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I'm watching "Eye of the Needle" right now (Spike TV has completed one run-through and gone right back to season one); the Doctor says that his program is integrated fully into the sickbay systems and that he cannot be downloaded when he is informed that the crew might be able to transport to the Romulan science ship through the wormhole. Obviously, this changed in later episodes of Voyager, as the Doctor commonly moved between sickbay and the holodecks, to and from the mobile emitter, and was even transmitted to ships many light years away.

Trek Continuity Problem # 97899787001652566489286674002864792! What else is new

It could be the same thing that makes it impossible to duplicate the Doctor. It may have been modified later on to allow him to be transfered.

They why couldn't they make those modifications then? Why didn't they make modifications to transfer him to the Holodeck in "Heros and Demons"? why didn't Starling have any trouble transfering him of Voyager in "Future's End"? Typical Voyager stupidity.

Let's not forget that Starling's technology was several hundred years more advanced than Voyager's....

And it may not have been a quick and easy 'trick of the week' type modification.

And? If the Doctor's program is dependant specifically on the sickbay computer, then how is any technology, no matter how advanced, going to overcome that? Not to mention the other non-future examples.

Technically, all they need for continuity sometimes is a single throwaway line of dialog... and the Trek writers never do it.

Captain Seafort wrote:And? If the Doctor's program is dependant specifically on the sickbay computer, then how is any technology, no matter how advanced, going to overcome that? Not to mention the other non-future examples.

Well, it may be like hooking up a brand new game console to an old tv that lacks even the oldest of still used connections. I know from personal experience as I had to buy an adaptor for it. It may be that simple. It just wasn't ready in that one instance. It was probably added after that episode, just in case a similar opportunity presented itself.

From originally stating that the Doctor couldn't run on any other computer, the Voyager writers went so far as to demonstrate that the Doctor could be stolen by an alien with no detailed knowledge of Starfleet engineering and run on a completely alien hospital ship! This goes beyond plugging an adapter into the sickbay systems!

Actually, aside from hardware issues, the software shouldn't even be able to be ported. Here we are, all humans from the same tech, and I can't run Leopard on a PC...

... and yet the alien hospital ship can just plug in the Doctor into an OS he wasn't designed for with no problem. This takes standardization to a whole new level, when it applies to software engineers on opposite sides of the Galaxy who had no clue the other existed!

Exactly. So, we either have to believe that such standardization DOES exist - and that the problem with the Doctor was just in developing the "adapter" as Blackstar mentioned; or, drive ourselves nuts every time we watch.

That sounds like a fairly reasonable explaination to me.

When the Doctor was being run by a different computer system, why couldn't they be using an emulator? They have emulators to let you run old Atari games on a desktop computer....

I thought he was stolen because the alien grabbed the modile emitter which the doctor was "in" at the time.

As a side not, for obvious writing reasons, Trek is much more willing to let you transfer/trasport something than duplicate it.

Actually did he have the mobile emitter before he got transfered to anything? I could be that thing was what made it possible. Having read/write capabilities of complicated holograms while standard starfleet tech has neither.