Oh god yes. In my long experience with entertainment: Expectation = Disappointment Bigger the expectation = the higher the chance for greater disappointment. Where was I just talking about this..... anyway, my experience is if you go to a movie with expectations... go ahead and take a coffin with you to bury it in. Same with TV. Very rarely, so rarely as to be all but unmentionable, expectations are met in film (movie/tv). Very rarely.
I don't think the plot hole exists so much with Living Witness as it does with the rest of the series. They have so much trouble not being able to duplicate the Doctor. Here is how I would do it: 1. Select EMH file 2. Ctrl-c 3. Ctrl-v 4. "Would you like to rename this file?" Yes. EMH_backup.hgm Done. Seriously why to they have so much trouble copying data in Voyager? All the data they deal with is originals. Is there some sort of Starfleet copyright protection on everything?
I think it's a case of either the writers not knowing shit about computers or of pure plot convenience and to hell with plausibility! It's like the episode where the doctor goes crazy because he decided to sacrifice the woman instead of harry. as a computer program he could have simply duplicated himself and saved them both.
If they want information to get to engineering, they send a bloke with a padd If you kick a console, it explodes with a puff of smoke Technology isn't their strong point. They're doing the best they can, bless em
Maybe there was something special about his program, possibly the becoing sentient part that meant that the ship's computer could not run two of him, a bit like Rimmer in Red Dwarf. Also, since Holodoc's self awareness is seemingly equal to that of a person, if he duplicated himself for that particular situation with two emergencies, what would happen to the second Doc when no longer needed? - store him in a data buffer until they get home? or simply delete him? - the second option would be analogous to something like phasering Tom Riker because he was simply a 'copy'.
But it's not just the doctor. Data in general isn't copied, the original is always transferred. Or when data is stolen from them they apparently don't have any kind of back up.
And that, in computer science, is pure crap! Computers couldn't even function if they weren't capable of duplicating their data, they do it on a micro-level millions of times per second. "Transfer" for example, consists in duplicating the data and then deleting the original.
I decided to watch this last night because of this thread. It was good, though not quite as good as I remember. I agree with the poster that said the message was a little too "on the nose." I'm much more interested in finding out what happened to the EMH! Did he make it home? What kind of adventures did he have along the way?
I don't care about the racial problems of the aliens, though the script tries hard to make us care. Really tries. Too hard. They're not people, they're speeches. Then there's the soapy 'our savior the doctor' finish. But the Evil Voyager scenes make it all worthwhile for me, because you can tell the cast is having a wonderul time with it.
It's seven hundred years in Voyager's future; it's likely that by then the Earth would be a phone call away.
Maybe, though the ending seems to imply that he hadn't been in contact with Starfleet for many years.
Which is weird in light of the fact that Q said in Death Wish that humans would be present in the Delta Quadrant only about a century in the future. That would mean that by then there would have been humans roaming around the DQ for about six centuries.