Learning Curve
As it turns out, we haven’t learned a damn thing.
Cheesy Fun
“Learning Curve” is one of those episodes that makes me wonder why people are watching Star Trek in the first place. I don’t mean that it’s so bad it becomes franchise-breaking (though it is pretty bad). It’s that the parts of this episode that gets the most stick is basically inoffensive, whereas those I found utterly enraging seem to generally get a pass.
Let’s start with the former, by cutting into Neelix’s infectious danger-cheese. I wasn’t really tuned into Trek fandom at the time – I’m not sure I am now – but from what I can gather, reaction at the time to the dairy-based B-plot ranged from just thinking it was rubbish, to thinking it was so rubbish it meant that Voyager was doomed.
Which doesn’t make sense to me. Nothing about the cheese plot is actually bad. For sure it’s silly. That’s not the same thing, though, and if you think it is, I’ve got a lot of sour news for you about pretty much the entire history of Trek. There aren’t many funnier ideas than humanity’s first foray into the sphere of bio-technology proving vulnerable to the hum of stinky space-Stilton. And if you can’t revel in the perfectly-pitched, utterly unapologetic ludicrousness of someone yelling “GET THIS CHEESE TO SICK-BAY”, then I simply don’t know what to tell you, except that other, more grimdark sci-fi shows are available, and that Enterprise’s worst excesses are probably partially your fault.
It suppose one could argue the real problem is the show still having no idea how to use Neelix, except as a drag factor. Not a terrible point, really, but it does lose some of its bite with this episode coming immediately after “Jetrel”. The message of that story might have been morally reprehensible, but it also gave Ethan Phillips the best material he’d had to work with all year. Plus, it’s Neelix here who gets to call Tuvok out on his absolutely toxic attitude which somebody absolutely had to do
.
Which brings us to where the episode’s problems really do start.
The Loneliness Of The Middle-Distance Runner
Your light yearage may vary. Under other circumstances, the fact no-one else is tickled by hyper-advanced bio-tech being threatened by unpasturised dairy produce would barely be worth noting. My problem isn’t so much the fact the B-plot here has a bad rap, then. It’s that the A-plot doesn’t, despite it being – and let’s not be coy – utterly fucking hideous.
Perhaps this is a case of needing to be careful about what you wish for. Over the course of this season, I’ve repeatedly complained about how many episodes that don’t even mention the Maquis, let alone actually do something interesting with them. That’s certainly not the case here. It may not have been anyone’s intention for “Learning Curve” to end up being the finale to the first season, but after four full episodes in which the word doesn’t so much as appear, it feels right to bring things to a close with an episode focused on Chakotay’s crew.
The problem comes in literally everything that happens after that decision.
First, there’s the framing. Voyager features two groups of people with radically different experiences and goals, from two organisations with wildly differing levels of resources and entry requirements, both of whom have been thrown into a situation neither one of them ever expected to face. It should have been a no-brainer to write a smattering of episodes (preferably starting long before now) exploring how the two approaches could be – and had to be - synthesised. It would have been difficult, and ugly, and you’d expect backsliding and infighting. Ultimately, though, what emerged from the crucible could have been stronger than any individual element that had gone in.
Instead, “Learning Curve” insists throughout that the Starfleet way is the only way, and all that’s in question is how best to make recalcitrant Maquis members realise that. I’m sure Janeway thinks she’s being perfectly reasonable when she says the Starfleet senior staff bear some of the blame for the fact the two crews aren’t yet fully integrated. Really though, the only blame she’s willing to take on herself is in accepting she may not have been clear enough in explaining why she is right and the Maquis are wrong. How magnanimous.
The situation continues to bounce downhill. Janeway’s argument that the Maquis crew never learned the benefits of the Starfleet approach because they didn’t go to the Academy is a little disingenuous – her own chief engineer got into the academy and explicitly rejected the approach it insisted on, for one thing – but it’s not an argument entirely divorced from reality. Even were it a more solid proposition, though, it should be clear that a problem caused by absence from school will not necessarily be solved by sending someone back there. If some failure in record keeping meant I’d managed to skip out on my TB shot as a thirteen-year old, the solution would not have been to make me retake Year 8.
