“Renaissance Man”

I really like "Renaissance Man" and it easily gets a 3-star rating from me. The Hierarchy are an interesting species and I welcome their reappearance. Sure, we've seen plenty of kidnapping plots in the Star Trek franchise, but there's something refreshing about the execution here. The pacing is great, the visual effects are very cool and the ending is smile-inducing.

Noteworthy:

*I believe this is Vorik's only appearance in the seventh season.

*It seems Ayala has received a promotion; he's sporting a red uniform and is seen at the helm in this episode.

Not that I thought differently beforehand, but the fact that Voyager's penultimate episode is a standard, stand alone adventure, whereas both TNG's Preemptive Strike and DS9's Dogs of War were first-rate dramas with affecting ramifications.

Not that I thought differently beforehand, but the fact that Voyager's penultimate episode is a standard, stand alone adventure is par for the course for this show, whereas both TNG's Preemptive Strike and DS9's Dogs of War were first-rate dramas with affecting ramifications.

I LOVED this episode and it's probably my favorite. In fact, I decided to watch Voyager again just because I suddenly remembered this particular show.

It's interesting, intriguing, different, full of suspense. The use of technology is really clever. There are some funny sequences, such as Paris getting all lovey-dovey with "Torres" (The Doc). There's no "bonding" or personal drama, thank god. I wish all Voyager episodes were like this one.

I totally disagree with the low rating by Jammer. This show in my view deserves at least 3.5 stars though I'd go so far as to give it fully 4.

@ Gretchen

I'm sorry, lasting ramifications for whom exactly? The characters in the Trek Universe, who are fictional creations...Voyager was the only member of the franchise with a premise established in the Pilot which was resolved in the series finale. About the fifth season of TNG, one realises that there's no cap to it--there's no where for them to go...so the writers just exhausted themselves until they began setting up the other two series, Voyager and DS9. Now DS9 created a destination for its series with the war but that wasn't until about season 5 either.

I'm not crazy about this episode, it's pretty mindless on its own, but there's no reason it "should" have been anything else given its placement in the series. As I've said before, I would have loved Voyager to be given long arcs and multi-parters like DS9 had, but it was not meant to be. At any rate, without that crutch of storytelling architecture, Voyager as a series makes a lot of sense and progresses continually towards a goal which was evident from the very first episode.

I'd have liked to have seen a more gradual end to Voyager myself, rather than having run-of-the-mill stuff right up to the penultimate episode.. but whatever. Indeed, it's befitting the series - it's not like there are a myriad of complex DS9-style ongoing stories to tie up :)

Still, I couldn't get into this episode at all. What are the Sontarans doing all the way out here? What is this all about? I guess no matter how suited it is to the series, I couldn't really get past the fact that this is the penultimate episode and they do something totally random. Then all of a sudden, next episode it's all over... no lead-up other than Neelix leaving.

At least the Doc got his feelings about Seven out in the open I guess.

Oh yeah, and nice to see that other Vulcan make an appearance again.

Still... can't really rate this ep much myself. 2 maybe. On to the finale!

Oh man did I laugh at the Doctor's Matrix wall climb when I saw that. It was ridiculous, and even funnier in slow motion. I suspected it might be mentioned in this review. It was just so weird.

We did see the Hierarchy guys in that weird hole in space.

Immanuel said,

"*I believe this is Vorik's only appearance in the seventh season.

*It seems Ayala has received a promotion; he's sporting a red uniform and is seen at the helm in this episode."

Yes, it was nice to see Vorik one last time, just as it was nice to see Naomi Wildman again last episode. His presence here really wasn't required, so it's kind of one last time in the limelight, I guess.

And as far as Ayala is concerned, oh my gosh, he actually spoke! If this wasn't the only time, it certainly was one of very few over the course of seven years. (One might almost think he was mute.)

As far as the story's concerned, eh, it held my interest but certainly wasn't notable. I think after this incident, Janeway should have removed the Doc's emergency command protocol. At the very least, he should have gotten more than his "hand slapped," so to speak.

@ Captain Jim,

In "Basics", Ayala said "yeah" when asked if he could run good. I think that was the first and last time before now...

I fucking loved this episode. Granted, the bad guys kind of suck...but the whole Doctor impersonating everyone was pretty cool. The scene where Tuvok uses VulKarate to stop him is awesome, epic wall climb...awesome...Tom/Doctor kiss...awesome in a hilarious way.

One thing I would like to point out though...the Doctor seems superior to a regular crew in everyway...so why not have a whole ship made up of Doctors?

@Bravestarr

"One thing I would like to point out though...the Doctor seems superior to a regular crew in everyway...so why not have a whole ship made up of Doctors?"

I'm not sure if you're talking about a ship full of EMHs or a ship full of capable EMH-like holograms who serve nonmedical functions. In the latter case, the crew (of holograms) would never be able to leave the ship, except maybe in a shuttle; whether this limitation would be a significant impediment to a Starfleet ship's being actually useful, I can't say. In the former case, it might be useful to have a ship crewed entirely by Doctor holograms, functioning as a sort of roaming medical facility for the use of any ship that passes by and has the need.

