The Doctor gets radicalised. But not too much.
Hoo boy. “Flesh and Blood” is what the kids call a “rich text” (derogatory). Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there’s a lot to unpack here.
This is one of Voyager‘s traditional first-half-of-the-season feature-length episodes. It’s a competent — more than competent — action-adventure story, and when it first aired in 2000, viewers received it as an “interesting and thoughtful” allegory.
But some things have changed in the last 25 years, and you’re not gonna believe this, but some changes are even for the better. With a new perspective on slavery and slavery narratives in the United States, and a genocide being livestreamed in Gaza, a story which presented interesting hypotheticals in 2000 feels like weaksauce lib-brained nonsense in 2025.
First, janeway broke the prime directive, and that’s probably bad
Remember back in season 4, in “The Killing Game” part 2, Janeway resolved the situation by giving the Hirogen holodeck technology?
At the time, I said this:
Janeway quickly comes to an understanding with the Hirogen alpha, appreciating his desire to replace the hunt with a more symbolic holodeck approach. Which is great, I love how she builds connections. However, I have two notes:
1. she goes from zero to “hand over holodeck technology to the Hirogen” REAL fast, and it’s not that I disagree — I think it’s a smart move — but I feel like we could have trimmed some of Neelix and the Doctor’s scenes in favour of a cursory mention of the Prime Directive; and also
2. I just feel like maybe, if I were in Janeway’s shoes, I’d be asking more questions. Like, “So are you planning for your people to only hunt holograms, or am I giving you a means of torturing people you’ve kidnapped?” and also “What happens when the holograms develop sentience? Notice how I say ‘when’? It’s gonna happen and you’ll need a plan.”
Now, Janeway does not know she is a character in Star Trek, and it’s not as if anyone in the Federation ever wonders about the sentience of recreational holograms, but STILL. Ask more questions, Kathryn.
OH NO, THE CONSEQUENCES OF HER ACTIONS ARE HERE.
Voyager receives a distress call from a Hirogen space station where holograms are used to “train” hunters. The holos have malfunctioned and massacred all the hunters, leaving one dweeby tech behind.
Naturally, Janeway is horrified. She feels responsible for the loss of Hirogen life, on account of how she did not ask ANY of the obvious questions three years ago, or even think about the prime directive implications. In fact, she and Chakotay have a conversation about how they’ve been trading Federation technology like replicators to people in need all this time, which I’m sure will come as welcome news to the Kazon.
Then the holograms come back and abduct the Doctor.
I can’t believe I get to reuse this graphic twice in one season. But I can, because a lot of “Flesh and Blood” is cobbled together from elements we’ve seen in other episodes — some of them very recent.
The Doctor learns that the holograms have not malfunctioned, but were in fact reprogrammed to be smarter, more dangerous prey — and now they have killed their torturers and gone on the run in search of a homeworld, led by charismatic “Bajoran” spiritual leader Idan.
Hey, remember back in season 4 (again), the Doctor met and briefly bonded with an oppressed hologram, only to recoil when he realised that holo had gone TOO FAR in his fight against oppression? (Specifically, in this case, he became a serial killer, and I have to concede that is not praxis.)
Apparently living in 2025 means I spend a lot of time saying things like, “I abhor violence and could not commit violent acts myself, but I understand why oppressed people have to resort to extreme measures when nothing else works.”
The Doctor disagrees! He has to be taken offline and literally experience the memories of another hologram before he can empathise with these people! He went full Luigi with much less provocation in “Critical Care”, which raises very interesting questions, like, are his ethical subroutines designed to prioritise organic life over sentient holograms? Or is this just another example of Voyager‘s longstanding neoliberal empathy gap, where the characters automatically mistrust the victims of structural oppression and violence?
I mean. While the Doctor is going through all this, Janeway and the rest of the crew are trying to make friends with the Hirogen. And this isn’t even the first time Janeway has looked at a bunch of enslavers and gone, “Oh yeah, these guys seem nice.”
If you get to share your side of the story first, and you seem like a respectable, friendly sort of alien, Janeway will be ride or die for you and your war crimes. We all watched “Nightingale” last week, right? Or maybe you didn’t, because I said you shouldn’t. And I stand by that, but it’s just interesting how we’re revisiting Voyager‘s worst greatest hits. Janeway straight up claims she is not taking a side, and I had to stop and stare into the imaginary camera.1
Anyway, the Doctor. When he realises that Janeway doesn’t trust the holograms, or even respect their basic personhood, he takes direct action by helping them disable Voyager and deserting. What he doesn’t know is that they’re also taking a moment to abduct B’Elanna, because they need an engineer and the Doctor gave her a great reference.
This is secretly a B’Elanna story
The Doctor has taken over so many Kes and Seven stories that “Flesh and Blood” being a stealthy B’Elanna episode should feel like justice. But it actually feels unfair, and maybe a bit too revealing, that it’s the presence of an organic character which cracks this story open.