And in some ways Janeway’s solution is even worth than that analogy suggests, because at least school was something I was required to go through. Janeway is looking at four people who all decided they didn’t want anything to do with the Starfleet system, and decided the solution is to force them into that system to the greatest degree possible. It's like finding out your assistant avoids the forth-floor copy room because they're afraid of heights, and responding by booking them on a skydiving course.
Treating these four Maquis as though they were raw recruits is a bad idea just in principle, in other words. In practice, it’s even worse. Tuvok takes his orders from Janeway literally, completely ignoring any attempts to actually demonstrate Starfleet’s ethos or approach, trying instead simply to break the Maquis in like wild horses.
I should note I’ve got my own ill-tempered equine in this race, I guess. I hated school, and never more so than when I was suffering through my thrice-weekly PE lessons. As an academically solid but asthmatic, overweight and (let’s be honest) rather lazy child, I found games lessons in general and long-distance running in particular the absolute nadir of my five years at secondary school.
So I have an instinctive, irrepressible reaction of outrage when I watch Tuvok punish someone’s chattiness by forcing them to do fifty laps of the sports hall – sorry, cargo bay. I know precisely which baggage I’m lugging when I say this looks more like bullying than teaching. Even if I’m over-identifying with my hatred of using enforced exertion as a method of punishment, though, I’m pretty sure I’m on firm ground objecting to Tuvok demanding eye-contact and a firm voice from someone clearly not disposed to provide either. I really hope this is the lieutenant’s mistake alone, and not a standard approach at the academy, because it looks an awful lot like an attempt to force the neurodiverse to conform to the standards of the neurotypical. Starfleet should be past that. We should be past that.
In short: if Tuvok’s aim here was to start winning the respect of his charges, then, he couldn’t possibly have gotten off to a worse start. We can say the same about the episode winning the interest of its audience.
Full Duranium Jacket
This leads us to a more general issue. For all the time we’ve spent in Trek’s twenty-fourth century, we still know comparatively little about the way Starfleet Academy really works. In particular, it’s not at all clear to what extent its curriculum includes physical fitness. We know the academic side of the Academy works roughly akin to a university, with a wide array of classes available. Pretty much every mention I’m aware of regarding physical activity, though, seems to be of an extra-curricular nature.
So why kick off with a mandatory ten-klick high-gravity run? That’s never been referenced as something the Academy does. In fact, one thing we do know about the Academy is that after passing the entrance exams, the next stage is four days of preparatory testing, not a death-march through the Jeffrey’s tubes.
Tuvok’s approach here doesn’t match up with anything we understand about how Starfleet inducts recruits, in other words. What it does match up with is any number of fictional representations of a military boot camp. This is more than a little disturbing, because it returns us to the fundamental problem of Starfleet being an organisation which claims to represent the best and brightest of a society dedicated to peace and understanding, but which deliberately models itself according to military principles.
There are more than a few Trek critics that have a major problem with Starfleet’s military trappings. At the risk of poorly serving those writers by oversimplifying their positions, there are two main objections here. First, the idea of a rigid military hierarchy sits uneasily in the context of a society seemingly dedicated to peace, egalitarianism, and self-improvement. Second, it’s impossible to forget the fact that throughout essentially the entirety of human history, a ship crammed with military personnel turning up where you live and claiming to simply be “explorers” has turned out to be an awful development for the locals. Put even more simply, a military implies imperialism, and imperialism was always supposed to be the last thing the Federation was about.
All of which is completely reasonable. The second point, in particular, is pretty hard to push back against. That said, I tend to be less concerned about the idea Starfleet apes a military structure, because I think the structure and historical circumstances of the military in question matter. Take the set-up of the post-revolutionary Russian armed forces, for instance – at least in its earliest phases – where the idea was everyone obeyed the chain of command during missions but got to vote officers in or out once back at the barracks. That’s a very different kettle of swordfish to the standard system of top-down promotions, where your only options are to do what your told by whomever you’re told will be telling you do what you’re told, or quit/get shot. We could also question how strict we want to be about the term “military” when thinking about how axiomatically bad the borrowing of such a structure actually is.
