“Flesh & Blood”, no question for me. I like all these others as 2 parters.

Flesh and blood.

I think Endgame is a good episode as it is٫ but it would have been great if the pacing weren't almost as bad as TMP. Cutting it down to one part would probably fix that.

It's been a moment since I last watched Flesh and Blood, so my memory of it might be a little fuzzy, but while I agree it's not the strongest two-parter, I think Workforce is the one I'd vote for. It's still a great story--I find the concept very unique and fun and definite a story worth telling--but I don't think it actually needed to be split into a two-parter so to tell that same story effectively.

The rest I've never had any issue with at all. I don't know where this talk about Endgame have "TMP-level pacing," I've always thought it's pacing was perfect.

I also had to go with Flesh and Blood... it just didn't feel like a story with enough gravity to warrant two parts. I also have a hard time getting invested in a story about holograms. To me, the Doctor, Moriarty, Minuet, Vic Fontaine -- they are exceptions, not the rule.

I think holograms like the Doctor and Vic really are the rule, but people just aren’t really willing to recognize how intelligent holograms really are. We see it all the time. Even as early as The Big Goodbye, Picard’s holo-friend is horrified to learn that he isn’t real. The Fair Haven episodes are dumb, but it certainly seems that the holograms in that episode are sentient. EMH Mark 2 also seemed sentient and he didn’t go through all the development that the doctor did. I think Starfleet just kind of ignores the sentience of holograms, or pretends that it is only a few isolated incidents, because that makes the use of the holodeck incredibly unethical.

@Icecreamdif

I think it's because, to Starfleet and holodeck users, they're all just programs, who might seem self-aware because they were deliberately programmed to behave as if they were. But just because they behave like they're self-aware, that doesn't automatically mean that they actually are.

Take real-life's generative AI--I hear a lot of users of the tech already claiming it's achieving self-awareness, or is on the verge of doing so, but I, having done more research, can be pretty confident that it's more likely it's only giving the illusion of self-awareness, because that's what it thinks humanity wants, given humanity just loves that idea of an AI becoming self-aware. It's otherwise just an ordinary program doing what it's programmed to, with no real awareness of its actual self or really the world around it.

But then that is also why Starfleet's slow to realize when a hologram does become self-aware, because how do you tell something has truly become self-aware, when it was already programmed to act as if self-aware in the first place, regardless of whether or not it actually is or not? The line between the two in such a scenario is pretty thin and VERY blurred. And as already noted, there has only been a handful of instances where it was definitely confirmed to have happened, and most of them were because of unusual circumstances the average holoprogram wouldn't normally be put through. So I can understand where Starfleet's coming from on the matter and why they tend to be skeptical and slow to recognize it whenever it does happen (at least in the 24th century).

That said, I don't think it excuses them--they built the holodeck with the whole point of making it's simulations as close to realistic as the tech will allow with every new iteration of it, so OF COURSE the holocharacters would eventually run the risk of becoming self-aware as a consequence, because that's what happens when you try and create a character as close to realistic as possible because you just about can't get more realistic than a self-aware consciousness.

Gosh, just had a potentially "keep you awake at night" thought--what if there has been an animal holocharacter, like a dog or something, that became self-aware, but had no way of proving it because...it's a dog or something? There's sort of a language barrier there, having no way of proving itself self-aware to its users as the users will just assume its behavior normal pre-programmed dog (or something) behavior. Poor thing could be forever side-lined as "just part of the program" throughout the entirety of its existence, getting turned on and off constantly against its will and on the whims of the programs users, probably until the program grows old or is replace and is deleted and/or decompiled, and most users would never think to check otherwise.

Heck, we just might need a new thread for this line of thought...

I agree that modern AI isn’t sentient even if it sometimes feels like it is. But Starfleet’s computers are much more advanced. As Data’s trial showed, it is very difficult to determine when an AI has achieved sentience. Technically, we have no way of knowing that Moriarty, the Doctor, or even Data are sentient. They could all just be acting sentient because that is what they are programmed to do. At a certain point it just doesn’t really matter anymore. If something seems sentient then for all practical purposed it is. It isn’t as if we can ever even be 100% sure that other humans are sentient.

On the subject of holograms, it doesn’t seem to take much to make them sentient. Vic was basically just programmed to be sentient. Moriarty became sentient because Geordi accidentally told the computer to make him sentient. The doctor developed more of a personality because he was on for a long time, but there doesn’t seem to be a single moment when he went from being a machine to being a person. It also didn’t seem to take much to make the Flesh and Blood holograms sentient, even if the Hirogen did mess with their programs first.

All Starfleet holograms are based on the same technology, so they all have the capacity to become sentient. I think that it probably happens a lot more often than Starfleet is willing to admit.

@Icecreamdif

You are probably right too, which, again, is a bit of a "keep you up at night" thought, thinking about what happens to the sentient holograms that DON'T get discovered as sentient by the program's users.

I think most of them just get deactivated and never realize that their simulated world isn’t the real world. It gets a little more iffy with the more violent programs, and with Quark’s sex programs. And, of course, the sentient holograms who know what they are but are used as slaves, like the EMH miners.