Chakotay/Seven - the pairing that came out of nowhere.

I can't be the only person who thought about this. I mean, when Seven AND Chakotay got together in season seven, it seemed to come completely out of the blue. In most cases, when the writers are intending to pair people up as a couple, they at least make it believable and put some subtext there for a season or so (like for example, Worf and Jadzia, Odo and Kira, Tom and B'Elanna...etc), but in their case they didn't do this. I always thought that if Seven was to become involved with anyone in the crew, it would have been the Holographic Doctor, and Chakotay could have been paired with Janeway. I felt that the Chakotay/Seven pairing looked almost as if the producers didn't really know what to do with the characters and made this random decision that made no sense. I thought they let themselves down because Voyager deserved better. Anyone else thought that?

 

Everyone agrees, it was utterly dreadful. I'm pretty sure they broke up 30 pages into the first post-"Endgame" novel

 

Let's Google "man in relationship with a siri".

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gl...is-iphone-so-much-he-literally-married-it/amp

Loads of results.

The Doctor is AI on a hard drive that is projected as a hologram. The Doctors program can be copied, improved and partitioned. If Seven wanted a sexual relationship with an obnoxious old bald man, she can do it in secret on a hard drive inside herself, because the real Doctor is an embarrassing blabbermouth.

 

It made zero sense. I don't know what the writers were thinking.

 

I thought it was plausible but not dramatically justified.

The defense of it is, Seven was not ready to think about attraction for three years. Who knows, when she suddenly starts noticing men, what her type will be?

Anyway hopefully Picard show breaks them up.

 

I thought it makes sense, Chakotay being a strong but also caring man, and Seven being a strong but also unsure-of-her-humanity woman. Why wouldn't they find each other attractive? Body-wise, it's basically the most masculine guy and the most feminine girl. Mind-wise, it's both of their strength, care, and admiration. Seven being bluntly logical and efficiency-oriented wouldn't want a sexual relationship with a non-biological, and therefore incompatible mate, I guess. Didn't she choose some random guy for her first date cause he's efficient at work? After Harry got scared, she finally went for the warrior on the ship. And since Janeway was out of reach for Chakotay, and B'Elanna had Tom, Seven made sense. He was also the one liberating her from the collective and reminding her that she's Annika at the end of Scorpion.

 

He's also the one who tried to liberate her from life a few days after they met.

One persisting theory is that that's not Chakotay who Seven is canoodling with in Endgame, but that she spaced the real XO, and replaced him with her lover from Human Error.

 

I know right?

 

The problem may not actually be the pairing itself, just the way it came about onscreen, completely out of the blue. Their relationship went from strictly professional to romantic in the blink of an eye. I know what you're saying about her maybe considering the holographic doctor to be incompatible, but they had more chemistry than she and Chakotay. Check out when they sing together, and it's more than obvious that the doctor had feelings for her (he's no ordinary hologram, and he appears sentient like Vic Fontaine hologram in DS9 and Moriarty in TNG). It's also been shown that holograms can have such relations, hence the kind of wares Quark is peddling in his holosuites. I guess it's down to personal feelings but I really thought they'd have been good together, at least that's what I think when I have my shipping head on

 

The Doctor could not legally prove his sentience, so he isn't sentient.

He might have been able to scientifically prove his sentience with a Turing test, but no one bothered.

The Doctor is a sympathetic character because he is an underdog. We feel sorry that he is in love and "all the women" will not reciprocate, so we wish that his love life will improve, even if it means that a woman who has her own life, and no interest in the Doctor as a husband or lover, has to be sacrificed to his urges.

 

He certainly appeared to be sentient to me, at least as much so as Data, whose sentience was more or less proven by Picard in the TNG Episode 'The measure of a man'. Legally speaking, you're quite correct, the sentience of holograms had not been proven. But my guess is that at some point, the legal status of sentient holograms would be dealt with in much the same way as the legal status of sentient androids was. You can't say he wasn't sentient because such was not written down in law, it's a case of the law keeping up with new technology, which at this point in the future includes sentient technology.

 

In the pilot he was not sentient.

Factory settings.

Has the Doctor's seemingness of sentience, in your opinion improved or enbiggened by Endgame compared since Caretaker?

If he is sentient in the end, and not sentient in the beginning, then the "change" is imperceptible to us, using the tools on hand, so it's unlikely that we can be sure that he is sentient in the end, even if he is.

 

When Data was activated he too was on 'Factory settings', but it did not change that he was sentient. He learned as he went along, just as the Holographic Doctor did. What do you feel makes Data sentient, but not the Holographic Doctor? Both are intelligent, both are self-aware, both are artificial life forms.

