Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Doctor

4. Emitterphobia

The failure of the Temporal Integrity Commission was a win for Voyager's EMH. With the advanced emitter, the Doctor was permanently "footloose and fancy-free" as of 2373. Though the mobile emitter was a liberation, it was also, at times, a burden, allegorised as a "small shuttlecraft" in Author, Author.

For Robert Picardo, confinement to sickbay wasn't a burden but a bonus. He told StarTrek.com in 2022,

I think it was actually a benefit for me, because it made the character unique and captured the audience's imagination. As an actor, I benefited from the character's limitations, because it set him apart in the audience's mind.

At first, therefore, Picardo thought the introduction of the mobile emitter was quite simply "a bad idea". He soon warmed to the Doctor's newfound liberty:

[Brannon] Braga was right. [The emitter] opened up whole new storytelling vistas and I was the first to tell him that I was wrong.

In the history of Star Trek: Online, the Doctor had to bring legal proceedings against Starfleet in 2382 to prevent his mobile emitter from being confiscated for study. The following year, in game, the 'Soong Foundation,' a group linked to the Daystrom Institute, started its own mobile emitter R&D project.

A mobile emitter was used in the Star Trek: Picard episode Imposters, suggesting the technology had been reverse-engineered by the 25th century.