“Learning Curve”
Written by Ronald Wilkerson & Jean Louise Matthias
Directed by David Livingston
Season 1, Episode 15
Production episode 116
Original air date: May 22, 1995
Stardate: 48846.5
Captain’s log. Janeway’s latest jaunt into the holodeck to do her Mrs. Davenport novel is interrupted by the two children she’s governess for disappearing. It’s one of several systems failures. Tuvok goes to investigate and finds a panel open—and Crewman Kenneth Dalby inside. He found a bioneural gelpack was malfunctioning and swapped it out for a new one. His doing so caused the system hiccups, mostly because he never bothered to report it to anyone. When Tuvok calls him on that lack of reporting, Dalby is insubordinate as hell.
Tuvok meets with Janeway and Chakotay to discuss Dalby’s behavior, which has apparently been a problem for a while. Several of the Maquis crew—particularly the ones who were never in Starfleet—are having trouble adjusting. Chakotay picks the four who are having the most difficulty, and Janeway assigns them to Tuvok. He’s to give them a crash course in Starfleet procedures, just like he did when he taught at the Academy years ago.
Dalby is joined by another human, Henley, a Bolian named Chell, and a Bajoran named Gerron. They all resent this assignment. Chell babbles to the point that Tuvok makes him do laps to shut him up, while Gerron barely speaks and doesn’t look at Tuvok when he speaks (quietly) to him. Eventually, they walk out on Tuvok and reconvene in the mess hall. They assume they won’t be put in the brig for 70 years, especially since they need every person on board. (They don’t mention that they’re already down two people, Seska and Durst, but that’s a factor.)
Chakotay then shows up and asks for their side of the story. Dalby is dismissive of the Starfleet way, saying he prefers the Maquis way, so Chakotay decides to discipline him the Maquis way: by hauling off and belting him. Chakotay makes it clear that the beatings will continue until morale improves, and they’d better not walk out on Tuvok tomorrow or ever again.
Tuvok ends his first complete class by inspecting uniforms, making Gerron and Chell remove jewelry and Henley remove her headband. Later, Dalby is bitching and moaning to Torres about the class, which is interrupted by another systems failure. Yet another gelpack has gone bad. They only have forty-seven replacements, and they can’t afford to keep losing them. Chakotay suggests they switch as many systems over to more traditional isolinear power as possible.
Having found no systemic issue with the gelpack, Torres takes it to sickbay to have the EMH examine the biological components. Sure enough, it turns out that the gelpacks are infected.
Tuvok sends the cadets on a climb through many Jefferies tubes, then go on a ten-kilometer run. It isn’t until they finish, exhausted, that Tuvok reveals that he increased gravity by ten percent on the deck where the run was.
He later takes them to the holodeck for a war-game simulation. Dalby’s in command and when they answer a distress call from a Ferengi ship, they’re challenged by two Romulan warbirds that decloak. Dalby tries to fight back, but loses, and they’re “killed.” Tuvok is disappointed that nobody gets what went wrong: retreat was never considered.
Tuvok is brooding in the mess hall, and Neelix takes it upon himself as self-appointed morale officer to try to cheer him up, showing him a flower they picked up on a planet that has very strong stems that can bend a bit, but don’t break—except for the occasional brittle one. Being a literal-minded doofus, Tuvok assumes that the brittle one that won’t bend is his cadets, but it is, in fact, Tuvok in this analogy.
Neelix has recently made cheese from some milk they acquired, and Tuvok realizes that to make cheese you need bacteria…
Sure enough, the cheese is chock full of bacteria. The EMH examines the cheese to discover that the bacteria is carrying tons of microviruses, which are too small to be picked up by Voyager’s sensors. That’s what’s infecting the gelpacks.
Taking Neelix’s advice, Tuvok invites Dalby to the holodeck to play pool at Chez Sandrine in an attempt to get to know him better. This fails rather spectacularly, as Dalby tells the story of how he wound up on Voyager: after growing up rough on the Bajoran frontier, he fell in love with a Bajoran woman—who was then raped and killed by three Cardassians. So he joined the Maquis so he could kill as many Cardassians as possible.