 

Data was designed to be sentient by a crazy person trying to prove a principle, and his genius.

The Doctor was designed to be a slave by lazy people who want a free workforce who does not complain or revolt. What sort of asshole designs a sentient slave? "Hi, I want you to underpin our empire with endless thankless menial labour, and it would be amazing if you could feel the frustration, pain and drudgery of it all, becuase I am a cruel bastard, who wants you to go on strike and kill all humans."

Remember the exocomps?

A failed slave race, that was discontinued because it was proved that they were sentient, and the Federation didn't want to hurt their robot feelings by making them pick up dogshit and serve food to fat humans, when they had the capacity to say "No I don't want to, frick off".

Exocomp.

 

Oh yes, I remember the exocomps episode. They weren't designed to be sentient, but later on it was proven that they were. Any AI sufficiently intelligent would eventually achieve sentience. So while the holographic doctor may not have been designed to be sentient, it doesn't dismiss that possibility. I know that holographic rights is something that Dr Zimmerman probably didn't have in mind when creating the doctor (which sets him apart from Dr Soong when he created Data), but I can forsee it becoming an issue in series set further into the future. The doctor expresses several emotions and he clearly understands his feelings. By series seven, he is viewed as a member of the crew, not as a walking tricorder.

 

Siri can have a conversation with you "fairly" well.

Do you think Siri is alive and sentient?

There are (at least) two points in Season seven where the Doctor would have had his program and personality hacked up for being a prick. Flesh and Blood where he sided with terrorists, who were firing on Voyager becuase he believed that he was morally superior, and Renaissance Man when he negotiated with terrorists and gave them Voyager becuase Janeway was being held hostage.

After the curtain went down on that episode, Janeway should have killed his children twice.

 

I'm right there with ya. I can't understand why either. Like the number of licks to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie roll pop, the world may never know.

(I think Seven's first pairing should've been the Doctor as well. A short lived 1 episode disaster, but still the first. The one person she could make 'perfect', or so she thought...)

 

The Doctor and Seven makes no sense, for the following reasons:

-We know the doctor is infatuated with Seven. This is consistently shown
What is also consistently shown is that Seven does not share those feelings. She considers him a friend, and has no romantic interest in him/doesn't see him that way

-He's also her doctor, personal mechanic, and part time psychotherapist. Let's leave "doctor dating his own patients" to Bashir

-Lastly, Seven has lost 20 years of her life. If she gets into a relationship at all, she deserves it to be with a person, and not a simulation of a person

Janeway and Chakotay doesn't work for the following reasons:

-Janeway has consistently shown that she is not willing to date someone in her chain of command, just like Picard, Kirk, etc.

-workplace relationships often have negative consequences, even worse when it's in a military direct chain of command with no ability for anyone to transfer. She's making a sacrifice for the good of the ship, but it's hers to make.

Reasons Seven and Chakotay makes perfect sense.

-Chakotay is a romantic, lonely, and I cannot see him ever turning her down. Plus, she's a civilian, so he doesn't have to worry necessarily about dating a subordinate.

-In "Human Error," Seven(who has been looking to try a relationship since season 5) chooses Chakotay as the most compatible partner for her on the ship. She creates a holoChakotay to be as close to the real thing as possible, so she can experiment with dating him before trying the real thing. She ends up falling in love with him. From then it was inevitable that she would eventually work up the courage to approach him. By the time of Endgame, some time has passed, and Seven and Chakotay are just in the very earliest stages of a potential relationship. They've been on one or two official dates, that seemingly went well.

Compare this to Worf and Deanna, who out of nowhere suddenly sleep together and begin dating. I'm also fine with not having 3 seasons of "will they, won't they" That stuff isn't necessary except for in soap operas and sitcoms.

 

If they don't recognize his sentience, it's probably because they believe that his "self awareness" is a trick of programming. Suggesting that holo-programs have some sort of sub-program that mimics self awareness.

Either way, it's bad news for holograms that believe they're sentient, because the Federation think it's all an illusion of programming.

I don't know if this is a good time to bring up Harry again, but after seeing Chakotay and Seven together, after all he went through, it must have been really frustrating.

 

But the same argument could be made that any AI appears sentient because of it's programming, whether it is or not. My point is that Federation law seems to say that sentience can apply to some kinds of artificial life (androids like Data, and Exocomps), but not to holographic life forms, like the doctor. Both are programmed, so again... what makes Data sentient and the doctor not? Just because he needs holo-emitters to exist and does not have a solid body? Like I said, Moriarty is another example of a sentient hologram.