I guess no one noticed the homage to "The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy?"
The line when the captain was told she would be put down on a planet whose inhabitants are "mostly harmless."

OK, for a second there when the Dr. said he wanted to spend more time with the Captain I thought he was hitting on her! If it hadn't have been for his "death bed confession" of love for Seven, I would have wondered.

This is where I wish they would have expanded a bit on the Captain's weekly dinners. They showed her and Chakotay having candlelight dinners every so often in a cheap bid to keep the J/C fans happy. But I always thought that the Captain might have had weekly dinners with Tuvok as well since they were friends and she turned to him for counsel. Well, at least she said she did-- they didnt' exactly write it in all that often...

Not bad, not great. *SIGH*

interesting that the 2nd to last episode was Michaels favorite. It is not an episode i remembered off the top of my head. but it was very enjoyable. these are the episodes that make me miss voyager. more action in Voyager than the other series i think.

very fun. last 2 scenes were great.

3 stars at least.

This is a fun comedy episode - romp is the right word - and I have no qualms with it being as the penultimate episode, especially given how well it compares with DS9's Extreme Measures, another attempt at "one last romp" that didn't come off anywhere near as well.

I really liked it.

Although I do question why they went to the trouble of bringing back them Hierarchy aliens instead of just using someone from this season who wasn't left too far behind. Even inventing a new race would probably have went down better. I guess the Hierachy guys are taken out whenever they need comedy villains for a harmless romp.

And while I don't mind the fact that this was a fun, standalone, penultimate adventure; I would have liked if they at least had one scene were the crew pondered Neelixes' absence from their lives or a last minute Star Fleet transmission to act as a lead-in for the finale.

Other than these complaints I generally enjoyed it very much.

I especially liked the skillfully played mystery, did anybody else noticed the subtle clue dropped by Janeway/Doctor when he said the made-up aliens had a hierarchy? Its a fun little detail. I loved the Doctors' crazy action scheme, it was cool as well as funny and inventive.

All in all, 3 stars which came very close to 3.5!

This is probably one of the most uninteresting episodes. The Dcotor is blatantly disregarding the captain's orders, for no reason other that to further the "plot".

This episode is so utterly stupid. One star. The bad guy's actions and motivations were meh, and it was difficult to watch their very stilted acting and writing. Granted, Picardo did a good acting job, and I liked the bit at the beginning where he mentioned he liked not being a human -- he's been a bit of a Data rip-off in the past, and it's nice to see him accept himself.

However, he just makes so many stupid choices. He has a line that goes something like (I don't remember the precise wording) "The ship can go on without a warp core, they can't go on without a captain". This is a very stupid reason to take a warp core to some generic baddies. Janeway herself would have sacrificed herself for the ship. Voyager is in a bad enough position as it is, and Doc's faulty reasoning ruins a lot of the fun of this episode.

This is another episode that clearly draws inspiration from the light classic star trek romps such as "Mudd's Women", wherein a rather comical and not overly dangerous villain is eventually outwitted. With all the danger and threats, no one even gets killed!

The 'insider' bonus bits for Voyager fans are touching. We get character snippets scattered throughout when the doc takes on different identities, we get insightful Janeway dialogue with the Doc (More socializing! Coffee in Brazil!), lastly we get the fantastic and hilarious non-deathbed confessions from the Doc. Yes, he does love Seven! ::sigh::: There is hope... ;)

As with many of the Seventh Season outings, this episode is tightly plotted, has a self-awareness about it, and doesn't quit until the credits roll. What more can a Voyager fan ask for? A more fitting (second) last episode couldn't be asked for.

a solid 4.5/5

I enjoy watching this episode. I didn't like its placement so close to the end, it was so anti climatic as Endgame was approaching. Since it's been 13 yrs since it first aired, I've started wondering what ifs

remembered how annoyed we were at the lack of consequence for Janeway when she made bad calls? It's human to make them but it's obnoxious when she is elevated to impeachable status every other cliff hanger. Anyway, I had a thought, would you all s*** your pants if we saw continuity from Janeway's "pretend" assimilation? I would have not seen it coming if the writers had Janeway or the doctor recall Janeway having Borg shielding intact from her unimatrix days. Have her walk through their shields like water and say those immortal words to those unsuspecting potato men. Now that is an ep :-)

Still bothers me seven and the queen were written to have 99% cybernetic bodies and Picardo, but most of all the command trio, do not. Had they not shown Seven to be metal with human flesh, I might have bought the senior officer restoration. I think Janeway should have walked through the alien shields :-)

*Picard. Not Picardo. I have Picardo in my auto correct. I better add Picard now :-)

I found it funny that an episode that features the Potato People would also feature a dish of potato salad... with extra paprika!

I agree with the consensus, that this was a fun episode but oddly placed in the line-up (or countdown, rather).

However, one thing really tickled me that hasn't been mentioned—there were clues early on that it was the Doctor, before the "reveal". The first was that the Doctor (as Janeway) went after Chakotay with a *hypospray*...and the second was that he (as Janeway) hid Chakotay in the *morgue*. Both those details were unusual, and after realizing it was really the Doctor, I appreciated those details.