The militia of the POUM, for instance, in which George Orwell served (initially as a corporal) during the Spanish Civil War, took an approach which is almost unrecognisable to what most people understand when they think of a military unit:
‘Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness–on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square… until about June 1937 there was nothing to keep [the militia] [on the front line], except class loyalty – Homage to Catalonia
In other words, the degree to which military structure is a problem depends a great deal on why that structure is necessary, and how that structure is both conceived, and imposed.
Antifa Through The Ages
Let me preface this section by pointing to what I’m sure is obvious: of the many topics on which I am not an expert, military discipline must be fairly high on the list. Take everything I’m about to say with a large pinch of replicated salt.
Backside thereby covered, let’s talk about conscription. From what little I understand – and I’m basing this almost entirely of what little I know about the Vietnam War – unit discipline looks very different depending on whether that unit actually volunteered to wear a uniform. Conscripts, for some reason, tend to be less willing to do what their told by a system that has not only taken over their lives, but reserves the right to risk or even sacrifice that life as well.
The relevance here should be obvious. One could try to argue the Maquis crew aren’t technically conscripts, because in theory they could choose to settle in the Delta Quadrant and let Voyager warp off without them. That option though would mean a) they never again saw their friends and families and homes, b) it would mean abandoning the fight against space-fascism they’re clearly dedicated to, and c) they might forever be at risk from any of the multiple people Janeway has already hacked off in the Delta. Seeing Dalby, Chell, Gerron and Henley as conscripts makes much more sense than treating them as volunteers (and hey, even conscription in our world can be avoided via emigration). But while the tour of duty for drafted soldiers was twelve months in Vietnam, the Maquis know they might be spending as long as seven decades on this Starfleet ship.
Under those circumstances, it’s inevitable that discipline would be a problem. Frankly, the fact the biggest issues that seem to have surfaced is that some of the Maquis crew talk too much and prioritise repairs over repair orders – or in Gerron’s case, dare to be autistic while on duty – is rather impressive. And yet having recognising that the issue lies in these four people having been forced to serve, Tuvok decides that rather than carefully consider what the unprecedented existence of Starfleet conscripts might imply, he simply gets on with the historical approach to conscripts, which is to break their will.
This would be an ugly look for Starfleet at any time. It particularly bothers me here, though, because I think it desperately short-sells the Maquis. In order to get this awful plot to work, after all, we’re told that the Maquis approach to discipline is to punch the junior ranks until they do as they’ve been instructed. The instillation of Maquis discipline is deliberately framed as an even more bullish and brutal process than its Starfleet equivalent, in the hopes the deck gets too stacked for us to bother reading the cards.
This is a vile calumny. I can think of nothing in the Maquis stories to date supporting the idea they operate through hierarchical corporal punishment. More than that, though, it’s historically illiterate. I didn’t choose the above example of anti-fascist militias at random. Nor did I do it just because it let me swipe at the kind of tactics being made use of by Tuvok here. It seems to me you couldn’t get much better at coming up with a real-world analogue for the Maquis’ struggle against the Cardassians than the fight against Franco [1]. A diverse quasi-military organisation drawn together from dozens of different societies in order to fight fascism, who struggle against enormous odds to liberate people while those with power who should be doing it are ignoring their struggle at best and actively hindering it at worst? Sounds a lot like Orwell’s experience to me.
So did the upper ranks of the POUM (such as they were) have to enforce discipline via the closed fist? Not even a little. As the rest of chapter 3 of Homage to Catalonia makes clear, the problem with a military unit brought together by political sympathies rather than a nation state isn’t that you can’t get an order followed without cold-cocking someone, it’s that you can’t get an order followed without a five-minute argument about whether the order will actually help to bring about a fascist-free utopia.
It’s not hard to think of situations in which the need to provide a Powerpoint presentation on why it’s important to advance immediately might cause problems. As Orwell points out, though, the POUM militias were still newly-formed. There was time for them to get their shit figured out. And critically, you could get them out into the field almost immediately, because you didn't have to smash your recruits around until their free will withered and died. The militamen were lippy, but they were also the only people actually shooting at the fascists.