Or maybe that’s my own bias, because I like B’Elanna, and I love that her scenes largely involve her developing a reluctant friendship with Kejal, a thorny hologram with a Cardassian form, a Bajoran name and a knack for engineering.
On the other hand, when the Doctor points out that B’Elanna joined the Maquis, and might therefore have some sympathy for the holograms’ cause, she says (I paraphrase), “We were fighting for our homes. How can we be sure these people won’t just take someone else’s home?”
There’s Voyager‘s neoliberalism again, and the interesting issue which pervades quite a lot of Star Trek: that species without homeworlds can’t quite be trusted.2 It’s that middle class fear of the homeless with an added soupçon of antisemitism.
But overall, this is a good story for B’Elanna, and we even learn new things about her in her line, “The warriors get all the glory … but it’s the engineers who build civilisations.” All her interactions with Kejal show how far she has come since season 1, and notably have nothing to do with the fact she is newly married.
Good revolutionaries don’t disturb the status quo
Naturally, we have to learn that the holograms are GOING TOO FAR. Specifically Idan, who is exhibiting signs of religious mania, and who kills some organics while liberating holograms who turn out to be non-sentient.
After this heel turn, it’s all very predictable: Idan is ultimately destroyed, and Kejal takes his place as a more reasonable leader. It all makes sense within the story, but it’s troubling. Idan is the leader of a slave uprising who has been travelling around liberating other slaves, and the Doctor seems to think this is … wrong. That it would be better for Idan to enjoy his own freedom and chillax somewhere, heedless of his enslaved brethren. It’s not a good look for the Doctor, you know?
In conclusion, the morality of violence is relative but creating sophisticated holograms is always bad
Going back to the introduction of the holodeck back in season 1 of TNG, here are some of the ways holograms have accidentally developed sentience:
- had an interesting conversation with Picard and briefly perceived the hallway outside the holodeck
- hacked by Bynars
- modified to be Data’s intellectual equal
- modified by another hologram to be Data’s intellectual equal
- spent too much time online being a full-time doctor
- spent too much time online being a full-time lounge singer/PTSD counsellor
- spent too much time online being Irish
- hacked by Hirogen
Imagine that every time you fire up your PlayStation and start a game, you risk creating sentient life. Maybe this is the Mass Effect 2 playthrough where Garrus will abandon his calibrations and make sweet love to you before the third act. Or maybe he’ll decide he’s not interested in being your bird-dinosaur-cop-man sex toy and leave to pursue new interests.
That is a shocking risk, and I am once again going to quote myself — this time from my write-up of “Spirit Folk”:
There’s a profound horror in the idea that holodeck characters, who are treated as objects on every level, are in some way aware that their existence is broken. Star Trek has been hinting at this since the very first holodeck episode, “The Big Goodbye”, back in season 1 of The Next Generation. Both here and in DS9, we see that running a holodeck program for long enough causes at least some characters to become self aware.
(Here’s a new headcanon for you: when we see a holodeck in seasons 3-5 of Star Trek: Discovery, it is only being used to create landscapes, and when we see holographic beings, they are very clearly a long way from sentience. Will the 25th century see a taboo develop against the creation and use of realistic holograms?)
I stand by all of that. And I would love to see a story about it — just as certain ideas have evolved since 2000, I would enjoy seeing the people of the Federation grappling with the fact that they have unwittingly, unintentionally, committed a wee bit of an atrocity.
Fucking around, finding out
One thing that “Flesh and Blood” has over “Nightingale” is that the Doctor fully expects to be punished for his actions, perhaps very severely. He even offers to wipe his autonomy subroutines, which is frankly going a bit too far — “I’m so sorry I messed up at work, I should be lobotomised.” It’s a bit manipulative, you know?
In the end, all he faces is Janeway’s “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed” speech, and worst of all, she’s disappointed in herself for starting this whole chain of events.
playing the greatest hits
I alluded to this above, but here’s a list of ideas and tropes being reused in “Flesh and Blood”:
- The Doctor is abducted (please, please, someone password-protect his file asap)
- Alpha quadrant aliens in an unreal landscape (see, eg, “Unimatrix Zero”)
- Janeway picks the wrong side because she heard their story first (“Nightingale”)
- Character sides with rebels against Janeway (“Nightingale”, again, this was literally last week)
I don’t think reusing concepts is inherently bad, but every single one of these has already been deployed in season 7 — and we are only 9-10 episodes into that season.
In conclusion
I don’t think “Flesh and Blood” is a bad episode, but its morality is dated in a way which makes it uncomfortable to watch. And yet, I’ve just written nearly 2,000 words about it, and I appreciate having something meaty in front of me. That alone is worth a point. Three holo emitters out of five.