By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 28 seconds ago
When Starfleet Academy was announced, many old-school fans were worried that the new show (which is tonally somewhere between a Saturday morning cartoon and a CW teen drama) wouldn’t really feel like Star Trek. To presumably assuage those concerns, Paramount brought back one of the most familiar franchise characters of them all: Robert Picardo’s beloved holographic Doctor, who was always a source of dry humor and gentle wisdom on Voyager. Unfortunately, the show has turned him into a complete parody of himself, one who embodies all of the character’s most excessive qualities while turning this once-dignified character into someone who cracks poop jokes.
In its own way, the Doctor’s poop joke is the first thing that really took me out of Starfleet Academy, even though the moment is relatively mild. When scanning new cadet Caleb, the Doctor discovers that he has lung maggots in his guts and heals the young man before telling him to “keep a close eye on your bowel movements for the next three days.” That was bad enough, but he then closed with a sneering “Call me if anything moves.”
Star Trek Goes To Crap (Literally)
Now, I’m not someone who is averse to potty humor. I regularly watch shows like Beavis and Butt-Head (the revival is really, really good, y’all), where gross-out gags are the norm. It can even be used in Star Trek with the right characters, like when Vance told the visiting Orion baddie in Discovery that she was eating replicated feces (“it’s sh*t, you know”). It’s an unintentionally funny moment that actually served the plot by establishing that Vance really wants to shock his biggest enemy and that she’s unfazed by the revelation of his (and hers, after taking a few bites of the replicated food) literal potty mouth.
On Star Trek: Voyager, though, neither the Doctor nor anyone else ever made such nasty jokes, so this forced attempt at humor felt really out of character. Why bring in a beloved ‘90s Star Trek character just to have him talk like a crude Zoomer? I know I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill (or should that be dung hill?) here, but this bad comedy gets even worse when you consider all the other ways Robert Picardo’s Doctor isn’t acting like himself.
The Doctor Is Out (Of Character)
For example, he flatly refuses to be a mentor to a plucky young hologram, saying, “I’m no one’s mentor;” when she rightfully points out all the times he has been a mentor before (like on Voyager and Prodigy), his “sensitivity calibrations” start spiking. She tells him this, and he weirdly insists that “I fear nothing.” It seems like Starfleet Academy is setting up some kind of dark backstory for the Doctor, which is doubly weird. Not only does this seem out-of-character for this stoic and sarcastic Voyager character, but it seems wild to do this with someone who was making low-brow poop jokes just a few scenes earlier.
The earlier grossness continues with the second episode, “Beta Test” (a title that is really just begging people to make fun of Starfleet Academy on multiple levels), where the Doctor takes weird pleasure in telling his students about how they’ll be working with “self-replicating mucus.” Soon, he’s describing how “mucus is romantic” and how if any cadets get it on them, they will have to move in with the mucus and “spend holidays with its parents.” I was really staggered by this…like, it’s bad enough making Voyager’s most dignified character into the bodily functions joke guy, but now they have Robert Picardo sexualizing snot?
Robert Picardo Sings For His Supper
In that same episode, the Doctor’s only other contribution is singing…specifically, singing Amadeus Mozart’s “Pa-Pa-Pa Papagena.” Obviously, the plucky hologram sang on Voyager, so it’s not like this (or even having him be the faculty sponsor of an opera club) is exactly out of character. However, while that earlier Star Trek show just had brief moments of occasional singing, this Starfleet Academy song is painfully long and just an excuse for Robert Picardo to mug for the camera.
This is proof that the writers don’t know what to do with this classic ‘90s Trek character…he’s like a Frankenstein’s monster made of old Trek and NuTrek’s worst parts. Sometimes, he obsesses about snot and poop like an idiotic teenage cadet, and other times, he acts like a Flanderized version of his Voyager character that someone replicated from bad fanfiction. Throw in the fact that this formerly reserved character is bouncing around with downright manic energy way too often, and it’s clear that the Doctor has become a complete parody of himself.
It’s a shame because Robert Picardo is an insanely talented actor, and he (like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti) is doing the best he can with some of the worst writing in Star Trek history. But his beloved Voyager character (one that he previously reprised to great acclaim in Prodigy) now feels like hollow rather than holographic: an utterly empty parody of his former glory. The wise and wisecracking mentor of yesteryear is now the guy making poop jokes, but maybe that’s fitting…after all, Starfleet Academy is the franchise’s biggest piece of crap since the Section 31 movie!