Steinway> I didn't mention it but yes, I suspected it was the doc when Janeway started stammering on the bridge and using a hypospray on Chakotay. He was easy prey to such a tiny woman :-) I mean really? He couldn't shove her down? :-) If the doc had done a subtle seductive move to get him from behind, yes, but front attack, Chakotay looked very whimpy to me.

I think the only thing that really hurts this episode is that they stuck it between Homestead and the finale. Put it in the middle of the season and run and it would be easily 3 1/2 stars... not as good as tinker tenor but still great.

Awful episode.

With apologies to Wayne Thomas Yorke, his character Zet reminded me of Rush Limbaugh in voice, aggression, and physical attributes. Although Zet is a bit more attractive. I actually like this episode even more after revisiting it over the years.

0 star atrocity. Almost as bad as threshold. What a complete garbage of an episode. Again, the treacherous doc goes all traitor while disobeying direct orders. Can they decompile it already?

It was funny. I would have liked to have seen what happened when Tom found out exactly who he kissed.

Maybe if I hadn't watched "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy" I would've had more fun with this one. But I feel like episode is just a colossal step backward for the Doctor's characterization. The notion that the Doctor would incapacity the whole senior staff in order to pull off a sinister stunt that could seriously jeopardize the crew is completely out of sync with a character who has now actually commanded Voyager.

I didn't notice half the problems Jammer did such as the crazy amount of distance the Hierarchy should be from Voyager, but I can't deny those issues are there. What I think it really a big problem here is that the villains are so laughably incompetent, you have to wonder why the Doctor and Janeway couldn't have outsmarted them much earlier and without jeopardizing Voyager.

I did like the chase scene with Tuvok and the Doctor, and I like the idea that Voyager could pin that hologram down pretty well if they wanted to. It's too bad the Doctor was never in any big enough danger that you actually sympathized with him.

1.5 stars, better to skip this and let your headcannon go on without it.

As others have noted, it is probably emblematic of the series as a whole that we get this utterly inconsequential episode as the last regular episode of the run. Yes, it does things well enough and some of the little details are quite nice, but when you build an episode around a line as ridiculous as "The ship can go on without a warp core, it can't go on without a captain" - ah, actually that's probably the other way around Doc - then you're asking for trouble.

I also can't help thinking that the uber-Doc busting out his Matrix moves and activating his own ECH routines does suggest that actually a ship full of Doctors might not be an idea for Starfleet. 2 stars.

Jammer asks: "I've never seen Doc pull a Matrix-like move like that before, but then why did I need to?"

Because it was AWESOME.

That is all.

Neelix leaving the ship was the best move he ever made. He did not have to endure this awful episode.
BTW, did anyone notice how un-interested and un-involved Mulgrew portrayal of Janeway these last few episodes? She really was looking forward to get out of ST VOY.

There can be some fun in seeing how a crewmember manages to outwit the rest of the crew. We saw Data successfully do it in Brothers, and Wesley fail in The Game. But you know what? Those were short sequences, not half the plot. And for good reason, because unless you do an exceptional job of plotting it, it can get boring and implausible real quick. Consider when "Chakotay" orders everyone out of engineering, then Torres learns the truth. So the EMH places her behind a forcefield. So she then... just watches. Didn't get on her communicator to ask anyone else from engineering to come back in? Didn't report in to Tuvok? Just sat there?

And how is the Doctor able to lock out everyone else's command codes all the time? For that matter, how does he do all these site-to-site transports? Wouldn't the transporter chief or whoever notice that they are just transporting a hologram? Isn't it rather convenient that no one else cared where Chakotay or Janeway was while they were both missing and he was trying to impersonate both of them? Obviously, that was the big hook of this episode; the EMH against the crew. But the longer it went on, the sillier it became. I just don't think they managed to sustain the concept as well as they had hoped to.

Meanwhile, with all due respect to the EMH, just what the heck was he thinking? "The ship can survive without a warp core; it can't survive without its captain." That may sound special in a touchy-feely sort of way, but it's actually the other way around. Without the warp core, you're dead in the water. No more voyaging for Voyager. No getting home, perhaps not even getting to a planet. Everyone slowly dying on the ship while they try to desperately inch towards the nearest star system. So not only did he ignore the Captain's orders, not only did he ignore the oldest rule in the book (don't negotiate with hostage takers), but he also ignored common sense. If we were supposed to sympathize with the EMH in this episode, they failed miserably. All those emergency command protocols he has and he failed to realize what he was doing was stupid?

It's not that I disliked the episode, but it wasn't really that good. I like the Hierarchy aliens, so it was fun to see them again. Some of the EMH's tricks worked well, such as the holodeck army. Likewise, Tuvok was fairly competent as well. But when the premise is bad, the EMH's decision making is questionable, and the pace somewhat slow, it kinda makes you wish for more from a penultimate episode.

Agree with the dissenters. Lousy episode; some entertaining elements in a vacuum but the core is infuriatingly stupid. They really couldn't come up with a good excuse for the action? A being this powerful and this easily manipulated should not have security clearance of any kind.

Well, this one probably should have been swapped with Homestead. But then we wouldn't have got one of the nicer moments with Seven talking to Neelix via subspace in astrometrics and her thanking him for the picnic suggestion.

