I think the Doctor was programmed to allow those who would trigger its emergency program, to extend the memory of its database to take into account the new requirements emerged during the varied missions, like new medical techniques, a better knowledge of virus, improve the capacity and effectiveness of its interventions, etc... . But our Doctor, forgetting what "he" was (and will always be, not matter its efforts granted and those coming from the crew!) and why "he" has been created in the first place, seeked to become more than a holoprogram in searching to adopt the same specificities (emotions, curiosity, hobbies, etc) of human beings for whom "he" has yet so little respect, not only in downloading the datas but in adding his comments, improvements (but we saw that in some occasions, its program could be modified by a third party to make the Doctor, a new version of DrJekyll and Mister Hyde. In fact, it became clear that there would never enough security keys brought to its program, because as human being and aliens, the Doctor wasn't infallible and immortal!), overloaded the capacity of its memory once, in downloading anything and everything so that the progam was on the verge to fail and even disappear (= the episode between s1 and 3, where Kes asked to a holoprogram of Dr Lewis Zimmerman to help her friend, which the program threated to disppear, and the good Dr Zimmerman choked then blamed the hologram after to have found out the cause of the problem and the futile nature of the programmed downloaded).
I know that the Doctor was and still is one of the main Voyager's favorites but I still cannot bring myself to being involved - in or even like - this character, sorry! In fact, from s4, his antics eventually but profundly bored me, sorry!
Ghislaine, I agree with you quite a bit about the Doctor, though I wouldn’t say I don’t like him. Picardo’s characterization could be quite amusing, and the EMH idea was a creative, useful device. However, I didn’t have a lot of patience for the “holograms are people too” episodes, especially when in the later seasons he himself disobeyed orders or betrayed his shipmates and yet barely received a slap on the wrist. It was inexplicable that he was never “fixed” so that he could not do that in the future, or to prevent his ethical subroutines from being altered or removed. In my view, since a computer program is a creation of humans, and dependent on human technology for its existence, then humans have the right and duty to adjust it so that it meets their needs. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” ;-) Of course, I’ve always found there to be a certain conceit and vanity in humans creating humanistic AI. I also didn’t care for it that they turned the doctor into a virtual superhero, while never fully developing my own favorite human characters. TOS made it abundantly clear that creating AI that can become more powerful than its creators never leads anywhere good—Frankenstein’s Monster by another medium.
