Robert Picardo Created His Star Trek Character’s Best Quirk By Accident

This article contains spoilers for the two-part premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is, by necessity, a forward-looking sort of property, what with its focus on the students who’ll become the next generation of Federation officers and the politically complex world they’ll inhabit. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of connections to what has come before. It’s set during the aftermath of The Burn, a crippling, galaxy-wide event introduced in Star Trek: Discovery, and features several familiar faces from that series, including Tig Notaro (Jett Reno) and Oded Fehr (Admiral Charles Vance). But the person old school Trek fans are almost certainly most excited to see is Robert Picardo, who reprises his Star Trek: Voyager role as the Emergency Medical Hologram Mark I, or, as he is better known, the Doctor. 

A beloved figure in Trek history, the Doctor fills the traditional role of a not-quite-human (or vaguely human-adjacent) figure who must learn about things like humanity and emotion from his proximity to his inevitably messy colleagues. His journey was a bit different than most in the sense that he is not technically alive in the strictest sense, but the lessons were still very similar. Now in the 32nd century, sentient holograms aren’t nearly as groundbreaking as they were when Picardo and his Doctor were first introduced. (Heck, the Academy just enrolled its first holographic cadet!) But the EMH himself has changed in the eight centuries since the last time we saw him, and part of his Starfleet Academy arc will inevitably involve unraveling the myriad of ways he’s grown and changed in the interim. Such as fully embracing his inner performer.

One of the most delightful callbacks in the first two episodes of Starfleet Academy revisits the Doctor’s longstanding love of opera. During his Voyager days, his singing wasn’t particularly impressive. In fact, it seemed to annoy most people whenever he brought it up. But while Picardo sings his own arias onscreen, his character’s affection for the genre actually came about by accident.

“Well, I sang opera by mistake on Voyager,” Picardo told Den of Geek. “I suggested to the producers that I listened to opera, and they misunderstood me. And then it was too late. They’d already written a show where I was singing.”

Picardo’s voice really is excellent, but what seems to most interest the actor is what the Doctor’s love of music says about who he is, even hundreds of years in the future. 

“I never intended to sing —  the idea of an artificial intelligence, a computer program having a hobby is silly enough,” PIcardo said. “But that an emotionless, humorless program, which I was at the beginning of Voyager, would pick such an emotional form of human art! Cut to hundreds of years in the future, it’s his sustaining passion outside of medicine, and he wants to share it with students who aren’t particularly interested in it.”

But in Starfleet Academy, not only does the Doctor get the chance to teach his students about the art form he’s loved for so long, but he actually gets to take part in it. (And not on a Holodeck.) During the series’ second episode, “Beta Test,” the Doctor gets the chance to perform a gorgeous rendition of Mozart’s “Pa Pa Pa Pa” from The Magic Flute as part of the entertainment during a reception for the visiting Betazoid delegation. And he absolutely smashes it. How far we’ve come, indeed.

“To perform again, and to sing with this wonderful actress from the Canadian Opera Company, [Jamie Groote], was great fun and a challenge and scary because I want to be good enough that I sound passable. I’m singing with a professional opera singer!” PIcardo said. “One of the leading voices in opera right now, Arturo Chacón Cruz, this is a good friend of mine. I have to be decent for these people to sit and watch the show. So I worked my butt off. That’s the answer.”

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.