hologram who sees himself as some kind of Messiah ? That's going overboard.
The positives of this story is that we again pick up consequences of Janeways actions because everything that happened here comes out of her decisions. I was actually surprised how they talked about how often they gave away replicator tech and stuff. I thought that was a absolute no-go.
In any case, you could probably do another seven season show that just deals with those kind of consequences.
You know, I'd actually watch that.