Why did Captain Janeway feel that using the Doctor as an expendable messenger boy was more important than keeping him around to heal the crew?

Question

I should start out by explaining that, until recently, I had only ever watched one episode of Star Trek: Voyager in my entire life. That was a recording of the pilot episode ("Caretaker"), some years ago.

Recently, I had a chance to pick up a secondhand copy of Season 4 on DVD at a low price, and I shrugged and went for it. Then I started watching those episodes in my spare time. (Note: I did watch one other episode first. When I saw that S04E01 was Part 2 of "Scorpion," I went to Amazon and paid to stream Part 1 of "Scorpion" first, so that I'd have a clue about what was happening in the second half of that storyline.)

Since then, I've gradually been working my way through Season 4. Things were going fairly well until I watched "Message in a Bottle" (S04E14) and was extremely confused by some of the assumptions that were used to set up the episode's plot in the first several minutes.

Here are five assumptions which caught me off guard as I tried to appreciate the plot, but I'm not asking anyone to justify the first four. Let's just accept them and move on from there, okay?

1. Until the time of "Message in a Bottle," either it has been utterly impossible for anyone on Voyager to create a full backup of the Doctor's personality software and store it for a rainy day . . . or else they simply never thought to take the trouble?

2. It is impossible to change this sad situation in the scant minutes left in their window of opportunity to successfully transmit a signal to the Starfleet vessel at the other end of an alien communications network which Seven of Nine has just discovered. (Because that other vessel is nearly out of range of the alien relay station nearest them, and once they are out of range, that will abruptly terminate the possible communications link. I could swallow this part about the impending deadline, actually!)

3. It is impossible to send a successful signal through the network if it is simpler and less complicated than the format of the Doctor's holographic programming. (I would have thought a simple e-mail could be broadcast just as "strongly," and could be repeated hundreds of times to improve the chances of at least one coherent copy making it all the way through the interference, but what do I know about futuristic telecommunications equipment?)

4. It is impossible to retain a copy of the Doctor's personality right there on Voyager at the same time that they are transmitting it through the alien network. (Although they do, as we learn later this episode, manage to keep copies of all the medical databases which the Doctor has access to.)

5. Captain Janeway already knows all of the above, and must be factoring those items into her command decisions, at the moment that she asks the Doctor to volunteer for this special "away mission." She freely concedes that using unfamiliar alien technology to send him thousands of light-years (and hoping that he'll be lucky enough to survive the return trip, as well) is a situation in which "a lot of things could go wrong" -- for instance, his program could be lost in transit. So she's not making it a flat order. But she wants him to do it anyway, and he says: "Far be it from me to turn down an opportunity to become a hero. I'm ready."

With an effort, I can tell myself, "Okay, Assumptions One through Four must be taken at face value, as simple facts which Janeway is painfully aware she can't change in the very limited time available. They don't make much sense, but roll with it and move on! Granting that this is the situation, she has to do something on that basis, right?"

But on Assumption Five, I just felt flabbergasted all the way through the rest of the episode! Why would Janeway be in such a hurry to kick the Doctor out the door? Afterwards, I reminded myself that people who were watching each episode as it came out, all through the show's seven-year run, might have had a different perspective from mine (as the guy who "came in late").

So here is an expanded version of the question I summarized in this post's title.

---

The Question: Are there crucial factors I don't know about -- something established in one or more scenes during the first three seasons, for instance -- which would cause Captain Janeway's decision to risk sending the Doctor away to the Alpha Quadrant, to deliver a message to Starfleet even if he never makes it back to her ship, to actually make sense as a responsible command decision under the circumstances? (Despite the obviously increased risk of members of her crew later dying from illnesses or injuries which the Doctor probably could have fixed in the nick of time, but which someone else (such as Tom Paris) might not be able to?)

---

Because right now, viewing it from my perspective as a guy who's only seen S01E01, S03E26, and the first half of S04, before reaching "Message in a Bottle" -- it seems as if Janeway is basically saying, "Hey, I am perfectly willing to throw away our one and only fully-qualified Medical Officer if it means there is at least a fighting chance that he will be able to give Starfleet the simple message that we are still alive and well, albeit sixty thousand light-years away from home and afraid it will take us several decades to get back where we belong!"

I cannot wrap my head around the "logic" of saying that just sending that message, even if the price turns out to be losing the Doctor's services aboard Voyager, is a cost-effective maneuver.

I mean, I try to imagine James T. Kirk making the decision to send Bones McCoy away on a probable one-way mission under similar circumstances . . . and I just can't see it happening. (Even if Bones were an Artificial Intelligence instead of a flesh-and-blood human being, I still don't think Kirk would even seriously consider squandering him on "messenger boy" duty.)

Not if just telling Starfleet HQ where Kirk's ship had gotten to were the only important message to be carried on that trip! But there could be other vital data involved, which upped the stakes and justified an extreme effort.

So that's why I'm wondering, in all sincerity . . . was there something else, not explicitly mentioned in the script of this episode, but established at some other time in the series' long run (before or even after this episode), which plausibly could have been weighing heavily on Captain Janeway's mind at this moment? Something which she felt absolutely must be communicated to Starfleet at the earliest possible opportunity, even at the risk of losing her Medical Officer? (And then expecting Tom Paris to frantically try to take up the slack in that department for decades to come, which even Paris himself felt was not going to be a workable idea in the long run?)