I REALLY didn't want to see the cone-head/humpty-dumpty aliens again.... once was MORE than enough for these guys.

But I must say, it was pretty enjoyable to watch and Doc's confession at the end was LOL funny and .... not sure what the word is, can you bust a gut and feel sorry for the guy at the same time? :-) .... what would that be called? :-) I did here.

Another LOL moment? ....

"EMH-TORRES: Computer, access medical file Torres Three and update her holographic template.
(The baby bump appears.) "

lol

All good fun. 2.5 stars from me.

sigh (*)

This is the penultimate episode?

2 stars. Very middle-of-the-road stuff.

Perfectly competent yet remarkably boring and workmanlike. As it's a direct follow-up to the excellent Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy, they should have kept the same tone and made it a comedy instead of an action/intrigue episode. Only the final scene is entertaining (if a little overdone), the rest is very routine. Roxann Dawson isn't a showy accent but I thought her performance in this was great - first when the Doctor is impersonating her, secondly her acerbic reaction at the end when fixing the Doctor's program.

A race that advanced on the edge of the Beta Quadrant (basically adjacent to the Klingon Empire) surely would have made themselves known by Picard's time to the Federation, or at least the afforementioned Klingon Empire.

This episode was lol fun at times, especially the Doctor's deathbed confession. Also, bodies piling up in the morgue was hilarious.

It's main weakness were those pathetic aliens. God I really hoped " The Void" would be the last time I'd see them. It's absolutely asinine that the Doctor defeated Tuvok so easily, but couldn't do exactly the same to those Hierarchy yahoos. As he showed with Chakotay, his strength is nothing more than the workings of his force-field. He can literally be as strong as he wants to be and easily overpowers Chakotay, yet somehow he's struggling to wrestle with the bootleg aliens of the season.

This would've been the perfect episode to bring back the Think Tank. They could've corrupted the Doctor's program and had him strand Voyager, instead of some lame ass hostage coercion. Jesus Christ on a crucifix. I'll always remember Voyager as the show of missed opportunities.

This episode shows how dangerous the Doctor can be given the right motivation. It's criminal someone in Starfleet didn't figure out how to replicate the mobile emitter so all EMH Mark 1s could be deployed in the Dominion War. The mobile holo-emitter came online in 1996, seaon 3 maybe. I believe the Dominion War culminates during Season 5 of Voyager. Holograms are the perfect foil to the Changelings' shape shifting abilities. There was no way in hell Starfleet wouldn't have deployed them in that situation, especially with Section 31 creeping around. Although they couldn't fool the Founders without the ability to commune, holograms could've infiltrated the Vorta, the Jem'Hadar, and Cardassians quite easily.

The doc and Janeway are kidnapped by aliens and come back and say they have to hand over the warp core and abandon ship or else. And Janeway is acting all out of character, even talking to herself. Chakotay should have immediately assumed command of the ship and tried to lock her up, which is when they would have discovered she was actually the doc, and they would have went searching for the real Janeway and rescued her quite easily. End of what would be about a 10 minute episode.

Instead we get a convoluted steaming pile of nonsense.

And the potato people say near the end that they can use the doc to get information worth 100 warp cores by using him to infiltrate a surveillance complex, so why bother with this complicated and risky plan to steal voyager's single warp core? As soon as they had the doc, why not just leave? Or send him over to disable Voyager and come back, if they were worried about them following them?

I don't think the writer's on this show ever put more than the most minimal thought into what they were writing. 'Let's get the doc to impersonate the crew!' 'For what reason?' 'Who cares?!' 'But what if it doesn't make any sense?' 'Who cares?! He'll be impersonating the crew!' 'Genius!' 'And make him do some Matrix stuff too!' 'That would be awesome!'

1 star

I disagree with Jammer's assessment of the series as a whole. I found many of Voyager's episodes to be moving and thought provoking. An excellent series overall and a wonderful addition to the Star Trek saga. I'm glad I passed my love of this show along to my children.

@Ben Sisko

Jammer gives plenty of favorable reviews to Voyager, though. P.S., don't forget to pass on your jambalaya recipe too.

@Chrome, if you have read every review Jammer has done on this show then it's the mistakable conclusion that he is disappointed with this show as a whole. And I just want to voice my opinion that I disagree wth that general sentiment and am very fond of this show as a whole.

@Ben Sisko

I don't think Jammer liked Voyager as much as say, DS9 or even TNG, but I don't think he's the biggest Voyager critic of Voyager either. In fact, some of his favorable reviews of Voyager episodes gave me the courage to actually go back and rewatch some of these even though I myself am not much of a fan. Found that Voyagers has a few gems, too.

@Chrome, TNG and DS9 were amazing shows, some of the best TV of all time. So, to say Voyager was maybe not quite as good as those shows, still says a lot about how wonderful this show truly was. But, from reading Jammer's reviews as a whole, I never got the impression he appreciated what he was watching most of the time. Again, this really comes through in his last few reviews of the series, where his overall disappointment of the series becomes quite clear to me. I just finished rewatching the entire series again, and I have really come to appreciate how good this show was, and how it's possible we may never get a Star Trek show as good as this again. I definitely get that impression after watching the first couple of episodes of Discovery.

