10 Most Messed Up Deaths In Star Trek: Voyager

At the end of Latent Image, The Doctor read from Dante's La Vita Nuova, but throughout he'd been faced with his own Cornelian dilemma, forced to make an impossible choice between two options of equal medical weight in which, and not by his original programming, he chose to save his friend. His ruminations on the decision would become a feedback loop.

What was an ethical nightmare for the EMH, and quite the drama to deal with for the rest of the crew, meant in the most concrete of terms the death of Ensign Ahni Jetal. We, the viewer, would never even have heard of her or her demise had it not been for a slight anomaly on Harry Kim's holo-image some 18 months later.

The manner of Jetal's death looked particularly unpleasant — killed in a senseless attack by an unknown species whose hand weapons, already devastating enough, were designed to leave behind "plasmic energy" which would then travel up the spinal cord and into the brain. Jetal died from massive synaptic failure as The Doctor operated on Harry.

To be kinder to the EMH, also, there were never just two options, but always a third, although one almost unthinkable for a doctor — not to act. In making a choice, however arbitrary, The Doctor didn't kill anyone, but in fact saved a life and opened a new chapter on his own. There it begins.