The infection spreads to more gelpacks. They haven’t had time to switch over to isolinear circuits, and they’re losing many ship’s systems. The EMH realizes that the gelpacks aren’t designed to fight off an infection the way living beings are, by getting a fever. They have to super-heat the gelpacks. Torres hits on a way to do it, but it requires diverting all power to the warp field for a plasma burst, which cuts out life support. The ship becomes incredibly hot, and the air gets stale. Some systems are still overloading and failing.
Tuvok and his cadets are in the cargo bay when the cascade failure of systems initially starts, and he dismisses class so they can report to duty stations—but one of the systems failures is the door to the cargo bay. They’re trapped. Tuvok sends Gerron to check the console.
A junction explodes and releases toxic gas. They manage to get an access panel to a Jefferies tube open, but Gerron is still up in the console room. Dalby wants to go back for Gerron, but Tuvok refuses to let any more of them come to harm, threatening to break Dalby’s arm if he doesn’t go into the tube.
Chell, Henley, and Dalby go into the tube—and then, to everyone’s shock, Tuvok closes the bulkhead behind them and goes after Gerron. He gets him from the console room and then brings him down the ladder before collapsing on the deck. The other three get to the corridor and are able to open the cargo-bay door from outside. Dalby is impressed that Tuvok went against procedure and tried to help Gerron, and he says that if Tuvok can violate procedure, maybe the four of them can occasionally follow it.
The super-heating works, and the gelpacks are “cured.” Voyager is able to restore systems with all the gelpacks functioning normally again.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The bioneural gelpacks, which were there to make it easier for Voyager to navigate the Badlands, control most critical ship’s systems. Janeway also comments that they’re practically indestructible, so seeing them fail like this is confusing. (Having said that, it’s still relatively new technology. There are always bugs. Almost literal bugs in this case…)
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway’s attitude toward training the four Maquis is that it will help them acclimate to the Starfleet way of doing things. She views it as a help to them, though the cadets themselves view it as a punishment. When Tuvok suggests that Chakotay would be better suited to train them, Janeway points out that Chakotay already has their respect. Tuvok still has to earn it.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok taught at the Academy for sixteen years. However, his methods, which were completely successful on eager young cadets, are not so much on recalcitrant ex-terrorists.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is the only one not affected by the super-heating of the ship. The murderous look that the sweat-drenched Kes gives him as he gleefully says that all is well while being the only kempt person left on the ship is hilarious.
Everyone comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is the cause of the problem, as the cheese he made is full of bacteria. He also tries to help Tuvok out by using a bog-obvious metaphor that still manages to go over Tuvok’s head.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Janeway has progressed to the part of her Gothic holonovel where Mrs. Davenport meets the (rather obnoxious) children she’s now responsible for, Henry, the Viscount Timmons, and Lady Beatrice. The urging by Lord Burleigh to avoid the fourth floor in “Cathexis” is possibly given more context by Beatrice insisting that her mother isn’t dead and she saw her yesterday.
The holodeck is later used by Tuvok for training by re-creating the bridge for a war game simulation, and then again to try to get to know Dalby over a game of pool at Chez Sandrine.
Do it.
“Get the cheese to sickbay!”
Torres manages to say this with a straight face. It is unknown how many takes it took Roxann Dawson to say it with such, however.
Welcome aboard. Armand Schultz (Dalby), Derek McGrath (Chell), Kenny Morrison (Gerron), and Catherine MacNeal (Henley) play the Maquis who are trained by Tuvok. Chell is the only one who’s even mentioned again, as McGrath will be back in “Repression,” and is referenced in dialogue several other times.
In addition, Thomas Dekker and Lindsey Haun play the two holographic children Janeway is governess for in her holonovel. They’ll both return in “Persistence of Vision,” and Haun will also play Belle in “Real Life.”