@ Ben Sisko,

You're entitled to your opinion but I think it's presumptuous to suggest that Jammer is 'wrong' in his assessment of Voyager. I was a huge Trek fan growing up, I was eating out of their hand, and I found it difficult to even watch Voyager week by week when it first aired. Sometimes I was so disappointed that I skipped watching it for a while, and would invariably be punished when I came back to try again. Some people act like being disappointed with a show means there's some kind of vendetta or they're 'out to bash' the show. Maybe they're just reacting to what they see? I had zero incentive to dislike Voyager when it first aired and it managed to piss my off anyhow.

@PeterG,

Maybe you should re-watch the show again in its entirety before agreeing with Jammer now in 2017. I found a great appreciation for this show now in retrospect and maybe you will too.

@Ben Sisko - VOY is better when you don't rewatch the whole thing in short order. It has a lot of fantastic hours, but it doesn't hold up as a seven year long saga. That was it's biggest problem.

@ Ben Sisko,

I gave it a rewatch last year. Didn't change what I had taken away from it previously. I noted the stronger and weaker parts, and my current thoughts on it are based on very recent memory.

Yeah, I just pick and choose episodes when it comes to rewatching Voyager. A third of it (at most 40%) is solid, the rest is disposable. There are plenty of good standalone episodes in seasons 2-5 and season 7 that are worth returning to and that I enjoy. But I'd never watch it all the way through as a seven-year saga the way I would DS9.

Used to like this episode but it really just feels like an inferior version of Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy. Treads territory the show had already done more than enough before.

On-the-spot review by Jammer, again.

Lt. Ayala did say a sentence in an episode (can't remember which) the preceding year, as a security officer, "Stop where you are!", before getting zapped :)) He must have gotten promoted finally.

The bouncing-off-the-wall move by Torres-Doctor was badly synchronized as you can notice, if you look closely, Tuvok kneeling down and looking at the ceiling before Torres-Doctor actually passes above him.

@Ben Sisko,

I just got done watching all seasons of Voyager and it is easily the weakest of the shows with the exception of Enterprise. Character development was poor, most of the shows had no long-term impact on the story arc and the seasons felt less inspired as time went on. Even the chemistry on the set seemed to go backward by the end. And instead of building to some type of climax, we get a two-hour finale that appears to come out of nowhere.

Sorry, Ben, but I agree that Voyager was a disappointment.

Interesting dialogue, like I stated in my comment on Homestead, Voyager was hamstrung by the studio. They green lit a show that *demanded* continuity and then insisted on a more or less stand alone format. Trek fatigue was in full effect as well and it showed. Perhaps the show would have been better if it was not designated the flagship show for a network not enjoying the freedom as first run syndication like TNG and ds9.

As it is almost every series I like has been screwed by the network so I enjoy what I see the best I can. (The Pretender, Firefly, Farscape, Dark Matter to name a few) And also no longer fall in love with a show.

It’s good to see the former cast mates enjoy their moments at the cons and convention. I respect what those artists have to go through but would not want that burden.

At least the bed death confession gag was funny. Seven's face when Tom asked if Doc had anything else to confess made me LOL.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. I agree that it's not great as a penultimate episode and is full of holes -- for example, how long exactly was B'Elanna repairing Janeway's replicator, without noticing that Janeway was not there, for the Doctor to impersonate her for so long? did he break Janeway's replicator? -- and that the villains are obviously stock characters. Nor do I think it's as good as Tinker, Tenor, or even The Game in terms of one-crew-member-against-the-crew, let alone the bravura opening act of Brothers.

*However*, I think it's a bit better than the thread generally gives it credit for. The episode opens with the Doctor fully embracing his non-human-ness and technological mastery, but also emphasizes that what he really wants is for he and Janeway to be better friends. Then as the episode goes on, we see his technical wizardly and mastery as he impersonates a number of the crew and keeps the crew on their toes, and it's all to the end of saving Janeway. Then he has that infamous "the crew can survive without its warp core...but not without its captain!" line, which -- if we take it literally -- means that the Doctor, despite his embracing his technological nature, at the same time still holds life as primary over tech, thus fulfilling his original nature as "do no harm" doctor even above all the other things he adds. Renaissance Man or no, he's still a doctor, and will do anything to save his patient. However, while that line is justly derided if taken literally -- no, the ship can't "survive without a warp core," they'll be stranded, etc. -- what the Doctor actually does is find a way to save both. Janeway suggests that the Doctor has command subroutines that will mean he's concocting some sort of plan to fool the ex-Hierarchies, and at the moment she's mostly BS-ing, but actually she's right, in that the Doctor is working on a way to alert Voyager to his real location in a way that relies on the crew's detailed knowledge of the Doctor's personality (he wouldn't get Blue Danube so wrong). His risky, maybe hubristic plan is to bring the warp core so that Janeway doesn't get killed and then bring a Voyager shuttle so that the warp core and Janeway (and himself) get recovered, validating both the human and the technical as essential parts of the ship -- and thus validating, indirectly, himself as both versatile technology and life form. His betrayal of the crew to carry out this mad-dash plan is on a shipwide scale and involves various technical tricks, but then at his "deathbed" gives way to various personal confessions, and those are the ones he's actually embarrassed about, again emphasizing the primacy of his personhood over his technological wizardry. And the very end is Janeway offering to go spend time with him as a person. I'm put in mind of the end of All Good Things with the poker game. So the episode actually seems to me to be thematically sound about balancing technological and personal, within the Doctor and within Voyager, and doing so within the context of a fun (if kind of stupid) romp, and it seems to me to be continuing the Doctor's character arc. I mean, yes, I'd probably prefer Author Author as a final statement on the character too, but this isn't bad and actually does seem to me to have some things to say.

