See A Star Trek Icon Return To His Role To Officiate A Villain Wedding
Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Picardo gets back in character at a convention to officiate a faux wedding between cosplayers.
A few days before his old Star Trek: Voyager co-star Robert Beltran raised eyebrows by comparing President Biden to Adolf Hitler, Robert Picardo posted a much happier message from the land the late Hitler once ruled. As TrekMovie reported, Picardo posted a video from September’s Destination Star Trek Germany convention while officiating, in-character, a faux wedding. The union in question was for characters from the classic Voyager episode “Bride of Chaotica!” with the convention goers cosplaying as Queen Arachnia and Doctor Chaotica.
Most of the 1999 Season 5 Voyager episode is in black-and-white, hence the beautifully reproduced color palette of the cosplayers’ make-up and costumes. “Bride of Chaotica!” is one of Star Trek’s many holodeck-gone-wrong episodes, which necessitates Robert Picardo’s The Doctor enter the simulation as the President of Earth; the role he assumes for the convention’s not-a-wedding.
To demonstrate just how on-point the cosplayers’ presentations are, below is a screenshot of their video with Picardo, followed by a shot of the characters played by Kate Mulgrew and Martin Rayner in the episode.
You won’t find many corners of Star Trek fandom without warm, fuzzy feelings for Robert Picardo. The actor has left his mark all over the franchise. Among other things, Picardo has the distinction being one of the only Voyager cast members during the show’s run to make appearances in outside franchise screen projects.
Star Trek: First Contact audiences got a treat when Robert Picardo showed up during the Borg’s infiltration of the Enterprise-E, when Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) used the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH) to delay the cyborgs busting into Sick Bay. The next year he played Dr. Lewis Zimmerman–the man who designed the EMH–in the pivotal Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?”
Out of the rest of Star Trek: Voyager‘s regular cast, the only actors other than Robert Picardo to get gigs in other Trek screen projects were Tim Russ in the DS9 episode “Through the Looking Glass” and Ethan Phillips, as a holographic Maitre d’, in First Contact. Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Robert Duncan McNeill, and Robert Beltran have all since appeared in canonical non-Voyager Trek projects; but not until after Voyager concluded its run.
Star Trek could very well be seeing more of Robert Picardo in the future. Besides the possibility he could voice his old role–or perhaps something different–in one of the current animated series, there’s been a lot of talk of Kate Mulgrew returning to the role of Kathryn Janeway in a live-action project akin to Star Trek: Picard. If and when such a project is officially announced, the status of The Doctor is something fans will definitely be curious about.
The events of Star Trek: Picard, in particular, could have fans worried about Robert Picardo’s signature character. In Season 1 of the revival series we learn artificial lifeforms are banned in the Federation because of a disaster on Mars. The ban is lifted by the end of first season, but what might have happened to The Doctor in the meantime?
