Star Trek: Voyager Real Life (1995–2001) watch online HD

I was surprised people were so hostile about the Doctor and his family. Yes it was a convention but I really thought Picardo's performance was excellent. I thought it Emmy worthy. I bawled. I also realize that the average reviewer here is Comic Book Guy far from having a family. Or anything that might lead to being in the family way. I'm a father and the script worked for me.

I didn't care that the eddy story was a non starter. Again Picardo's performance deserved some special recognition here. He chews the scenery with the best of them in the Darkling, but this was restrained and very moving. I'm also an actor and always enjoy when an actor pulls back on the reins rather than capital A act. Star Trek has plenty of that. The doctor role could easily fall into Data land or some other cliché but Picardo never does.

This episode features two stories, the first centres on the Doctor who has created a family on the holosuite so he can learn about family life; the problem is he has designed a perfect family with a doting wife and children who excel at school and never misbehave which won't teach him anything. After witnessing his family at a dinner B'Elanna offers to make a few changes to the program to make it more realistic. These changes come as a shock to the Doctor who doesn't know how to deal with a son who is hanging out with Klingons, a daughter who wants to play a sport he considers dangerous and a wife who has a life outside their house. As he attempts to deal with this family he learns that not all problems can be easily solved and some can't be solved at all. The secondary story line concerns the discovery of a strange anomaly in which Paris gets trapped while attempting to harvest particles which could be used for fuel.

I quite liked this episode, the poignant ending of the Doctor's story is one of the more memorable Voyager stories; it was fun to see how his saccharine sweet family turns dysfunctional and after a tragic accident it is genuinely sad. The secondary story was fairly forgettable though and felt as if it was there just to fill time.

Though a way for the Doctor to understand about loss and real families, this still has some flaws - why is it B'Elanna's or ANYBODY'S business how he should live his holographic life? And sad to relate, the Doctor being on the verge of leaving his family when he can't cope with tragedy is EXACTLY what some actual human beings would do, despite what Paris might think.

But the most telling aspect is that his family is never again mentioned in any episode. Ever. And it's not like this series hasn't brought up other family members for characters before and since, either; his family is, after all, just a holographic simulation which he can (and presumably does) switch off... which ultimately makes the episode, though good, pointless if it has nothing to affect future stories.

The summary comes from the scene in "Soul Man" when C. Thomas Howell points out to James Earl Jones that he doesn't really know what it's like to be black - Jones has no choice, but Howell (being white) can get out. Just like the Doctor, who as he himself once said has a programme instead of a life, also gets out...

Is this good science fiction or just manipulative drama? Watching the evolution of the Doctor's "family" was quite engaging. At first it's a sappy, squeaky clean set of automatons. When Torres finishes with them she has turned the wife into an overworked, uncooperative shrew, the daughter a whiny little snot, and the son heading for danger with his teenaged Klingon friends. Meanwhile, there is some other plot that we just cast aside. Everything comes to a head when the little girl is injured and blinded with no hope of recovery. This is a gut wrenching scene that is at the very least tearful.

Love Voyager and this is one of my favorite episodes. Watching Tom get trapped and find his way out was decent but watching the DR explore real life is heart breaking. Hard episode to watch but one of the more meaningful episode. This one gets me every time, not sure why they never followed up with the story line it would have been great to watch that family grow and develop.

An astral eddy.

That's the ship-threatening red-herring this week that allows us to continue the overuse and erosion of the Doctor character. Here he's created a holo-family and must deal with the difficulty of being a husband and father. How wacky!

How again is he still a hologram? What's the point of even pretending he's any different from the humans? After sitting through stiflingly-banal domestic scenes based on 1950's sitcoms, B'Elanna reprograms the holodeck and the episode becomes a dramatic family show, in which Picardo plays a loving but overwhelmed Father, doing his best to balance his work, family and marriage... exactly what Gene Roddenbury envisioned when he conceived Star Trek!

But don't think you're going to escape without your weekly nightmare moment: What seems at first to be lighthearted fun goes Voyager when the Doctor's holo-daughter gets in an accident, goes blind, and eventually dies. (Hooray!)

Picardo is touching in his final scene, and it's good to see him emote instead of spewing medi-babble in Sick Bay, but otherwise this is disposable filler, and a wasted effort.

GRADE: C-

I've really appreciated seeing Robert Picardo's Doctor grow as the series goes on.

He starts as a sarcastic and unempathetic hologram, unable to understand common human actions. As time goes on he begins to learn how to comfort his patients, learning human emotions and reasoning. Finally in this episode he learns what it all means to be human, to be a part of family.

When this episode began I thought it was a bit corny but stayed with it. Eventually, the storyline hit on some real life family concerns and did a pretty good job of it for the available time of one episode. I especially liked the versatility of Lindsey Haun in her role.

"Real Life" is an episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" you can live without seeing. It does nothing to really further the overall story and seems like the writers were stretching the Doctor's character a bit too far. In this case, the Pinocchio-like Doctor has decided that to be more human, he has to have his own family. Most of the show concerns this make believe family. At first, they are like a "Donna Reed Show" family but after B'Elanna makes some changes to the program, they are a family in constant crisis and turmoil--too much. How the Doc deals with all this is a bit painful to watch towards the end...and it's a bit painful to watch because it's rather stupid as well.

Overall, this is not a terrible episode but it is forgettable and amazingly contrived.