I mean, it still is pretty dumb in plot stuff, but with some fun elements -- I like how Tuvok doesn't let the Doctor hypospray him, and the bit with the dozens of Doctors in the holodeck -- so I won't exactly fully recommend it, but I think it earns a sold-to-high 2.5 stars.

Doctor episode rankings (by quality and Doctor-ness):

Latent Image
Living Witness
Author, Author
Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy
Flesh and Blood
Projections
Someone to Watch Over Me
Retrospect
Lifesigns
Message in a Bottle
Life Line
Critical Care
The Swarm
Real Life
One (basically a two-hander with Seven for a while)
Virtuoso
Renaissance Man
Body and Soul
Revulsion
Heroes and Demons
Nothing Human
Darkling

So overall a pretty good set of episodes, with only a few losers -- and even them not terrible -- and several real winners among the series' best. Definitely the best character arc of the series, even if it comes from humble beginnings (e.g. Heroes and Demons ain't much to speak of, IMO).

And thus ends my "character ep rankings". I'm not doing one for Janeway -- too many to sift through (since the default episode is "about Janeway" insofar as being about the captain). For other characters see: Fury (Kes), Drive (Paris), Repression (Tuvok), Nightingale (Kim), Prophesy (Torres), Natural Law (Seven, Chakotay), Homestead (Neelix).

Since I'm in a ranking mood, my overall take on how the characters were handled (both writing and acting) -- not counting Janeway, who is a separate, difficult case -- from best to worst:

The Doctor
Seven
Torres
Tuvok
Paris
Chakotay
Neelix
Kes
Kim

Oh right -- it also occurred to me when watching this that the Doctor defying the captain's direct order in order to protect her is the same thing that Riker had done and that made Picard interested in him as a first officer, as discussed in Encounter at Farpoint. I'm sure it's not an intentional echo, but I think it's kind of neat to have some callbacks to the beginning of the TNG TV era as it's about to close. (DS9 was much more explicit in having direct call backs to TOS' Where No Man Has Gone Before in its finale.)

The worst thing Janeway ever did for the Doctor was never punish him. He’s done some horrible, treasonous things in the name of ego and incompetency, and she just laughs and pats him on the back after. He never had to learn that the reason he couldn’t do certain things wasn’t because he was a hologram, but rather that not all people get to be all things all the time. He never got to learn about consequences for his actions, or feel any punishment other than what he inflicted on himself. Maddening. But good to hear he kept the same diary about her terriblecommand decisions as the rest of us

Round Two of commentary. The stakes were too high for this to be a comedy and too low to be taken seriously. The Doctor should have been able to use his Emergency Command knowledge to know that Janeway was serious about not giving them the warp core, and been able to come up with a creative way to communicate that wasn’t a stupid song at the end. It was fun to see him switching bodies and I loved the room of doctors on the holodeck, but his actions were too extreme for the situation. Shoving people into the morgue? Why didn’t he just incapacitate the entire crew with a modification to environmental controls then tell them an alien invaded the ship? His talk about being happy to be a hologram had no real bearing on the episode, aside maybe as misderection to make us think he was taking over the crew willingly. Non of his usual blundering was there. It was kind of ruthlessly efficient, and now that I think about it, kind of scary. The doctor is a kind of super AI and episodes like this show why we maybe shouldn’t create sentient life in this manner.

This episode was better when O’Brien was being forced to sabotage the ship when the Pagh Wraiths took over Keiko’s body.

Thought this was crap and basically character assassination of the Doctor. It made him way too incompetent and the confessions at the end were needlessly humiliating. The dichotomy between him being incredibly capable and resourceful while not being able to outmaneuver two dimwitted aliens was extremely jarring. I'm also fairly tired of his program being arbitrarily small and large and being able or unable to accommodate new data.

The episode would've been really fun and interesting if the Doctor had just been allowed to kick ass. I was expecting some sort of twist at the end where he saves to day and outsmarts the aliens. We did get the Blue Danube trick but it was still basically Tuvok and Paris saving his ass along with the conveniently good alien.

Jammer says: "Call it enjoyable, silly, brain-dead mayhem." I largely agree although I'd add "barely" before "enjoyable". Was really disappointed to see the potato people again behind this scheme -- the episode just degenerated from there as we can't take these clowns seriously as villains and it was only a matter of time before the junior guy takes matter into his own hands. This is a recurring cliche when 2 villains are involved -- the serious guy and the goofy other guy.

Really basic plot here but what was kind of cool (and could have been even more so) is Doc getting into awkward situations as holo-images of the various crew. The only time this worked was when he was Torres and Paris kissed him -- good awkward situation. But the problem with the episode is it didn't want to be a comedy but I think it should have tried to be one.