“Learning Curve” is doubly unpalatable, then. It not only takes as read that Starfleet’s militaristic approach is the objectively correct one, it also suggests any alternate form of discipline is automatically inferior. It’s authoritarian, reactionary nonsense. And while it’s true that Neelix calls Tuvok out on his approach, that scarcely seems sufficient. Tuvok and his terrible attitude are a symptom, not the disease.
(Let’s also take a minute to marvel at how completely the writers must have misunderstood their own characters to have B’Elanna Torres argue that Dalby is only resisting arbitrary demands from Starfleet authorities because he’s afraid he won’t measure up. I can’t decide what’s worse, the idea that Torres could mock a fellow Maquis despite knowing she’s got the same underlying tendencies, or the idea that after being promoted to Chief Engineer she genuinely doesn’t get why any other Maquis would still have a problem with the current state of affairs.)
It didn’t have to be this way. There are genuine criticisms one can level against the Maquis, ones that wouldn’t require pretending discipline and free-thinking are mutually exclusive. The one smart thing Tuvok does here is rewrite the Kobiyashi Maru test to allow escape to be possible, knowing the Maquis aren’t going to even countenance retreat. It’s literally the only time in the entire episode where he makes a solid point about the blindspots of the Maquis compared to Starfleet. In that moment, Tuvok becomes a forerunner to Rose Tico, pointing out the folly of focusing on the destruction of your enemy, rather than the preservation of your friends. [2]
An actual episode about that tension could have been glorious. Actually exploring what the two crews would fight for, and what they’d sacrifice in the process, would have been entirely worth our time. That isn’t what we get here, though. What we get is musings on whether or not boot camps need to work a little harder at individualising their process of dehumanisation, like checking what someone’s favourite drink is before you waterboard them with it. It’s an objectionable failure on just about every level, even before we get to a conclusion that essentially argues unswerving obedience to a mandated military structure is bearable, so long as the people maintaining that structure don’t abandon their subordinates to burn to death. [3]
I said at the start that this episode isn’t so bad that it breaks the franchise. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t do its best to try. I don’t care that Roddenberry himself was in the US Armed Forces, this king of fetishisation of military training is a betrayal of everything that makes Star Trek worth writing about.
We’re supposed to have moved past this. Apparently, that is not the case. I’ll say this much for the first season of Voyager, though. It ends the way it begins, with a desperate quest to turn the clocks back to a past that is as unreachable as it is undesirable. The franchise that once prided itself in imagining a better future for mankind has now been reduced to pretending mankind used to have a better past, one in which barn dances were places of refuge and the US Army knew how to make a man out of you.
It’s almost beside the point to note that by this stage, the franchise is killing itself with its own self-plagiarism. The real problem isn’t that it’s repackaging its own history. It’s that it’s repackaging the positions of some genuinely unpleasant people. It turns out, amazingly, that the idea anti-fascist organisations are bad because they lack discipline isn’t actually a message we needed, then or now.
Sadly, we leave Voyager as backwards-facing as it has ever been.
Ordering
1. Shore Leave
5. Learning Curve
[1] The show itself went with the French Resistance, due to the common problem of American TV writers being incapable of drawing inspiration from any historical event that didn’t involve America itself.
[2] It’s very interesting, when viewing events from this angle, that Tuvok makes the choice to have Voyager attacked by Romulans, rather than Cardassians. By doing so, he strengthens his point about the Maquis not knowing when to retreat - they can't even claim they lost focus through their need for revenge. Of course, given the rest of the episode’s fixation on Starfleet being right and the Maquis being wrong, the idea that the Maquis should be less combative carries with it some rather unfortunate implications about fascism being something you should make peace with rather than physically oppose. That’s the rest of the episode’s problem though – this bit I rather like.
[3] I suspect we’ll come back to this when I cover “Coming Of Age” in April, given Wesley learns the exact opposite lesson as part of his own attempts to reach the standards required of Starfleet.