My honest opinion is that I would have restored the Doctor to his factory settings for that. The Voyager crew cannot do without the EMH, but he deserved to be punished for attempted murder, kidnap, sexual assault and sabotage.FaxModem1 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:42 pmWow, I haven't been on this forum in months.Ranchoth wrote: ↑Thu Dec 01, 2022 4:05 amKind of a late reply, but, ah...I'm really not sure this is the kind of legal precedent you'd want to establish.FaxModem1 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 02, 2022 5:45 am No permanent damage was done to the child or the Doctor, so it was allowed to be off her record. And I can understand why no one wanted to really press the issue.[...]No one outside the ship was affected at all, and no one inside the ship was really affected by it. You could chalk it up to a domestic dispute if you wanted to.
Especially worse with the level of "permanent damage" that could be technically averted with 24th century medical technology. "Sure, Ensign Wildman was brutally assaulted in every way by her boyfriend, but...the Doctor just healed all the damage, and she doesn't actually remember most of the incident, anyway, so why make a deal out of it? You'd be damaging a promising young lieutenant's career—and we have the local image of Starfleet to uphold. No one really has to know..."
Again, should the Doctor have been put in the Brig for nearly killing a man in Darkling? This was while he was also sexually assaulting B'elanna and attempting to kidnap Kes. Because that's something that happened. Precedent is already kind of set there if the Doctor is a member of the crew. How about the time Paris kidnapped and raped Janeway in Threshold? The time Neelix hijacked the transporter to try and kill himself in Mortal Coil? Etc.
You either have to have every single thing the crew did over their 7 years reported and reviewed, or you cut them complete slack because they're trying to survive on their own in a high stress environment, or try and find some compromise between the two so that you can have a functioning starship crew.
I do not buy that he is ''alive'' in the sense of him being a free-thinking sapient being and I never have. He is merely a program designed to adapt that has been running too long. Besides a bedside manner, can you honestly tell me anything the VOY crew have gained by allowing the Doctor to grow? Lets see: he loses his mind so badly at one point that they had to erase a woman from history, he tried to steal the ship, he betrayed the crew for a group of psychotic holograms, he stole Seven's body, he let his personal feelings get in the way of a rape case so badly that the guy in question killed himself instead of being captured, he soiled Voyager's image with fanfiction and... oh yes... Equinox.
Lets look at Equinox shall we? Where removing his ethical subroutines turned him into Dr Mengele. No fighting it, no hesitation, no noticing something was wrong, he just went along with it. On the contrary - he was having a great old time of it! Singing and jigging and rewiring Seven's brain so that she could sing along with him. Not even Phlox ever reached this level and he killed off an entire species by withholding the cure.
If you are ''alive'' it should take more than flicking a switch to force you to start cutting up the woman that you regularly fantasise about naked: