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Summary
Star Trek: Voyager’s Robert Picardo explains the origin of how his character, The Doctor, fell in love with Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). Picardo played The Doctor, Voyager’s sentient Emergency Medical Hologram, in all seven seasons. Jeri Ryan joined Voyager at the end of season 3 and Seven of Nine became arguably the show’s most popular character. Voyager teased a romance between Seven and The Doctor, although Seven and Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) briefly became an item at the end of the series, to the dismay of fans.
Appearing on The Shuttlepod Show recorded prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Robert Picardo spoke in depth to hosts Connor Trinneer, Dominic Keating, Erica LaRose, and producer Mark Cartier about how The Doctor’s romance with Seven of Nine came about on Star Trek: Voyager following Kes (Jennifer Lien) leaving the series. Read his quote below and watch the video from The Shuttlepod Show. The time stamp begins at 1:04:28:
The relationship I had with Seven came out of a suggestion I made to Brannon [Braga, executive producer]… When Kes was leaving our show, Kes had been the Doctor’s confidant. Kes was the one character that he felt, because she was the youngest, she treated me like a person. At the same time, I’m ostensibly mentoring her to be my assistant in Sickbay. She is really mentoring me in my developing sense of self, and what I’m entitled to and all that as an artificial intelligence.
So when she leaves, I said to Brannon, “I’m really concerned that I’m just gonna go back to being the arrogant windbag again for the rest of the crew, which is fun, but we’ve already seen he has a different side. And now who do I show that to? I don’t have a confessor anymore. And he said, “Well, we have this new character coming. Seven of Nine. Think of a unique way to relate to her…” I went back to Brannon a week later and I said, “Wouldn’t it be fun if I take the relationship with Kes, flip it around, and the Doctor now thinks that he’s a better teacher of how to be human than a human?”
She’s been a Borg, she has to reclaim her humanity, [and] I have to teach her how to behave appropriately in various professional and social situations. And I’ll do it with role play… and I’ll teach her how to behave. Because as a Borg, she has zero social skills and zero affect. Not unlike the way I had been at the beginning of season 1, but now I had developed. So it had loads of comic potential… but that culminated in that episode where I fall in love with my star pupil.
Source: The Shuttlepod Show