Trivial matters: This episode wound up being the first season finale, with UPN holding back the final four episodes that were produced for the first season—”Projections,” “Elogium,” “Twisted,” and “The 37s”—for season two. “The 37s” was originally to be the first-season finale, but it instead became the second-season premiere. In the UK, however, those four episodes were shown (and released on home video) as part of the first season.
Writers Ronald Wilkerson & Jean Louise Matthias had originally pitched a Neelix-focused episode, but the producers went with “Jetrel” instead, so they pitched this. That original Neelix concept would later be purchased for the third season as “Fair Trade.” This is the first Voyager credit for the writing team, who had previously written or co-written “Imaginary Friend,” “Schisms,” “Lessons,” and “Lower Decks” for TNG.
The four Maquis characters all appear as part of Chakotay’s Maquis cell in your humble rewatcher’s The Brave and the Bold Book 2, the first half of which tells the story of how and why Tuvok infiltrated the Maquis prior to “Caretaker.”
While the other three are never referenced ever again, Chell keeps coming back. Besides returning onscreen in “Repression” and being mentioned in several episodes, he turns up in several tie-ins: the video games Elite Force and Elite Force II (in the latter, which takes place after Voyager‘s return home in the series finale, he’s serving on the U.S.S. Enterprise-E); the comic book Elite Force by Dan Abnett, Ian Edginton, Jeffrey Moy, and W.C. Carani; and the Prometheus novel trilogy by Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg, in which he’s serving on the U.S.S. Prometheus eight years after Voyager’s return.
Set a course for home. “I don’t want to get to know you, and I don’t want to be your friend.” Where last episode was Voyager at its best, this episode is Voyager at its most frustrating.
Back in 2011 when I was rewatching The Next Generation, I mentioned how frustrating it was that the premise of TNG was that there were children and families on the Enterprise, yet nothing significant was done with that until “When the Bough Breaks,” the sixteenth episode of the season.
History repeats itself here. “Caretaker” set up a situation where the Maquis had to integrate with the Starfleet crew to work together to get home, but it’s taken until the fifteenth episode of the season for an episode to be built around it, though, to be fair, it was also part of the texture of “Parallax,” “Prime Factors,” and “State of Flux,” though the latter two would still have worked the same if the crew was just Starfleet, as the being-stranded-far-from-home part was more important than the mixed-crew part of both stories. Still, the events of “Learning Curve” are the sorts of things that should’ve happened much sooner in the first season.
More to the point, it should’ve happened with actual characters we care about. After doing such a good job with Carey and Seska (“State of Flux” mostly worked because prior episodes had established both of them), and even sort of with Durst, they drop the ball here, giving us four characters we’ve never seen before and three of whom we will never see again (the latter is not really this episode’s fault, but it points up to the endemic problem). There are only a couple hundred people on this ship, and they all have roles to play on the ship, and they can’t be replaced. That needed to be a factor more often.
On top of that, the episode completely blows it with the use of Tuvok, because apparently nobody involved with the creation of this episode remembered that Tuvok infiltrated Chakotay’s Maquis cell, as established in the opening scene of “Caretaker.” Janeway said back in “Parallax” that Tuvok provided full information on the Maquis cell he was part of.
So why doesn’t he know them? Why doesn’t he already know Dalby’s story? Why do the four of them appear to be complete strangers to him? He mentions that Chell has been reported to be a bit of a babbler, but Tuvok himself should already know that from his time as part of Chakotay’s cell.
It’s especially frustrating because that could’ve been a plot point. Janeway’s comment about how this was as much about Tuvok earning the Maquis personnel’s trust as it was about them learning how to be Starfleet could have been taken one step further. Tuvok betrayed all of them and lied to them in order to gather intelligence about them for Starfleet. Dalby, Chell, Hanley, and Gerron shouldn’t resent Tuvok because he’s being a hardass to them as their trainer, they should resent him because of what he did to them.
That’s not the only bit of collective amnesia, as apparently everyone also forgot Tuvok breaking regulations to save Janeway an agonizing decision in “Prime Factors,” something that everyone on board was aware of. Tuvok being a hidebound asshole toward the cadets still mostly works because he’s in teacher mode, but Tuvok bending the rules to save Gerron isn’t exactly new behavior given his back-room deal to get the spatial trajector on Sikaris.
