The Pathfinder Project is able to establish brief, daily communications with Voyager. The Doctor uses his time allotment to pursue a book deal with a publisher for his first holonovel. When the novel turns out to be a thinly-veiled autobiographical story that portrays the rest of the Voyager crew in an unflattering light, the Doctor must be persuaded to soften his writing. But even then, the publisher has gone and published without his permission; as a hologram, they say, he has no rights to control his own story. A legal battle for the Doctor's personhood ensues.
This episode is really two in one, and not balanced at that. We're practically three-quarters of the way done when a serious legal drama supplants what had thus far been a light-hearted comedy. Let me take each "episode" one at a time.
I find the "Doctor writes a book that offends the crew" story to be some of the best comedy Voyager ever did. The story leans into the Doctor's pomposity, having him narrate in a smoking jacket, underline his already bold text themes, and gaslight his crewmates (almost as much as he's gaslighting himself).
All that would be funny enough, but the real comedy comes in the holonovel itself. The Voyager actors and writers have fun heightening their characters to a not-quite-Mirror-universe degree of villainy. We get a Chakotay with an over-the-top face tattoo, ridiculous proxy names like "Mister Marseilles" (who sports a ridiculous mustache), prop comedy involving a giant mobile emitter, and an evil Vulcan with an actual mirror Spock beard. The fake Janeway executes one crewmember to force her chief medical officer to tend to another, the fake Paris cheats on his wife... it's all wild.
Just as fun is watching the actual characters react to "playing" this holonovel. Paris plays along at first, until he discovers how dark the scenario gets. B'Elanna accuses Paris of just being jealous that the Doctor is throwing his hat in the "holonovel writer" arena... until she plays it herself. We see Neelix, Kim, and Janeway play too, leading to fun moments where each character comes face-to-face with their holographic proxy.
The comedy continues when Tom Paris turns the tables and rewrites the Doctor's holonovel to show him why everyone else is so offended by the Doctor's work. Now it's Robert Picardo's turn to cut loose, sporting a bad combover and playing his character with an extra dose of insensitivity and horniness. This leads to an unexpectedly poignant moment when the Doctor confronts Paris: Paris says he isn't bothered if others would see him as the Doctor wrote him; it bothers him that that's how The Doctor himself sees him.
Admittedly, this cluelessness from the Doctor to all the offenses he's causing seems a bit farfetched, as does to the degree to which he's protesting his lack of freedoms. Both seem more keyed to the Doctor circa season one than season seven. But at least to the latter point, the episode has an answer: the Doctor is writing with an eye toward his Alpha Quadrant brothers, who enjoy less freedom than he does.
Running alongside this enjoyable main story is a nice subplot about crewmembers taking their turns talking to family from the Alpha Quadrant. This gives us several lovely scenes with more emotional weight amid the comedy: Kim talking to his parents (and seeming very childlike when he does), B'Elanna facing her estranged father (with Paris at her side), and Seven of Nine learning why family does matter (when she has a brief talk with a distant aunt). Indeed, the quality of these little family vignettes is so good that I think it highlights a big misstep Voyager would take with its finale: it doesn't show us the characters interacting with loved ones after they make it back to Earth.
So that's all "episode one" of "Author, Author." And if you forgive the regression in the Doctor's behavior, it's pretty great. Then, with barely 10 minutes left, we get "episode two" of "Author, Author," a sudden legal drama where the Doctor must fight for his own basic rights. I don't mind the episode taking a hard turn like this; sometimes a bit of levity is just what you need to sneak in a powerful moral message.
What I'm more uncertain about is the specter hanging over this, the fact that on The Next Generation, the episode "The Measure of a Man" already exists. There, a full 45 minutes is devoted to the question of whether a "non-human" character has "human" rights. The episode was the series' first legitimately great installment, and remained in the top 10 even after the series improved in later seasons. Getting a rehash of it here, crammed into 10 minutes, seems not great.
On the other hand, I have a lot of respect for the way the Doctor's claims get resolved in this episode. "The Measure of a Man," great as it is, is quite idealistic: Data's rights are vindicated in the fullest way imaginable. In reality, that's really not how civil rights tend to progress. Very hard-fought battles yield very incremental steps forward over a long period of time. Don't get me wrong, I love the idealistic version (and very often, that's what I expect from Star Trek in particular). But I also appreciate that here, the court doesn't rule that "the Doctor is a person." Instead, they rule that he is an "author" with a right to control distribution of his work. That feels like exactly the sort of incremental victory that happens in life -- the case about men paying alimony that tees up the later case fighting for womens' equal rights, or the case about a lesbian widow's tax liabilities that tees up the later case for nationwide same-sex marriage.
Other observations:
- I don't know that you really need Barclay in this episode, but I guess you can't do "Pathfinder" stories without him at this point.
- The episode's coda (showing a bunch of repurposed EMHs working in a mine and talking about the Doctor's book) takes place "four months later." This actually puts it after the events of the series finale.
I find "Author, Author" to be a late but pleasant surprise. I give it an A-. And really, the "minus" mostly comes from the degree to which the episode is running back "The Measure of a Man." Overall, it's great fun.
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