The simplistic family the Doctor creates is reflective of his age. He's a three year old playing house.

To be fair, the Klingons here aren't "real" Klingons, but the fault of either the algorithms used to generate them... Or maybe Belonna's personal issues specifically

When you think about how completely immersive the holodeck is, and how completely it simulates people, it's just a PTSD factory.

Mostly this just leaves me wondering why, when Voyager's crew had been away from home for years and still believed it to be decades before they'd be home again, there wasn't an epidemic of crew members using the holodeck to simulate being back at home with their families.

I think there is a plausible in universe reason for how the episode portrays Klingons. We know that B'elanna is very prejudiced towards other/full Klingons, and she shows it off throughout the series. I believe that she thinks Klingon teens act that way and programmed them that way on purpose.

Personally, I enjoy Voyager and DS9 more than the other shows.

"Except 👏👏 that's not 👏👏 how racism works!" 🕺😼 Preach, Brother Shives! 😂

I was once frequently criticized for having enough empathy to react emotionally to the loss of fictional characters. I finally decided I liked the fictional characters better than this "real" person and that was one of the reasons I ended that long term relationship. Thanks for the validation!

I would be-careful Steve, you might be a random hologram, a fully conscious being from "Fair Haven" Holodeck program someone forgot to shutdown after Voyager made it home and has been running for quite some time... and if word gets out that it has been running and evolving and if Janeway finds out you know she has no issues Killing you, or re-writing your programming to her liking :-D

I still cry every time I watch Daniel Jackson die.

This episode was heart-wrenching to me! But in typical Voyager fashion, we never see the family again, and by the next episode it's like it never happened. Would have loved to have seen the Doctor (who is my favorite Voyager character outside of Tuvok) deal with his sense of grief.

"Okay I'll go back and watch my daughter die, Jesus." I laughed a great deal at this line and your delivery of it.

That episode is actually one of my favorite Voyager episodes. The Doctor is kind of a complicated character. He is problematic. He does need to grow and work on himself (including that racism), but he’s also a great example of what we should all strive for. Growth and understanding. This episode signaled growth for the Doctor and it translated to how he saw his crew mates. His daughter is dying and he calls Tom reckless. The Voyager crew are his family and he wants to protect them, but he can’t always save them. He doesn’t ever visit his holographic family again because he learns more about families from his life on Voyager. It’s a moment when you see him make that shift. Draw closer to the crew. Face the pain of losing them, the challenge of living with them, and the joy of spending time with them. That fictional family helped him understand things about his real life on the ship and you see him reach out to Seven and others as a result... kind of like how fiction helps us understand our real lives and how to deal with our real relationships. Before Kes, he didn’t have those kinds of connections, but after that episode and Kes’s departure he’s connecting to the crew like never before. Even if the crew often humor him (roll their eyes at his behavior). You don’t see it as much before, because he wasn’t yet seeing the crew as his family, his friends. At least, that’s my take on the episode. I watched this show at 12... what do you want from me? 😅

I always thought the "Klingon delinquents" thing might have been Belanna's influence, since she's experienced some issues as a result of her mixed heritage, and she might well have drawn on that for the program.

Personally, I was touched by the doctor's choice to face the struggle of his daughter's dying, which is compounded by the fact that he himself is a doctor who prides himself on it so much and still could not save her... That increased the impact for me.

And to think all I previously took from this episode was, jeez Belonna is freaking merciless

The doctor felt the same way I felt when I saw the DS9 episode where Sisko is lost and his son is trying to find him as he reappears through time.

This episode completely writes me off for anywhere up to an hour. As a kid watching Voyager it was one of the boring episodes where they don't even fire any phasers, but as a grown man and father with a kid who shares a name with Bell, this episode nearly kills me. I can't watch it anymore.

The Doctor is my favorite character in the show. I love how he's kinda like a reverse-Pinocchio. Opposed to Data who starts of as blank slate of a machine and wishes to be more human, The Doctor already acts and behaves like a human (a terrible one but still human) but he initially limits himself at first to what his program was designed to do. He's like Pinocchio after turning into a real boy and asking himself, what's next.

I was lukewarm about Voyager when it first aired, but over the years I've found myself rewatching it the most. It keeps getting better and better with time, because there was a lot to enjoy there beyond the frustration of what Voyager 'could have been.' Once I accepted Voyager for what it was, not what I wanted it to be when it was airing, I could see what they were trying to do within the limitations the network and production gave them. More often than not, it's worth repeated viewings.