Entertainment
Beloved Star Trek Character’s Best Episode Secretly Ripped Off An Earlier Show
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
There’s an old, somewhat controversial statement about creative works often attributed to Pablo Picasso: “good artists copy, great artists steal.” The quote often ruffles the feathers of creative types because it seemingly glorifies the act of stealing from someone else’s ideas. However, the greatest sci-fi franchise ever created has been engaging in this practice for over 60 years.
The first Star Trek show was originally conceived of as “Wagon Train to the stars,” which meant it would take the style and sensibility of Western TV shows and adapt them to a sci-fi setting. Subsequent spinoffs adopted this same mentality and, inevitably enough, some of Trek’s best episodes ended up cannibalizing the best episodes of previous shows. For example, the writer of the fan-favorite Voyager episode “Projections” admitted that he created this seemingly original tale by mashing together two different episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
If You Glitch Him, Does He Not Bleed?
“Projections” is a Voyager episode with a very fascinating concept: after an attack on the ship, the holographic Doctor discovers that he is flesh and blood. As the episode unfolds, he starts to believe that he is actually a human being and that the rest of the crew are actually holograms. Thanks to a surprise appearance from minor TNG character Barclay, the Doctor is convinced he must destroy the ship in order to end the holographic program he is stuck inside. However, he realizes far too late that he is actually stuck on the holodeck, and listening to Barclay’s destructive orders will actually delete his own program.
This Voyager episode was written by Brannon Braga, the rockstar writer who helped transform The Next Generation into must-see TV. He was so well-versed in that earlier Star Trek show that he wasn’t afraid to borrow heavily from it when he was writing Voyager episodes. In an old interview with Star Trek Monthly, he admitted that the plot of “Projections” is a mashup of the plots from two very different THG episodes: “The Measure of a Man” and “Frame of Mind.”
Mixing And Matching Star Trek Stories
“The Measure of a Man” is, of course, the iconic TNG episode in which Lieutenant Commander Data had to prove in court that he was a sentient being rather than Starfleet property. Meanwhile, “Frame of Mind” (which Braga also wrote) has Riker trapped in an asylum after the completion of a recent covert mission. He has trouble telling what’s real and what is not, eventually discovering that he was captured by enemies during the mission, and all of the mind games he was experiencing were a side effect of these aliens probing his mind for Federation secrets.
How does combining the plots from these two TNG episodes add up to Voyager’s “Projections?” Like Data in “The Measure of a Man,” the Doctor must prove that he is exactly who and what he thinks he is. But there’s an interesting inversion here: the artificial Data had to prove he had the same rights as humans like Riker and Picard, whereas the Doctor had to prove that he was completely artificial and not a flesh-and-blood human being.
The Ultimate Story Synthesis
The parallels between “Projections” and “Frame of Mind” are even easier to see: in each episode, the primary character had to decide which version of reality was authentic. The Doctor had to figure out whether he was actually an Emergency Medical Hologram or Lewis Zimmerman, the human scientist who created the EMH in his image. Riker, meanwhile, had to figure out if he was actually the first officer of the Federation flagship Enterprise or a crazy man trapped within an alien asylum.
Brannon Braga was the first to admit that “Projections” wasn’t the most original story because it mashed up the stories from two earlier Next Generation episodes. Nonetheless, he managed to synthesize two older stories into something that felt both fresh and innovative. The result was an episode that has thrilled fans for decades due to its cool concept, vaulting ambition, and pitch-perfect acting.