In the twenty-fourth episode of the sixth season of Voyager, the Doctor is sent far away to help his creator. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Oh, I’m just so impressed with where this episode went. The opening is so huge because Voyager reached a milestone that’s significant for the whole series. They can now communicate every 32 days with Starfleet! Once a month, y’all. It’s not a direct communication, of course, and is much more akin to snail mail than a phone call, but it’s HUGE.
Yet the story in “Life Line” doesn’t focus on this at all. It’s the impetus for something else, and that’s such a bold writing choice. It’s not hard to see the similarities between “Pathfinder” and this episode, since major stepping stones in Voyager‘s journey home happen alongside Barclay and Deanna Troi, but this is a story about shame and embarrassment. It’s hard to watch at times, but that challenge made this all the more worth it. And it’s here, right at the start, that I have to make myself very clear: Robert Picardo killed it. This episode heavily relies on him pulling off the dual role of The Doctor and Lewis Zimmerman while still distinguishing between them. How do you do that when one of these characters was built to be just like the other?
Well, Picardo plays Zimmerman much more like he played the Doctor at the start of the show, though Zimmerman is obviously Much Worse. (Yes, that deserves capitalization. It is an Official Designation.) For practically all of his life, Zimmerman has relied on his intellect, which has had major drawbacks. Namely? He keeps everyone at a distance because he thinks he’s superior to them all. I’d be interesting in knowing whether or not Zimmerman was as much of a jerk before the EMH Mark-1 failure, but that’s not important here. “Life Line” gives us a portrait of one of the meanest and most cantankerous characters we’ve ever seen – even though this isn’t the first time Zimmerman appeared in the show! – and then somehow manages to successfully show us why he is so awful. It’s a heartbreaking thing to watch because we see how excited The Doctor is to get to interact with the person who created him.
And how long is it before he’s utterly crushed by the experience? Like… a few minutes. AT THAT. His disappointment is sudden and all-encompassing. Zimmerman treats the Doctor like an antique. Like he is unworthy of any attention or validation. At no point does the Doctor even get to attempt to examine Zimmerman, or explain the therapy he designed to treat his ailment, or demonstrate all the ways in which he exceeded his programming. None of these things matter to Zimmerman, who rejects anything and everything associated with the Doctor. That includes any attempts from Reg Barclay or his assistant Haley to help him out. The Doctor might be stubborn and arrogant at times, but seeing Zimmerman in all his awful glory reminded me of just how much the Doctor had changed! Yet Zimmerman knew none of this and he wasn’t willing to. IT WAS SO FRUSTRATING TO WATCH.
The writers cleverly used Barclay, Haley, and Deanna Troi within this conflict, and that deserves credit, too. This could have been an all-out fight between the Doctor and Zimmerman; it also could have been about Barclay’s own insecurities and issues. But since we’d already dealt with that in “Pathfinder,” I found their presence here appropriate. Barclay has to be here because he was the one on the verge of a breakthrough with the Pathfinder project. Troi acts not just as the counselor, but as a fascinating point of conflict: she is the one who lets the audience know that the problem has reached a shocking impasse. Seriously, that scene where she calls both the Doctor and Zimmerman jerks is SO GOOD. It has to be there! Why? Because we needed to understand why both of these characters were having such a difficult time getting along. For the most part, we understand the Doctor. He convinced Janeway to delay a message from Voyager back home so that he could treat Zimmerman. Zimmerman rejected him just minutes into his trip! In the end, the Doctor is rejected for merely wanting to help, so his frustration makes a ton of sense.
Yet the show crafts a backstory for Zimmerman that explains his hostility towards the Doctor THAT IS 100% BELIEVABLE. Look, we knew that the EMH project had long since eclipsed the Doctor, and it wasn’t a surprise to find out just how much Zimmerman had improved this piece of technology. However, if there was a possibility that the Doctor had found a way of treating Zimmerman because of his time in the Delta Quadrant, then it made no sense for Zimmerman to just outright reject him. That was what the writers needed to explain: why so much hostility? I’m glad that this episode doesn’t commit the same mistake as “Fury.” Oh, no, we get a full backstory for Zimmerman, who based his first EMH on himself and then had it summarily rejected by Starfleet because the Mark 1s were TOO MUCH OF AN ASSHOLE. Not only were the Mark 1s rejected, they weren’t decommissioned; they were basically made into glorified janitors, all of which have his face.
So imagine Zimmerman’s pain as his body is dying and he’s more aware of his mortality and his failures than ever before, and that face shows up, claiming that he can fix him. It is GUT-WRENCHING to think about because the Doctor is a reminder of the worst thing Zimmerman went through, his greatest humiliation. The irony, of course, is that by keeping the Doctor at arm’s length meant that he never discovered just how wonderful the Doctor had become. He never knew that because the Doctor had escaped being recommissioned by Starfleet, he had developed into something special and unique. CAN YOU FEEL ALL THOSE EMOTIONS. And look, the Doctor already knew this was possible because HALEY WAS RIGHT THERE. Oh, Haley, who I totally did not think was a hologram at first, who supported the Doctor for NINE YEARS and was so special that Zimmerman put in a section of his will to make sure that Starfleet kept her program running in the research facility long after he was gone. STOP BEING STUBBORN, YOU KNEW THIS WAS POSSIBLE.
Anyway, I loved this episode. Goddamn, Robert Picardo was incredible!
The video for “Life Line” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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