Star Trek: Every Medical Officer Ranked

Robert Picardo famously worried his character, The Doctor, had the least interesting role to play when Star Trek: Voyager commenced in 1995. Those concerns were clearly unfounded as the starship Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram became one of the series' most versatile and thoroughly developed characters.

From his origin as just a hologram confined to sickbay in "Caretaker" to an opera virtuoso in "Virtuoso" to expanding his programming to become the Emergency Command Hologram in "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy", The Doctor's evolution in Voyager was dramatic and, frankly, a little wild.

The series grappled with the character's existential crisis early, often vacillating between stances on whether or not The Doctor truly was sentient, but ultimately settled into a depiction of a hologram oppressed by his programming and striving for freedom. The Doctor was also the conduit for much of the show's comic relief, derived from his terrible bedside manner and (later in the series) his almost cartoonish embrace of imagination in the form of daydreaming algorithms and a loosely autobiographical holonovel, Photons Be Free.

Voyager's holo-doc also performed some of the franchise's most fantastical medical feats, including resurrecting a totally dead Neelix with Borg nanoprobes, reversing the rapid evolution that turned Captain Janeway and Tom Paris into literal space salamanders, and of course transforming a grungy Borg drone into Jeri Ryan.