10 Times Star Trek Broke The Fourth Wall

Whilst ‘Beam me up Scotty’ is the most well known yet apocryphal quote from The Original Series, another recurring catchphrase with some legs is the consistently exhausted protestation of Dr McCoy: “I’m a doctor, not a…(a reference to the thing he isn’t yet being asked to do)”.

The phrase is first heard in its traditional form in the first season episode ‘The Devil In The Dark’, where McCoy protests he is not a bricklayer when asked to treat a rock-like silicone-based lifeform. He would go on to utter the phrase many more times over the course of the original show, with the phrase even cropping up in the Kelvin timeline iteration in the 21st-century movies. So iconic is the phrase that Trek couldn’t resist a chance to reference it, with a few oblique references from Dr. Bashir in DS9, but most notably as a running joke from Voyager’s own Emergency Medical Hologram; The Doctor.

Sci-fi staple Robert Picardo first used the phrase before he’d even been cast, with the doctor’s inability to deactivate his own program reference within his audition scene. Once the crew had left, Picardo’s line was “I believe someone has failed to terminate my program” before he decided to ad-lib “I’m a doctor, not a nightlight”.

The producers were clearly impressed, as not only did they cast Picardo, but decided to add this little bit of sass to his character. The phrase would crop up again and again over the series run, including Picardo’s cameo in the First Contact movie, and whether you find it joyful or nauseating, it’s a phrase that will likely follow the show for many more years to come.