Star Trek: Voyager made the right call to not name The Doctor

Star Trek: Voyager was a show that found great success with the holographic doctor, simply called The Doctor. Played wonderfully by Robert Picardo, The Doctor was considered one of the major players on the show. A true breakout character for the Voyager franchise and a major reason to tune in every week.

His evolution and development sucked fans in. It was like watching someone mature in front of your eyes from infancy to adulthood over seven seasons. The series benefited greatly from him and the way he was written, but everything could've been undone by doing the one thing he constantly sought out; getting a proper name.

For every episode, he was simply The Doctor. He didn't necessarily like that, so there were a few times when he tried to come up with a name. As Giant Freaking Robot wrote, one of the potential names that he could've considered was Doctor Smoke, as in Doctor Smoke and Mirrors. A truly bad name that thankfully never made the final cut.

The Doctor never got saddled with a name, good, bad, or otherwise, and in doing so they not only kept the character going as is, much to the fan's desire but also allowed him to have a little mystery or mystique to his character.

See, not naming him gave him an element of uniqueness that few other characters got to experience in Star Trek. He had no name but he clearly had an identity. As the seasons grew on and on, the idea and prospect of naming him took on more and more onus. A larger emphasis on naming him and getting it right started to really take hold.

If they named him, and they got it wrong, they'd ruin the character. That uniqueness, that mystique he had, would be gone and replaced with a likely shallow explanation that no one would be satisfied with. Sort of like what's happening with Star Trek: Discovery.

They're trying to answer a lot of lingering series plot points and disappointing fans along the way. It's not doing them or their reputation any good. Had Voyager tried to do the same thing, they likely would've run into the same fan discontentment that is going on with Discovery.

So it was a good thing that the Voyager crew never named him, as the name would've never lived up to the expectations we had for it.