"Life Support" (season three, episode thirteen; 30 January 1994): Wikipedia-link.
Commentary: "Life Support" is a thoughful meditation on medical ethics, as Doctor Bashir struggles to heal Vedek Bariel, who is mortally wounded in a shuttle accident. Bashir wants to place Bariel in indefinite statis, potentially for years, as the physician searches for a treatment to the cleric's injuries. Bariel insists that his life does not matter, that he needs to be kept alert for the days necessary to conclude a peace treaty between Bajor & Cardassia, an important step in healing the wounds of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. Bashir can keep Bariel conscious, but at a terrible cost: first sequential organ failure, then brain death. Kai Winn & Major Kira make an uneasy alliance, as both of them push Bashir to honor Bariel's wishes.
One of the most satisfying parts of "Life Support" is Doctor Bashir's uncompromising exposure of the lie at the heart of the later show, Star Trek: Picard. At the end of the first season of Picard, Jean-Luc Picard dies. A Soong-type android programmed to think it is Jean-Luc Picard (see: "Inheritance," The Next Generation) is then activated, & both we the audience & his shipmates, who know Picard has died, are then expected to treat the android as if it somehow is the man Jean-Luc Picard raised from the dead, his memories (the only important thing about a human, don't you know) transferred into "his" new body. That charade then continues through the second & third seasons of Picard. As Vedek Bariel's organs fail in "Life Support," they are replaced with artificial organs; as the damage spreads to Bariel's brain, the damaged portion is replaced with a "positronic matrix" (Data, & other Soong-type androids, has a "positronic brain," a reference to Isaac Asimov's robot stories). Bariel's behavior is markedly different after the installation of the first positronic matrix. When the damage spreads, requiring the replacement of the remainder of his brain with a positronicmatrix, Kira urges Bashir to save Bariel's life, but Bashir argues that installing any further matrices would effectively kill Bariel:
Kira: "We have to keep going.""That 'spark of life'"—recalling an earlier conversation, involving Bashir's medical school training—is the closest secular humanistic Star Trek can come to identifying the human soul. (The Vulcan katra & the Bajoran pagh can be mentioned, because those are safely alien.) Picard sits on a throne of lies!
Bashir: "Nerys, if I remove the rest of his brain & replace it with a machine, he may look like Bariel, he may even talk like Bariel, but he won't be Bariel. That 'spark of life' will be gone. He'll be dead, & I'll be the one to have killed him."
Kira: "But if we do nothing, he'll die."
Bashir: "That's right, he will, but he'll die like man, not a machine…."
Star Trek: Voyager debuted in the three weeks between "Part Tense, Part II" & "Life Support," on 16 January 1995.
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