The Doctor was never intended to be a sapient program, and the crew take the situation seriously and treat him as a person when they find out. B’Elanna actually treats him as a person from the start, which I thought was interesting. It’s not clear if the later EMH models are sapient, but the Bashir prototype didn’t seem to be.
Mostly, the Federation seems to be shockingly unprepared for intelligent computers given how often they encounter them, like each time they think it’s a fluke that will never happen again.
the lead water pipes of the future?
The photonic beings they encounter are right to be confused and horrified by the holodeck
The zeal with which Harry dispatches those goons shows you the kind of monster he really is.
It was his only outlet for not being promoted.
Do you want a tyrant? Cause that’s how you get a tyrant. That shit’s on Janeway.
I’m not crazy about him being excited that some of the holograms in the program were “slaves”.
Indeed, the signs of his extended duress as an ensign and what that was doing to his mental health and perception was pretty disturbing. 🫤
So is TNG’s entire plotline with Moriarty. One could argue that the Federation knew about the sentience of holograms long before the Voyager era, and actively encouraged their slavery despite their clear sentience.
In fact the final "solution" Picard & Data work out for Moriarty in TNG is pretty fucking evil if you think about it.
So, summary is that Moriarty is holding the Enterprise hostage (he’s gained the command codes) in exchange for his freedom from the holodeck. Picard trades it for control of the Enterprise, and Moriarty and his love, the Countess, depart the Enterprise on a shuttle.
Unknown to Moriarty, Data and Picard had created a program within the program, allowing Moriarty to believe he had departed the holodeck despite actually remaining within it. Picard and Data then ended the program the moment the command lockouts were removed, and left the holodeck a few minutes later. Moriarty and the Countess Regina Barthalomew would spend the rest of their lives inside a memory module, unaware of their situation, for as far as they were concerned they had left the Enterprise to live their lives in the real world.
The resolution of that story is presented as Picard, a representative of Starfleet, genuinely expressing a desire to find a more permanent and real solution for Moriarty. Unfortunately as established by Lower Decks (and indeed hinted at in the second Moriarty episode itself) Starfleet is actually really, really bad at follow-through.
To be fair, they had a team at Starfleet HQ working on granting Moriarty independence from the holodeck for four years and simply didn’t have the technology for it. They also didn’t know he was aware that whole time and thought he was basically asleep. Picard is also very reasonable and encouraging when it looks like he’s left the holodeck, and only starts on the prison box when it’s clear he’s willing to destroy the ship if they don’t get him off the holodeck.
They trapped Moriarty and the Countess inside a velvet prison, yes, but with every intention of finding a way to release them into the universe.
I like to think that in the future, they give the two a reverse engineered holo-emitter the doctor uses in Voyager. They know how it works, but they can’t yet duplicate it due to technological limitations.
So at some point in the future, some science Ensign is gonna come across the Moriarty Cube in storage and give them bodies. Hijinks will ensue as Moriarty is not happy with having been trapped so long, as he DID eventually figure it out, and has to be reminded of his “humanity” to accept things again. Then they give the happy couple their mobile emitters, and a small ship equipped with emitters everywhere, including on the hull to allow for limited travel near the ship without a mobile emitter being necessary.
Claimed they had every intention. That intention is never followed through, even after they gain the capacity to create holo-emitters. Overall, it’s kind of a horrifying fate, because canonically, without another resolution, eventually they reach the limits of the fake universe, and discover they’ve been imprisoned the entire time.
