The worst Starfleet officers in the Delta Quadrant go on an adventure.
Remember Voyager’s first season finale, in which a group of former Maquis are underperforming in their new jobs and have to pull their socks up?
It was a perfectly okay bit of Star Trek, if underwhelming as a season finale. It gave us the line “get this cheese to sickbay”, which makes it more memorable than a lot of technically-better episodes.
Nevertheless, it’s an odd choice for a season 6 retread.
This time, the under-performers are Starfleet, rather than Maquis, and it is interesting to meet officers who are bad at their jobs. In TNG, you had to be the best and the brightest just to get assigned to the Enterprise, and DS9’s situation meant you either shaped up or shipped out. But on Voyager, there’s nowhere for them to ship to. Hence this episode.
I don’t fault the idea. But it feels like a season 2 concept. It’s too late for this story. There are three crew members on this tiny ship that Janeway has barely met? That doesn’t exactly reflect well on her leadership, just as B’Elanna talking shit about Harren in the mess hall doesn’t reflect well on her, and just as Seven is effectively bullying Celes—
Wait. Is this secretly a story about how women are bad at leadership?
Let’s not ask difficult questions.
Instead, let’s have a look our individual lost sheep
Billy Telfer — the hypochondriac
Billy’s a very straightforward character. He’s a competent officer, but his anxiety (for which he refuses treatment, in a rare acknowledgement that such things can be treated) manifests as hypochondria.
There’s a little bit of Reg Barclay in Billy, except that he’s not so off-putting, and his problems only affect his work when people try to drag him out of his comfort zone. In fact, he reminds me more of Brad Boimler, especially in the early episodes of Lower Decks, before Mariner has lovingly bullied the anxiety (mostly) out of him.
It’s obvious from the very beginning that Billy will experience some sort of horrifying medical event and come through it a changed man. What’s more important is that he’s a good friend and a decent officer once he gets out of his head.
Mortimer Harren — the tech bro
One of the first things we learn about Harren is that he has five advanced degrees. Sometimes Hollywood uses this as shorthand for “guy who is really smart”; Voyager uses it more accurately to signal that Harren is really smart, and also completely incapable of existing in the real world or getting along with others.
I liked Harren a lot more back when this episode first aired. An innocent time when Amazon was still a start-up and … okay, the internet was full of tech bros who valued theoretical mathematics more than life and imagination, but we weren’t silly enough to listen, let alone give them piles of money and an unreasonable amount of political influence.
But I do think that Harren makes sense as a character. Starfleet isn’t the only road to a scientific career in the Federation, but it’s always been implied that at least a few years in uniform can open doors for an ambitious young nerd. Harren straight up says that a year of “practical experience” aboard a starship was required for his desired career.
I love this worldbuilding. It speaks to the role of Starfleet in the Federation, and its unquestioned place in an unspoken hierarchy. No one is going so far as saying that other career paths are lesser, or that you should do a few years of national interstellar service before you move onto your real job. It’s entirely implicit, and kind of stupid — much like NASA’s early requirement that astronauts had to be test pilots. It makes sense … but does it? Really? It’s both irrational and makes perfect sense in a society which aspires to value service above individualism.
Naturally Harren learns an important lesson about valuing life and also not being a complete asshole all the time. Will it stick? Who knows? We never see him again! Unlike…
Tal Celes — the most precious baby
I love Tal Celes. She is my favourite of the three lost sheep, and I suspect Janeway’s, too. A Starfleet officer who struggles with maths? Identifiable queen.
However.
There’s an ugly subtext here, and it’s yet another reflection of the fundamental conservatism that underlies Voyager. Celes believes that she only graduated from the Academy because Starfleet Command felt sorry for her personally, and because the brass wanted more Bajorans in Starfleet for political/optics reasons.
I get why Celes believes that. She clearly struggles with her self-esteem, which impedes her ability to do her job — at which she is competent when given support and positive reinforcement.
But Janeway listens to this and doesn’t argue, which makes me think we’re meant to believe it’s true — that Celes is an unqualified affirmative action graduate, a diversity hire. It’s an ugly idea with real world implications, and I think it’s a real shame that line made it through to the final script without challenge.
It’s especially a shame because it overshadows Celes’s story. Which is, again, predictable — of course she’s going to do the thing and pull her weight and help save everyone. All she needed was the right mentor. Which brings us to the titular “good shepherd”…
Let’s talk about Kathryn Janeway
I know everyone’s probably sick of my “Kathryn Janeway is not a maternal figure and doesn’t want to be” rants, but I have to point this out: faced with a trio of very young officers in need of a gentle, nurturing parental figure, she declares herself God.
I mean. The script works quite hard to avoid mentioning that the parable of the good shepherd is an explicitly and specifically Christian story. But the good shepherd is Jesus. Janeway is comparing herself to Jesus.
It’s hilarious.
But also incredibly in character, and I love it.
However, I also think that Janeway is the problem with this story, or at least, the reason it’s not particularly special: she doesn’t change.
“Good Shepherd” is inspired by TNG’s “Lower Decks”, which follows a quartet of junior officers as they vie for a promotion. It’s one of the best episodes of the series, and particularly of the seventh season. And while the focus is very much on the junior officers, their mentors do evolve — if not internally, then in terms the audience’s perception of them. We see a new facet of Picard, for example, and get a rare opportunity to learn that Worf is a really excellent mentor.
“Good Shepherd” doesn’t really do that. Janeway ends as the same person she was at the beginning. Maybe worse, so does Seven of Nine, even though she has almost as much to learn about being a decent person as Harren. (I mean. She opens the episode basically positioning herself as a corporate-style efficiency expert, and no one pushes back. And she is clearly a big part of the reason Celes is struggling.)
This problem means that “Good Shepherd” is a perfectly fine episode, but it’s not essential the way “Lower Decks” was, and doesn’t even have the absurdity that makes “Learning Curve” a guilty pleasure.
Other observations
- It would be remiss of me to overlook the one way “Good Shepard” was extremely essential for the fandom — TaraLJC’s Lower Decks fic archive predated “Good Shepherd”, but the episode boosted its popularity and size. I believe some of my own work is in there…
- Tal Celes was played by Zoe McLellan, who went on to have a long career in network television with a pile of recurring and regular roles. But she has been missing since 2019, along with her young son, in what is rumoured to be a parental kidnapping arising out of a custody dispute and allegations of abuse against her child’s father. Which is super rough! Usually when I look up a guest star from this era, the challenge is counting how many medical dramas they guest starred in.
- Never mind the Tom Morello cameo, what’s wild about this episode is how it opens with someone carrying a report by hand to Harren in his dungeon. This efficiency meeting could have been an email. I know it was 1999, but also, it was 1999 and email very much existed. I wonder if it was a deliberate choice to not address the tech revolution that was making ’90s Trek obsolete before it aired.
In conclusion
It’s fine. It’s fine. Three dark matter entities out of five.