Answer 1

Janeway’s primary mission is to get the crew home. If I remember correctly (which I may well not), at that point, she believes (correctly) that Starfleet considers Voyager destroyed in the Badlands, and thus isn’t searching for them, or working on ways to bring them home.

If she can inform Starfleet that they’re actually alive and stranded in the Delta Quadrant, then she no longer just has her ship and crew working to get Voyager home, but potentially the best minds in the whole of Starfleet too.

Sure, losing the Doctor would increase the risk of some or all of Voyager’s crew dying due to a medical skills deficit on board. But there are plenty of other unrelated death risks scattered around their long route home, which they might avoid once Starfleet is on the case — for example, the Borg (as you may remember from Scorpion), who aren’t going to be noticeably slowed in assimilating the entire crew by an emergency medical hologram (see Star Trek: First Contact).

And, in general, the risk of dying for the sake of the mission is something that all Starfleet officers sign up to when they join.

It’s certainly a gamble, and a bold one. But it’s exactly the sort of gamble that a captain needs to be able to take. This is why Picard never joined the Enterprise senior staff’s weekly poker game; he, like Janeway, would crush them without blinking.

Answer 2

While Paul D. Waite's answer is pretty accurate, there is one piece of information missing which I think makes the OP's question a moot point.

There is, in fact, a backup module for the doctor. I remembered it from the episode "Living Witness" where the Doctor's backup module was found. It was then used by the museum curator to re-animate the doctor, who, from his perspective, was just aboard Voyager (but that was actually a few hundred years earlier). So it must consistently back up his program.

So the crew's welfare was not an issue in this command decision.

Note: The Doc's program was self-repairing, I think that's why they sent him rather than an e-mail.
Also, it does come out in another episode that Cpt. Janeway does feel extremely guilty about stranding the crew in the Delta Quadrant, and she even starts to regret the decision she made which stranded them there.

Answer 3

1. After several years of isolation from their own civilization, Janeway and the rest of the crew is getting desperate to re-connect. This desperation, combined with a short time to make a decision, would make it difficult to perform an impartial risk-reward analysis.
2. Janeway was a Chief Science Officer previous to becoming captain. This makes her particularly eager to be hands-on and to pursue scientific or technical solutions to problems. (Contrast with, for example, Picard who focuses on management + diplomatic solutions, but mostly leaves technical details to his subordinates.)
3. Until this point in the series, the Voyager crew had successfully overcome every scientific/technical obstacle which threatened their safety. Thus Janeway would be trained to have high confidence that, as usual, their clever plan will succeed.
4. Crewman Tom Paris has, at this point, spent several years training as a medical assistant to the doctor. While his medical skills would always be inferior to the Doctor, he would be fully capable of replacing the doctor for routine issues. Thus the doctor's loss would not be catastropic.

Answer 4

The logical reason for sending the doctor rather than an "email" is believability. There was too much of a chance that Starfleet would regard any such messages as unconfirmed, possibly bogus or a trick. There would be no way of providing any follow up proof or answers to any questions. The doctor would be solid proof and able to provide a wide range of details about Voyager no one else would be able to do as disinformation or a trap. There was no time to create another hologram that had the rich and varied information, including even incidental personal information not available by a hacker. In short, the Doctor was the only way to prove to Starfleet that in fact Voyager had survived.

Answer 5

Character development

OK the doctor is a computer programme, and as such it should be possible - even trivial - to make copies of him - assuming available computer capacity, but the show treats him as a singular object who must be moved from place to place. As strange as it seems to us computer experts from the 2020s (which most of us are, compared to your average 1990s author) this we must accept.

So the remaining question is - why would Janeway risk the (arguably) most indispensible member of the crew? You can attempt to justify it as the other answers have, but it's hard to get around the fact that it's poor decision making - the Doctor has used his advanced knowledge to save lives and cure diseases on quite a large number of occasions.

However!

By not watching the first three series, you're missing out on an important nuance. That is the development of the character of the Doctor himself and the attitudes of the crew (especially Janeway) towards him. He continually strives to become regarded as a person: i.e. a proper, indepdendent crew member, rather than an automatic humanoid repair machine, and gradually over the episodes begins to achieve this. (This was given a boost by his acquisition of the "Mobile Emitter" which means he was no longer confined to holodecks).

As the crew's attitudes towards him change over time, it becomes more and more believable that he'd be sent on an away mission, and IIRC, he even indicates a desire to be sent on them. So when it gets to this episode, he - being a hologramme - is the perfect candidate for this mission.

Now I'm not saying that Janeway was right in risking such a huge asset - but the episode is kind of an acknowledgement by her (and the writers, and the Doctor himself) of his growth as a person. e.g. It's unlikely she would have sent, say, the replicator programme, or the warp-core containment subroutine.

You compare it to Kirk sending McCoy on a one-man risky away mission. However, McCoy's character trajectory was not one starting as an automaton / piece of equipment and ending up as a fully-fledged person. If it was, then I would consider it a lot more likely that Bones would have been sent on such a mission for an opportunity to "prove himself" at some point.