Robert Picardo’s Favorite Voyager Episode Will Surprise You

As a performer, Robert Picardo is a bit like Star Trek fans in that his tastes and preferences change over time. He has offered up multiple episodes as his all-time favorites over the years, but the actor has always been consistent about his favorite outing from season 1. Near the end of that season, he told Star Trek Monthly that “Heroes and Demons” was “probably my favorite episode” and restated that opinion to Star Trek Magazine once Voyager’s first season came out on DVD.

To understand why this is Robert Picardo’s favorite season 1 outing, it’s important to know what “Heroes and Demons” is all about. When Ensign Kim is seemingly lost in the holodeck with a program still running, Janeway discovers that everyone she sends inside to retrieve him becomes inexplicably lost. Unable to shut down the program or retrieve her flesh-and-blood crew, Captain Janeway decides to send the ship’s holographic Doctor into the program under the assumption that he will be safer inside the holodeck than everyone else.

What follows is a classic fish-out-of-water style episode, with Robert Picardo’s character getting to leave sickbay and go on a cool and surprisingly dangerous mission. The danger comes from the fact that the holodeck is running a Beowulf program, and the dangers of this violent Viking world are compounded by alien life forms that the Doctor realizes have accidentally gotten stuck on the holodeck. Fortunately, he saves the day by releasing these energy-based lifeforms, and this kind gesture convinces the aliens to release the “lost” crew that were effectively hostages.

With his typical dry wit, Robert Picardo once described this episode as “Alice in Wonderland with a bald, middle-aged, cranky, arrogant Alice.” But he truly loves “Heroes and Demons” because he sees it as “the perfect [example] of how interesting it can be to put The Doctor in a position he’s not designed for.” Getting the Doctor out of his comfort zone meant that “he had to discover how to function within the demands of an unfamiliar situation.”

There are other great reasons why this episode is Robert Picardo’s early fave, including that the Doctor got to eat for the first time, allowing the actor to chow down on a particularly salty leg of lamb. His character even gets a bit of romance (“his first romantic encounter”), and the actor playing love interest Freya really impressed Picardo. He later described Marjorie Monaghan in a short, memorable way:  that she was “gorgeous, blond [and] 6′ 11.”

Beyond getting to do new things with his fan-favorite Star Trek character, Robert Picardo personally enjoyed the premise of “Heroes and Villains.” When asked what kind of holodeck program he’d prefer in real life, he once said, “I think the most fun would be to play a heroic character in a timeless dramatic or literary classic like Beowulf.” He also praised the episode’s humor, saying at one point “It’s one of the great secret pleasures of being an actor that you can actually watch something you’ve done that’s supposed to be funny and laugh.”

Honestly, we can’t disagree…this episode of fun, funny, and features a tour-de-force performance from Robert Picardo. As a Star Trek fan, what else can you ask for? Fair warning: the first of you that says “a promotion for Ensign Kim” is getting a phaser blast to the face.