AUTHOR, AUTHOR (STAR TREK: VOYAGER)

'Author, Author' is an episode of the TV series '', the twentieth episode of the seventh season.

Contents

Plot

Notes

External links

Plot

A new method of communications allows Voyager to contact home for eleven minutes each day, and each crewmember is given a chance to use this time once a day. In the holodeck, the Doctor edits his holonovel ''Photons Be Free'', is pleased with his work, and saves the file. He plans to use this new method of communication to publish his work in Federation space.
Tom Paris asks the Doctor to let him preview ''Photons Be Free'', set on the fictional USS ''Vortex'', a Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant. The protagonist of the story---a holographic doctor---wears a huge, cumbersome backpack-like mobile emitter to get around, and is constantly mistreated by his crewmates. Worse, each of the crewmates is a thinly-veiled allusion to an actual crewmember, but portrayed as being cruel or obnoxious---for example, Paris' character is a self-serving adulterer, Harry Kim's a hypochondriac, and Captain Janeway's a tyrant and murderer. The senior crew plays through the novel one by one. When Janeway sees the fate of the fictional doctor, she orders a meeting. The Doctor, while insisting that the story was not based on his crewmates, claims his novel was meant to highlight the plight of Mark 1 holograms back home. The Doctor, a Mark 1 hologram, does not like the fact the other holograms are now reduced to menial tasks.
Going back to the holodeck to work on his novel, the Doctor discovers it replaced by a parody where ''he'' is a boorish slacker who drugs a patient (reminiscent of Seven of Nine) to take advantage of her. He confronts Tom Paris, who explains that he made it in order to show how hurtful the other members of the crew found the ''Vortex'' portrayals of them. This, and a talk with Neelix convince him to edit his work so it is more fictionalized. He does not wish the entire Federation to see his friends in a negative light. The issue seems to become moot when Admiral Paris from Earth lets Captain Kathryn Janeway know that ''Photons Be Free'' is already being distributed by the Doctor's intended publisher, without his permission, and people are wondering how fictional it really is.
When the publisher refuses to recall the holonovel, an arbitration hearing is conducted by long distance. After several days, the arbiter rules that the Doctor is not a person under current Federation law, but ''is'' an artist and therefore has the right to control his work.
Flash-forward to a few months later, to an asteroid where several EMH Mark Ones perform menial labor. One of them suggests to another that at the diagnostic station they play ''Photons Be Free.''

Notes

★ The Mark 1 holograms performing menial labor was first referred to in "Life Line," when Zimmerman expressed profound embarrassment that holograms he had modeled on himself were taken off medical duty and summarily reprogrammed.

★ Some fans have noted the similarity of this episode to the ''Star Trek: The Next Generation'' episode "The Measure of a Man", in which the android crew member Data calls a trial to establish that he is a person in order to avoid being reassigned and disassembled. That episode's ruling concludes that Data has the right to self-determination, while this episode's ruling does not grant that same right to the Doctor, but does grant him the right to control his work.

External links

★ "Author, Author" episode summary from StarTrek.com