Torres’s role in this is just off, too. She’s ex-Maquis as well, and her contribution is strangely muted. She comments to Dalby about how he’s maybe afraid of failing, but that’s as far as it goes. Chakotay’s role, at least, makes sense, and, for all that it’s a cliché, I love when he hauls off and belts Dalby, because it shows up the foursome’s hypocrisy. They’re more than happy to do things the Starfleet way when it comes to Starfleet decorum, where they are generally polite to you even when they’re being hardasses. But they want to be Maquis when it comes to their own behavior, and that one punch makes it clear that that double standard won’t hold. If they want to be ragtag terrorists, they’ll be disciplined like ragtag terrorists.
The final resolution is pathetic. Tuvok does one unexpected thing, and that’s it? Now Dalby and the others will be good officers? Really?
These same two writers did the story for “Lower Decks,” and that TNG episode did right what this episode utterly failed at. The non-regular characters all had specific arcs that came to a conclusion by episode’s end. By contrast, the four Maquis here are cranky and annoyed until the last minute, when Dalby says they’re okay. Since we’ll never see three of them ever again, we have no way of knowing if this will take, and the episode itself failed spectacularly at closing off their arcs.
The actual training is—okay? I guess? The physical fitness makes sense, especially given the circumstance, and I really liked that Tuvok increased the gravity without telling them, as that’s the sort of unexpected thing that can happen. (Hell, the time since they got stuck in the Delta Quadrant has seen much crazier-ass shit happen to them than a simple increase in gravity, what with time distortions, singularities, micro-wormholes, dimensional shifting, and so on.) But the holodeck scenario didn’t feel like it was thought through particularly well, and it really wasn’t much of a teamwork exercise, it was just Dalby making one decision that changed everything.
This could’ve been a great episode, one that highlighted the differences between Starfleet and Maquis philosophy, and how those differences play out when everyone’s stuck impossibly far from home. Instead, it’s a mess, one that ignores the show’s own history twice over to ill effect, and winds up serving neither the main characters nor its guest characters well.
Hilariously, the episode is only getting as high as a 4 rating because of the technobabble B-plot, which is usually a disposable part of any Trek story, but this one works because it’s ultimately about cheese, which is delightful, and is exactly the sort of thing that will happen when you’re in uncharted territory. Very little was done with Voyager‘s bioneural gelpacks as a power system overall, but this was a fun use of it.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be contributing to three Crazy 8 Press anthologies later this year: Bad Ass Moms, edited by Mary Fan, a collection of short stories about mothers you don’t mess with, ZLONK! ZOK! ZOWIE! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guide to Batman ’66—Season One, edited by Jim Beard, with Rich Handley, a collection of essays about the first season of the Adam West TV series, and the third volume in the Pangaea shared-world anthology series, edited by Michael Jan Friedman, a collection of alternate-history short stories taking place in an Earth that only has one huge continent instead of seven.
You know that a franchise has legs when it can go from passionate paeans on the ‘Measure of a Man’ to “Get the cheese to the sickbay!” without breaking character; honestly, a STAR TREK that didn’t occasionally throw in such hilariously implausible bits of business just wouldn’t be quite so loveable!
By the way, that remark about the precise origins of the Maquis defaulter’s attitude towards Mr Tuvok is excellent Mr Decandido – I’m ashamed it didn’t occur to me while watching the episode itself (clearly my grasp of Logic simply doesn’t equal a True Vulcan Master as yet!).
Here I was, all ready to stand up and defend the much-reviled “Get this cheese to sickbay!” as a delightful line that was silly on purpose and thus undeserving of the ridicule it gets, and it turns out the cheese part was the part you liked. I agree, it’s a nice for-want-of-a-nail puzzle story where the answer is something totally mundane and unexpected, and a nice use of the semi-biological nature of the gel packs. That was a concept new to Voyager, so it was cool that they found a way to make real use of it in a story.
