Quotable Moments

"Three people have slipped through the cracks on my ship. That makes it my problem."

Doctor: The Devil finds work for idle hands.    More Stories Star Trek: Voyager -- Seasons Six and Seven 'Star Trek: Voyager' - 'Good Shepherd' (spoilers) Star Trek: Voyager - 'Child's Play' Star Trek: Voyager - 'Ashes to Ashes'    Related Links Star Trek UPN Seven: Religious metaphors are irrelevant.

Seven gives instructions for changing the sensors' radiogenic resolution to a Bajoran woman who works in astrometrics. The instructions ultimately reach an engineering crew member who works in an isolated room on deck 15. He's a bit annoyed at being disturbed, preferring to work on a cosmology problem.

"Good Shepherd" is an enjoyable episode, built upon the plausible premise that job satisfaction aboard Voyager is less than universal. Because our attention in most episodes is focused on a handful of senior-level decision-makers, it is good to be reminded that there are many other people aboard the ship, including some who may be displeased at the status of their lives and careers.

In this connection, the episode serves as a useful memento of Voyager's daunting circumstances: lost in a distant quarter of the galaxy and desperately trying to get home. That basic situation -- and Janeway's role in bringing it about -- sometimes fades into the background as the crew go about their daily business.

A weakness of "Good Shepherd," however, is that the three misfit characters are presented in a somewhat caricatured manner. They exhibit extremes -- of hypochondria, self-doubt, and intellectual arrogance, respectively -- that place a strain on plausibility.

Nonetheless, Janeway is probably right to sense that these crew members have untapped potential. It is to be hoped that we will see more of them, particularly the Bajoran woman Tal, who may possess the valuable qualities -- spiritual insight and guerrilla warfare skill -- for which her people are widely known.

Janeway is capable of a proactive, hands-on management approach.

Will Tal get transferred to a department where her skills are put to better use?

One crew member is depicted analyzing (and trying to disprove) a theory of "multiple big bangs." Present-day cosmologists have postulated similar theories. Penn State physicist Lee Smolin, for instance, has conjectured that our universe arose from a black hole in a previous universe, and that each black hole in our universe (and other universes) gives rise to yet another universe.