As VOY comes to a close, this is one of those episodes probably just thrown together with little thought -- just to make up the numbers. Doc's a great character and I liked his confessions at the end, but I did think the series started to go a bit overboard with his personal interests (opera etc.).

Barely 2.5 stars for "Renaissance Man" -- kind of fun given the web Doc weaves himself into but nothing of consequence and not as clever as I think it could have been. The villains here are a letdown -- better suited to a pure comedy episode. Also not sure what they're doing so far away from where Voyager met them last. Thought the penultimate VOY episode would have more bearing on the finale.

Not consequential or qwirky enough to like or hate. Just a meh episode to be quickly forgotten. 2 stars.

And another episode where a character evades voyager's laughable security protocols.

In a way, I'm glad there wasn't an eighth season, so I could be spared the episode where Naomi Wildeman takes over the ship, leaving Tuvok stunned and confused.

This was the last episode of Voyager that I had never watched, and it was a disappointment. The first two acts are great as the mystery of Janeway's odd behavior and the Doctor's clandestine mission are slowly revealed. I was hoping that the Doctor was running a long con on the alien kidnappers and was going to cleverly outwit them in the end a la "The Sting".

Instead, we get the Doctor foolishly trusting the aliens, crippling Voyager, and disobeying a direct order from Janeway. In the final act, it's Tuvok and Tom to the rescue as the Doctor suddenly becomes inert, and the "confession" scene at the end is just plain silly. Two stars.

The overall plot is kinda silly, but it was fun watching the Doc inhabiting all the different bodies and doing his holographic tricks.

Not sure what the big idea is, with this fairly odd and mostly inconsequential episode, right before our big finale.

I was sure Doc would do something to help the crew find the warp core and the Captain, though the musical solution was just "eh." After all the theatrics, I was expecting something more.

I can't believe I've only got one more ep!! I am really going to miss Voyager. I'd consider a rewatch, this time going through and reading and commenting on each ep, but I've never seen anything but a few first season eps of DS9 . . . I've seen ENT, TNG, THIS and VOY. I really should do DS9.

Buona sera, Trekini.

Springy,

"THIS"?

Yanks,

A typo. I use a Swype keyboard on my Android. If I don't watch closely it does some screwy stuff. It was supposed to be TOS.

Springy,

No problems... I make more typos than most :-)

@Springy

You’ve watched ENT but not DS9? You need to fix that, ASAP.

I don't know if anyone else said this (I haven't read the comments yet), and I know it is petty, but he is supposed to be a Vulcan and thus will age a lot less than humans, but he seems MUCH older than he did earlier in the series. The only other actor who I think aged a lot was Paris.

I thought the Doctor here was pushed beyond redemption. Time and time again, he defies orders and common logic. Janeway was far too lenient after he helped the renegade holograms as he clearly didn’t learn his lesson. He should have paid severe consequence for substituting his judgement for the Captain’s. He put all of them in great peril, simply because of his superiority complex. He never has been a team player, and this episode shows just how dangerous that attitude could be with such a sophisticated program.

I have been a longtime fan of Voyager, watching every episode when it was originally airing and re-watching episodes some since then, though less frequently in recent years.

"Renaissance Man" was an episode I used to not like, but after re-watching it yesterday, I have come to appreciate it more. For sure, there were some things that could have been done better. But I don't think this was merely a "filler" show before the last episode. I think its basic premise was perfectly timed.

Why? Think about it like this. If we had seen this plot line (Voyager potentially losing its warp core and the crew settling on a planet) earlier during the show's run, it would have been obvious that something would change and everyone would continue on their journey home. But by placing this plot line here, in the penultimate episode, I feel like the goal was to make viewers wonder if this really might be how the series ends--without the crew getting home, but instead giving up their warp core and settling on a planet.

Regardless of how you feel about the specifics of this episode, it seems like a great idea to me to have the crew face the potential of losing their means of travel in the penultimate episode.

@Marcus the Doctor? Getting consequences? Never. "He got away on time served". Ha! He was trying to avoid everyone anyway.

Voyager at its most entertaining mood. After the tear jerking "Homestead", this is a most welcome hour of witty, well written and pleasant to the eye entertainment: featuring a balanced exposé of the crew members we have come to love over the years.

If you don't like this I don't get how you could get this far to begin with; you'll have to be a masochist.

This is good ol' VOY shining.

Liked this episode mostly. Fun on its own but seems a bit out of place as a penultimate show to the series.

And- personal beef - why does the VOY crew never act like they have seen the potato people race before? With races like the Borg, Devore, Malon, etc., the crew actually remembers who they are (and even references them from time to time). Never any continuity references with the PPs.

I go back on my above comment from 2017 - I was right the first time, this is a clever, funny and engaging episode.

I found this way more entertaining than 'Body and Soul' and a very fitting penultimate episode for Voyager. Seven's face when Doc professes his love for her is one of the funniest sights this show has given us in ages. 3 stars.

The Hierarchy aliens are the Ferengi of the DQ.

This is a pretty spanking good Voyager episode. Kind of resembles the TNG episode Brothers, showing just how formidable Trek artificial life forms can be.