And I guess I don’t recall liking the training plot all that much either. I think my impression was that it just kind of meandered and then fizzled out. I don’t remember if I noticed the inconsistency of Tuvok not knowing these four.
One thing that did impress me, if not here then in his later appearance, was the performance of the 7-year-old Thomas Dekker as the holographic Henry Burleigh. He really gave a hell of a good performance for such a young kid (although at the time I thought he was 4 or 5, which made it seem even more impressive). He would return to play another illusory character, Picard’s Nexus-fantasy son Thomas in Generations, and would go on to have a recurring role in the first season of Heroes and star as the teenaged John Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
He would return to play another illusory character, Picard’s Nexus-fantasy son Thomas in Generations
@2/Christopher: Wasn’t Generations filmed several months before this episode? More likely, Berman and the casting department (Lowry-Johnson and Surma) had him in mind for the Voyager Holodeck role.
wow, I never loved this episode to begin with (and I just completed my own Voyager rewatch this year) but I never even thought about the obvious plot hole that Tuvok should absolutely know all of these people before. Good point, KRaD.
Yeah, Dekker’s role in Generations came before this one.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As always, heh, I can’t help thinking of SF Debris’ review during Janeway’s Holodeck Program:
“God, why do I have to read this drivel?! All I want to do is get that umbrella that lets me fly!”
As a season finale, I think this is kind of … meh. Not a bad little episode, though Krad has an excellent point about how the logic breaks down with Tuvok not knowing the Maquis. And that shot of Kes being utterly drenched in sweat standing next to a perfectly normal Doctor, that was probably my favorite visual of the season.
One little thing, I’d have considered it a valid Trivial Matter, but I may be too easy or stuff: Gerron not being allowed his earring recalls “Ensign Ro”, the episode, and it really did make me blink in surprise the first time I saw this episode, because I’d missed “Ensign Ro”, and thus never got to see Riker give Ro crap for her earring. (Gerron had an even better case for it being a religious thing as well as a cultural thing, if I recall what writers and/or Michelle Forbes said about Ro being basically agnostic/areligious, wearing her earring on the left side to keep the vedeks from checking her pagh all the time…)
I don’t particularly care for the way the four Maquis are presented as if something is wrong with them for not fitting in with the Starfleet culture. Wearing uniforms and working in a strict hierarchy are not for everyone. It would have been nice to see a few Maquis refuse the uniform and rank but still able to contribute positively to the survival and success of the overall group. Instead, the episode makes it seems like a person who doesn’t want to join the military is somehow deficient.
To be honest, I had completely forgotten that Tuvok had been a spy & we are watching on a compressed schedule (I’m rewatching/watching as we go along). I wonder what it was like for people watching live & it being 14-15 weeks (min, depending on any hiatuses during the season) after Caretaker. Another plot point that didn’t get handled very well.
I just thought Tuvok was the absolute worst choice for a teacher for the same reason Janeway thought he was the best. Yes, he taught at the Academy, but the cadets wanted to be there, the Maquis crew members? Not so much. And I get that the decision had been made to run the ship as Star Fleet and there are regs, but the business with the headband and jewelry just felt petty.
There never seems to be any effort given to actually blending the two crews – with the best of both being used to make a new whole. Instead all the Maquis are Borg assimilated into Star Fleet drones. And as KRAD says in the recap, this should have been addressed at the beginning of the season, not the end (and really, not ever again…).
It occurs to me that this episode would have been a LOT more effective not only had they done this very early on in the season, but also had they used Seska herself as one of the disgruntled underlings. It would have given extra weight to her heel turn in Prime Factors/State of Flux.
As it is, it’s very much a poorly done reimagining of TNG’s Lower Decks, with disposable characters and very little in the way of actual stakes. I can find a laugh here and there, mostly thanks to the use of cheese bacteria, plus Tuvok’s clever training by adding extra gravity to the deck.
