Stardate 54732.3: Thanks to Q’s reward to Janeway for taking care of his son, Voyager is now within shouting distance of home – or, at the very least, close enough to utilize Lt. Barclay’s latest innovation, a subspace signal bounced into the Alpha Quadrant, enabling real-time communications between Voyager and Starfleet. For the first time since Voyager became stranded in the Delta Quadrant, Harry Kim is able to see his parents, B’Elanna Torres sees her father for the first time in over twenty years, and the entire crew gets their first glimpse of Earth via a satellite transmission. And who has the Doctor been talking to? A Bolian publisher of holonovels, who has shown great interest in the hologram’s dramatization of the crew’s struggles over the past seven years. The Doctor’s crewmates learn about the negotiations for his literary work, but when they play the scenario themselves, they’re appalled to see how the Doctor has exaggerated their worst traits (not to mention his own struggle for equal rights as a member of the crew). The crew suggests more realistic revisions, which the Doctor implements without realizing that his unscrupulous publisher has already gone to “press” – with the wildly unflattering first draft. The crew’s families back home, after experiencing the holonovel, start asking questions about what has really happened to their loved ones in the Delta Quadrant. But when the Doctor tries to seek legal recourse for the unauthorized distribution of his work, the publisher falls back on the very point of the Doctor’s drama – holograms have no rights.
teleplay by Phyllis Strong & Mike Sussman
story by Brannon Braga
directed by David Livingston
music byGuest Cast: Dwight Schultz (Barclay), Richard Herd (Admiral Paris), Barry Gordon (Broht), Irene Tsu (Mary Kim), Joseph Campanella (Arbitrator), Lorinne Vozoff (Irene Hansen), Juan Garcia (John Torres), Robert Ito (John Kim)
LogBook entry by Earl Green