I was never a fan of the shit head aliens, though.

The Doc doing all the impersonations and all his antics were great.

Still, it does feature the very tired Voyager trope of setting the stakes very high while the crew only seems mildly concerned because they know they’ll get the techno thing back. Losing the warp core would almost seem like a severe crippling problem, but nah, we’ll just go get it in shuttle.

That said, it does work pretty well here, they just went to that trough so so many times.

As mentioned, we should be past Hierarchy space, because even since we last saw them in "The Void", Q sent Voyager a few years closer to home as reward for bratsitting via "homework". It never said how much, but "a year" has pretty much amounted to ~1000 light years thus far.

The Doctor went from being one of my favorite characters in Voyager to now by the end me really not caring for him or his actions. I keep wondering why Janeway never took away his mobile emitter? Do something to punish him! I couldn't even enjoy the action in the episode because of this ongoing problem. After what he did helping those rebel holograms then this, she sees how dangerous he is but continues to let him off with not even a slap on the wrist. He defies captain orders, stage these elaborate tricks that put the ship and crew in serious danger and afterwards Janeway is just like "holograms will be holograms." All because his intentions were good that makes defiance and deception ok??? It's quite frustrating to watch lol

Fun episode, weird placement in the season. I guess it makes sense, it's not like the crew at this point had any clue that they were just about to get home, so it's just another day in the journey to them. But it's odd to finish Neelix's story in one episode, have a "standard" adventure the next, then finish everyone else's stories in the series finale. It's just odd episode placement that leave me scratching my head.

That aside, it's a fun, low key comedy episode that should be enjoyed without being taken all that seriously, though losing the warp core would be a crippling blow to Voyager. I'm not sure we needed one more episode with the Doctor as the focal character, but at least the main cast all get something to do. I enjoyed it.

I liked "Renaissance Man". However, following my viewing of the episode, I realized that the Doctor's main character function is to cause massive stress in the Voyager audience, by over-reacting and not listening...by shooting-from-the-hip and by basically being ungovernable. It was frustrating to watch, and I can agree with those who say that they began to fall out of love with the Doctor after watching this go on.

To some extent, I have come to expect over-the-top
craziness from the Doctor and can be entertained when he defies all odds to do exactly the opposite of what I want him to do. It causes me think of Slim Pickens making sure that the bomb drops toward the end of Dr. Strangelove. The main take away is that there's often a preternatural excess of dedication or persistence when people are doing the wrong thing.

An over-the-top approach to character development has also been applied to Lieutenant Barclay from time to time in an effort to emphasize his passionare embrace of novel ideas. With Barclay though, I tend to think that this approach shifts his character into becoming a raging extrovert, which Barclay just isn't, and should never be.

The entire premise of this episode hinges on the fact that the doctor is indistinguishable from any member of the crew when he's in disguise, with only behavioural queues to give him away. I don't buy it. You're telling me that not one single officer on the entire ship noticed a holographic signature in their scans where there should be a flesh and blood human being? Not to mention, the away team members weren't scanned at all upon their return, even when their shuttle was docking, to confirm that the shuttle didn't have stowaways, imposters, or other alien influences? Only the doctor himself does a medical check on the crew members to say they're a-ok?

I also have a hard time buying that the doctor, with his ECH database, would knowingly sacrifice the ship's warp core in exchange for its Captain, when that is not something that any command officer would do. The safety of the ship is paramount.

And yes... the Hierarchy race being so spread out over the Delta Quadrant is also hard to buy into.

This episode was a lousy pre-finale ending of the series.

This episode was just too frenetic for my tastes. Seems like a lot of people enjoyed it, but a fair number of us didn't.

First, The Hierarchy. As if the Ferengi and the Pakled had a less interesting baby. Next, there's a couple plot elements that absolutely needed to be returned to at the end of the episode but the moments never came which seems a frustrating waste. One was the fact the Tom planted a big ol' kiss on The Doctor. I was really hoping for the moment he realized this. Second is the Doc's confession to Seven. I hope this fact doesn't just vanish into thin air during the finale.

With 3 hours left in a 7 year series this sort of irrelevant drivel becomes inexcusable

When the Doctor posing as Janeway calls Voyager, why is the interference analogue and not digital? I can tell by the graininess, surely by the 24th century they are using digital compression?

I didn't read most of the comments, but I did see one that echoed my own biggest gripe. The Doc tells Janeway that he disobeyed her order because “Voyager can survive without a warp core, but not without a captain.” This is entirely wrong. Of course the ship can survive without a captain. Chakotay can become captain, that’s what he’s for. Come to that, the Doctor has that ECH programming. But without a warp core, they might as well give up. But anyway, this is NOT the argument the EMH would make. He would stress that his CMO programming makes him literally unable to harm the captain. He's made that argument in other situations, so why not this time?

Yet another episode in which the Delta Flyer is so easily overcome just because the script demands it. In Unimatrix Zero it goes toe to toe with a tactical Borg cube taking hit after hit from its super advanced weapons yet in this episode and many others they are overcome by a single shot. In the next episode, we’re home guys, yeah, that makes sense. Voyager could have been a great series but the writers didn’t have the balls to make it one, they just played it safe.