Owing to some excellent posts recently about Seven taking over Chakotay's role on Voyager, I've been reflecting more on Good Shepherd.
I think one thing that really bothers me more than most of Seven's scene stealing is that the situation in Good Shepherd - while a good episode to watch - should never have happened. It made everyone look incompetent - including Janeway.
Chakotay will be well aware of Billy, Celes and Harren. He's probably had Billy's hypochondria brought up by the Doctor more than once, and Harren has to have racked up a whole stack of disciplinaries by this point for choosing to do the bare minimum and pissing off his coworkers. As for Celes, she was on Voyager for a full 3 years before Seven joined them - her problems with providing inaccurate analyses will already be well-known, and probably flagged to Chakotay years beforehand by the senior Science officer (who is probably Sam Wildman, and definitely not Seven of Nine (not that you'd know it)).
Chakotay is right in pointing out that some officers wash out not long after starting active service. All three of these crewmen would have been removed from Voyager within months had the ship not been lost, but Chakotay and their department heads are stuck trying to find ways for them to fit in without it causing further problems, and they already had strategies in place:
Celes was put in a junior position in astrometrics where those senior to her were in a position to quietly check her work and help her improve her accuracy - that way she could still work and improve at her own pace, while not affecting anything too important. Not ideal but probably the best place to put her without having to relieve her of her duties. It's also worth noting that Celes went to Starfleet Academy but somehow graduated without getting a commission - she's a crewman. As much as she's a nice person, she is not cut out for active service and she knows it - this is ultimately why she doesn't feel a part of the crew, and it's unlikely that there's anything that will fix that for her. It's a tough situation all round and everyone around her has probably tried their best by her, but she knows she's not up to scratch. It's only Seven that rubs it in her face by taking it straight to the captain.
Billy is fine at his work but his hypochondria makes his position in the field close to impossible and if Voyager had stayed in the Alpha Quadrant he'd have transferred to a posting on a planet before losing his post. And the away mission will not have magically cured his hypochondria - think about all the shit the crew have been through before this - no-one aboard Voyager has gotten away without serious injury on numerous occasions. Many times the entire crew have been traumatised and injured by aliens. It's likely once the Good Shepherd mission ended and he had time to absorb being temporary host to that lifeform an his hypochondria would have worsened. Prior to the mission he hadn't been assigned to an away mission - probably because of the Doctor (as he always provides him with a sick note) because it could make his hypochondria that much worse if he incurs further injuries that legitimise his medical paranoia. If six years of Delta Quadrant injuries hadn't cured him of it, nothing was going to barring lots and lots of therapy. The Doctor, Chakotay - and probably also Billy - all knew that already. Everyone was trying to manage what is after all, a serious medical condition. Hypochondria is a real thing and needs to be treated seriously. The only reason Billy doesn't get a sick note this time around is because the captain's involved.
And then there's Mortimer. And Mortimer would never have lasted the length of his placement had Voyager not gotten lost. He is hostile, purposefully underperforms and when he does try and do something 'helpful' all he does is put everyone else in even more danger. He's a complete liability and after six years of Delta Quadrant horrors, he hadn't learned a thing or decided to pull his weight at all. He'd have been fired within months or even weeks if not for the Caretaker. It's obvious he's been a thorn in B'Elanna's side for a long time and as with Celes, rather than relieving him of duty she decided to stick him out the way where there wasn't much chance of him causing problems - either by not doing his job or pissing off the rest of the engineering team. He's also a pretty shit cosmologist by the sounds of it - Janeway, who was only a cosmologist to trade for about a year after getting her doctorate before switching to Command - was clearly unimpressed by what he was working on, despite him seemingly having devoted more years to the field than she has.
Chakotay as First Officer has been aware of these three problem crewmen, probably since his earliest months aboard the ship and has worked within the constraints of Voyager life to try and do the best he could do by all three of them while keeping the ship functioning as it should.
And then suddenly in swans Seven of Nine, essentially shaming those three officers in front of the senior staff (those three might not know about Seven's special efficiency report, but they definitely will have put two and two together when all three get a mission and the Captain's in charge - they'll know they've been talked about).
Seven had no right to do that to them. She run roughshod over the senior science officer, B'Elanna, Chakotay and the Doctor just to vent about three crewmen who were already being managed.
And sadly, Janeway chose to listen to her over everyone else and led them on an away mission that nearly got them all killed.
Post away mission, Janeway might feel better at having tried to get to know them, but Harren will have immediately returned to the plasma relay room to do next to no work and generally be an ass. Celes will have returned to Astrometrics to - let's be honest - continue to be bullied by Seven, and Billy will probably have been back visiting the Doctor within a week or two. And I'd bet both Celes and Billy would reflect on the mission and feel awful for almost getting their Captain killed when she was trying to help them.
At the end of the day, Chakotay had made the right choices with those three officers, and had also made the right choice not bringing it to Janeway's attention because managing the crew isn't her job - it's Chakotay's job! Chakotay already said that Celes couldn't meet the minimum standards for taking part in away mission, Billy always got the Doctor to excuse him, and Harren point blank refused. Those three officers didn't want to go on an away mission, but the episode frames it as them missing out. (missing out on what exactly? Voyager's away missions are always disasters!!)
And Seven knew all this and just didn't care. She just put together an efficiency report because she thinks she knows better than everyone else about everything. In fact I'd bet she'd cobbled it all together purely because she didn't want Celes working near her any more. In fact it's pretty obvious that's what it's all about as Seven's great solution for Celes is to make her B'Elanna's problem... when Celes doesn't even have an engineering background.
