Last edited: Sunday at 11:01 PM

Back in the mid-90s (don't remember when, exactly, but it must have been early in Voyager's run because he made jokes about them trying to come up with names for the Doctor) I went to a convention where Robert Picardo was the guest speaker. During the Q&A session, someone asked him if they'd ever thought of re-initializing the EMH program to get another Doctor. He said they had, and he mentioned a scenario where someone was either ill or injured and needed an operation too complicated for Kes to assist the Doctor. They would basically have to shut everything else down on the ship to make this work (which leaves all sorts of possibilities for complications). The second Doctor would be the officious twit from the pilot (he'd look at Kes and ask, "Who is this chippie in my operating room?"), and, since they would look identical, the only way to tell them apart would be by their behavior. Picardo said they were waiting to do the episode until the Doctor had some more character development under his belt.

Obviously, we never got this episode, as it eventually mutated into the season 5 episode "Nothing Human." This is one lost episode that I

wish they had filmed. It would have been a tour de force show for Picardo, and, seeing how well he handled "Life Line" in season 6, I think he could have knocked it out of the park.