1x16 Learning Curve

[7.5/10] In some ways, “Learning Curve” gives me exactly what I’ve been asking for from Star Trek: Voyager. When you try to smush a Starfleet crew and a Maquis crew together out of necessity, they won’t necessarily mesh well together. Examining what happens when some former Maquis don’t want to get with the program, and forcing the Starfleet officers to reckon with that, is the sort of conflict I’ve been clamoring for since the series began. This episode delivers that, with Crewman Dalby in particular bucking against Tuvok’s commands, and eventually his tutelage.

But in some ways, it’s the opposite of what I wanted. It’s good that Voyager is tackling this issue head-on, rather than just sweeping it under the rug (give or take Seska) and pretending that everything would be hunky dory when mixing Federation citizens and Federation rebels on the same ship. However, the path “Learning Curve” takes to address that conflict, and eventually sew it up in a neat little package, runs counter to the complexities and need to blend two crews’ sensibilities when forced to work together I’d hoped for.

So let’s start with a simple baseline -- Tuvok is a dick here. Captain Janeway tasks him with giving four former Maquis, selected by Chakotay and others, a crash course in Starfleet. He proceeds to treat them like children, condescend to them, and run them ragged. It’s one thing to treat Starfleet cadets that way, who are both young people like Wesley Crusher in need of some molding, and who, if nothing else, applied for this knowing what they were signing up for. It’s another thing to act this way toward adults who have basically been impressed into service by circumstance.

Now I want to be fair to “Learning Curve”. Some of this is the point. Neelix, of all people, ends up being the voice of reason when Tuvok’s methods run aground on dissension and frustration. Using a colorful metaphor with flowers and stems, he warns Mr. Vulcan that he’s being too inflexible, and needs to meet Dalby and his compatriots where they live. Some of the intention here is clearly that Tuvok’s rigid approach is not a good fit for these people.

How does the show dramatize that idea, though? With Tuvok trying to genuinely get to know Dalby and learn about his harsh family history, which is something! If hearing about this recalcitrant crewman’s tough upbringing led Tuvok to soften his approach a little, or demonstrate some understanding of where Dalby was coming from that would be great.

None of that really happens though. The big dramatization of how Neelix’s advice and Dalby’s personal history has affected Tuvok is that he...chooses to rescue one of the former Maquis even though it goes against his “greatest gain at the lowest cost” tactical philosophy. At the most charitable, you can chalk it up to Tuvok seeing these crewmembers as people, not just cogs in the Starfleet machine, thanks to them expressing their individuality. But the episode paints it simply as him learning that sometimes it’s okay to “bend the rules”, which kinda sort of fits the Maquis crew members' “whatever works” philosophy, but wasn’t really the problem...

Dalby and friends’ arc is no better. They resent having to fit into the Starfleet mold and hate Tuvok’s methods of instruction. But clearly it works on them because they...are able to get the door to a room full of poison gas open to rescue Tuvok and their friend? I guess? Charitably, you could say Tuvok made a big deal out of teaching them the layout of the ship, which allowed them to get to the right place, but it’s pretty thin.

More to the point, after seeing Tuvok “bend the rules” to try to rescue their friend from the poison gas themselves, Dalby declares that he and his pals are officially ready to follow his orders, and implicitly, fit themselves into the whole Starfleet system. Taking Tuvok’s gesture as an important first step toward a real partnership between the most rigid of Starfleet officers and the most rebellious of Maquis operatives would be great. But the sense of finality and “problem solved” to this whole thing comes off too simple, too tidy, and too unsatisfying. As so often afflicted Voyager’s early seasons in particular, it wraps what should be a complicated, ongoing dynamic into a neat little package, without really addressing the underlying issue in full.

Do you want to know the worst part? I mostly agree with Dalby and the former Maquis here. That absolutely should not happen. I’ve spent my whole life basically indoctrinated by Starfleet methods and values. The Kurtzman era of Star Trek has made it a priority to reclaim those values across a variety of new shows, and it reflects how “Why we do things the way we do”, as Janeway put it, filtered down to the young and young-at-heart who watched these shows growing up. Tuvok’s perspective has the ultimate home-field advantage when it comes to hearts and minds here.

And yet he is unyielding, callous, persnickety, and at times outright unreasonable. Dalby makes some pretty good points about how the former Maquis never asked for this, and should be granted more leeway and autonomy than officers who were trained in, and importantly, agreed to be a part of, the Starfleet system. Tuvok forcing them to run laps like they’re kids in gym class is degrading. His “don’t speak unless spoken to” approach is condescending. And his insistence that the young Bajoran crewman remove his earring, which has religious significance, because it’s not part of the uniform, sucks as much as when Riker did it to Ensign Ro, and even Ro at least volunteered for Starfleet. All of it makes Tuvok come off like a petty tyrant, and the Academy approach seems inappropriate at best for grown men and women who never set out to become Starfleet officers.

So you kind of root for them when they basically tell Tuvok to sod off. Dalby isn’t wrong when he says that Voyager needs them, and so as long as they keep doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, there’s only so much Tuvok and Janeway can do to punish them. God help me, I’d love to see somebody on the ship test that theory. (As I recall, we get a little of it with Paris down the line, but even that's pretty abbreviated.) What does it mean when Starfleet stiffs used to discipline and the observing chain of command have to make peace with rebellious types who don’t cotton to that hierarchy or rigidity, and have to be reasoned with rather than cowed?

The answer is, apparently, that Chakotay will just punch them in the face until they comply, since that's what a Maquis captain would do apparently. Cool? I guess? There’s something to be said for Torres questioning Dalby’s ability to meet the challenges that works as a bit of psychological motivation. But for the most part, these people with somewhat reasonable demands and gripes with being forced into a setup they don’t like are simply cajoled into going along with it, rather than believably convinced that it’s the right way to go.

It doesn’t help that Dalby is essentially the only one of the four Maquis recruits who gets any true development or shading. The others show glimpses of personality, but are basically one-note stand-ins. The proceedings are buoyed, though, by a neat sci-fi crisis of the week that stems from, of all things, the bio-neural gel packs getting infected with a virus thanks to Neelix’s cheese. It’s a unique problem, at least, and features some fun and clever moments from the whole gang to solve the problem. And as much as the Tuvok story frustrates me in places, it’s neat for longtime fans to see a new spin on the Kobayashi Maru test and “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” from another Vulcan officer.

And despite all my gripes, “Learning Curve” is still one of early Voyager’s more memorable hours because it’s one of the few to take the series’ original premise seriously. Onetime Maquis operatives pushing back against Starfleet’s protocols; seasoned officers getting frustrated when their near-conscripts don’t play by the rules; the two groups learning something from one another and meeting in the middle, could all have been not only the backbone of a great episode, but the foundation for the whole series. Instead, we get a tantalizing episode that delivers plenty of interesting ideas and food for thought while, like the show itself in this shaky first season, still struggles mightily to live up to its potential.