Learning Curve

Learning Curve ended up being the season finale as some episodes were carried into the second season.

It was an underwhelming way to end matters. The Voyager's bio neural gel packs are malfunctioning. The crew need to get to the bottom of this as the gel packs cannot be replicated and not many supplies left.

Tuvok figures that some cheese that Neelix has created might have contaminated the gel packs. It leads to a hot, sticky situation.

However that is not the end of Tuvok's problems. He has been tasked to deal with four Maquis crew members who are not fully fledged observers of doing things the Starfleet way.

In a timely way, the first season ends how it began. The conflict between Maquis and Starfleet. It shows how Chakotay has moved on, even punching the recalcitrant Crewman Dalby who wants to stay loyal to him.

It would have benefitted the series more, if these crew members showed up later on.

Tuvok has these crew members reenacting the Kobayashi Maru program used at the Starfleet Academy. The Starfleet version puts the starship in a no win situation. It's the same thing here. Had no idea that retreat was an acceptable solution to this test.

This is a better episode than the rating would indicate, in my opinion.

Tuvok is charged with teaching a condensed boot camp to four of the more problematic Maquis. He encounters a lot of attitude, but eventually ends up earning their respect.

As a former Soldier, I was reminded strongly of the first few days of basic training. Tuvok was near-dead-on as a demanding drill sergeant. Also dead-on was how the cadets banded together (along with Tuvok) when presented with an actual life-threatening situation.

The "B" story, such as it is, involves a viral agent that attacks the bio-gel packs which power the ship. To say more may give one spoiler too many.

Tuvok is assigned the task of teaching a rebellious group of ex-Marquis the ways of Starfleet.

This is a reasonably enjoyable yet highly unoriginal Star Trek episode.

All I can say about the cheese-related shenanigans that drives the sci-fi aspect of the story, is that it is fun.

Likewise are many of the scenes involving Tuvok if you do not think too much about them and try to forget original series episodes like 'The Balance of Terror' and 'The Galileo Seven'. The biggest issue for me is that it portrays Tuvok as inept in his role as a Starfleet Academy training offer, so if you can overcome that you will likely enjoy.

I would have liked to have seen this type of Marquis story earlier in the series and the guest characters return in later episodes but I cannot judge this one on those factors.

Tim Russ leads this one very well. Armand Schultz strays over the top with a few lines but is mostly good as an antagonist written with some clichés.

For me it's a 6.5/10 but I round upwards.

How does a piece of cheese cause Tuvok to take a small group of Maquis "students" under his "wing"?

You'll have to watch this to find out. Crewman Dalby (Armand Schultz - Vanilla Sky) is a Maquis crewman who was just going about his business, mainly, fixing things when they needed to be fixed without checking on if the repair process itself would cause even more inconvenience. It does, and it interferes with something that the Captain is doing- which turns this into a huge, shipwide issue that Tuvok has to deal with.

This thing about checking with your superior before doing any random fix-it job, this is that tiny little thing called "Starfleet protocol", which basically rubs Maquis crewmen the wrong way. The very beginning of this episode is the textbook example of why, on a starship, not just a starship but on any military vessel, you can't just do things that you perceive need to be done. The chain of command has to be checked with to make sure that the planned operation does not turn into a catastrophe. This is true with the US military as it is here in Starfleet.

But on Voyager we don't exactly have the ideal crew situation. Because that small Maquis vessel that Chakotay flew into the Kazon/Trabe ship in the Pilot Episode? Which was so small that we originally thought had only four people crewing it, had possibly 30 Maquis inside.

We had seen those ships before on TNG and in Deep Space Nine, and in those shows they always appeared to be 4-man vessels.

So now, in Voyager, we find out that this particular Maquis ship had many more people inside of it.

Ok, so we just have to accept it, then.

We had been meeting a lot of these people in the previous episodes. So it just comes down to suspending disbelief and agreeing that those ships could hold many more people, maybe they were "Tesseract" ships, like the ship from the future that they found in "Enterprise"- much larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside.

So... crewman Dalby, after being confronted by Tuvok, makes "protocol" into a new Maquis dirty word... which then makes it also Chakotay's problem.

So a Maquis "Lower Decks Club" has to be formed.

Which included: a Bolian (Derek McGrath) as the talkative Crewman Chell... A Bajora, Crewman Gerron (Kenny Morrison, who was Atreyu in The Never-Ending Story II)... A girl with a festive bandana (Catherine MacNeal as Crewoman Henley), as well as Dalby.

These have become Tuvok's new students. But Tuvok is at an impasse with himself because he is frustrated at his inability to be able to teach these kids a single thing. Everything that he attempts, fails miserably.

But what we have here is a pretty good story about how something that was merely an inconvenience turns into a shipwide emergency focusing on these four "students", eventually becoming a bonding experience that neither they, nor Tuvok, ever expected.

I think it is unfortunate that we were introduced to these characters in this way but we only ever saw crewman Chell ever again. They could have and should have been used more, especially in the episode where the Seska hologram takes over the ship... or the episode where the disgraced Vedek programs Tuvox's brain from the Alpha quadrant, who then uses Tuvok to ignite a small Maquis rebellion on the ship... there was even an episode where Janeway takes on a small Lower Decks Club of her own, needless to say that there were also the crewmen left over from the starship Equinox.

But this episode was merely a 1st Season interlude. Not too many dire things had happened to Voyager... Yet. In this episode the focus is the Maquis lower decks but also on one of Neelix's big cooking blunders.

What is hilarious about this episode is that the small thing that Neelix attempted to do revealed a severe design flaw with those double blasted "Bio-Neural Gel Packs", The Starfleet engineer that thought up the tech did not consider that things having biological "circuitry" can get sick, and the pack would need to be able to recover from that illness the same way a person would recover from it.

Fortunately a solution was thought of by the Doctor, but how in 57 inferno blazes can Be'elana make it happen?