I watched every scene of Tuvok and Dalby expecting for the man to throw Tuvok’s Caretaker betrayal back at him. While I can understand his anger and his Maquis motivation (the Cardassian rape), it doesn’t really add anything to the dynamic between them. And it certainly paints Tuvok as a less than thorough investigator. Plotting consistency was not in the writers’ minds. Then again, it was late in the season. Late season episodes tend to suffer from the crunch production time. Still, nothing that couldn’t have been fixed in one of the script rewrites. That’s why shows have bibles.
It’s watchable enough, thanks in no small part to Tim Russ, who’s capable of making Tuvok unintentionally funny during the worst of these pedantic drill scenes (because the four Maquis themselves barely qualify as antagonists).
I really don’t know whether this episode or The 37′s would have served better as a finale. Voyager was so episodic at this point that it didn’t really matter (and next season’s Basics two parter would also be a major mixed bag on its own end). It’s not until Braga’s creative move to develop large-scale blockbuster two parters that the show becomes better structured on how to do its season finales. So, I don’t have a particular problem with this season ending on a small-scale episode. I only wish it was a better one than this. It wasn’t a smart decision by UPN.
On a side note – this was David Livingston’s last directorial credit while also functioning as a producer on both this and DS9. After this season, he would contribute mainly as a director-for-hire.
@6 “I’d like to find whoever wrote that line and hit them in the groin with a wiffle bat.”
Sonnenberg is the gift that keeps on giving.
This episode annoyed me for pretty much all the same reasons, plus one thing I noticed (it may just be me) but the entire Fed/Cardassian/DMZ/Maquis arc in Berman Trek seemed to make the Federation seem almost imperialist, that if you don’t do it our way then we will consider you the enemy . Imperialist may be the wrong word.
Anyways!
This will always be the episode where the crew gave Voyager a bad fever to cure it of food poisoning from bad cheese.
@11:
Sonnenberg is the gift that keeps on giving.
Absolutely. His Origin Story for the Defiant always makes me crack up anytime I need a laugh.
Suffice it to say, I’m keep quoting my favorite, relevant SF Debris as the VOY Rewatch continues.
Heh heh heh, we’re gonna have lots of fun with the Psycho Janeway jokes. :)
Excellent review Keith, nailed it as usual.
One other thing that bugs me about the bridge simulation: The Maquis are terrorists! Or, well, I’m sure they think of themselves as insurgents. However you want to label them, hit and run tactics would be well-known to the Maquis. If anything, the Maquis should be more familiar with retreating (or “strategic withdrawals”) than Starfleet is, since they’re constantly outgunned while Starfleet rarely is at this pre-Dominion War point. More broadly, Voyager is going to be operating a lot more like a Maquis ship, because they don’t have a massive interstellar empire they can phone for help. Really wish this had been styled more as the crews learning from each other. Because, let’s face it, there’s worse things than a crewman noticing something is broken and fixing it and Voyager definitely doesn’t have the luxury of worrying about scuffed boots or headbands.
@10/Eduardo: I definitely think “The 37s” would’ve made a better finale, since it ends with the crew being given a choice between settling down and moving on and choosing to keep going, which is the kind of reaffirmation of the characters’ quest that was common in season finales in these more episodic times. It kind of works as a season premiere too for the same reason, but I wish they’d kept it as a finale (and I wish something else too, but I’ll get to that when the time comes).
“Learning Curve” makes a terrible finale because it’s a totally ordinary episode that has nothing finale-ish about it in any way. Even within itself, it has a weak and inconclusive ending, so it’s a hell of an anticlimactic way to end a whole season. I prefer to define the seasons by production order in my own mind. Indeed, the Voyager Companion book goes with that, defining the first season as 20 episodes ending with “The 37s,” and I think it was that way in syndication too. I don’t know about DVDs or streaming.
“It’s not until Braga’s creative move to develop large-scale blockbuster two parters”
Huh? Braga didn’t become showrunner until season 5. There were multiple 2-part events before then — “Basics,” “Future’s End,” “Scorpion,” “Year of Hell,” and “The Killing Game.” Granted, all of those except “Basics” were written by Braga and Joe Menosky, but why ignore Menosky, or Rick Berman and Jeri Taylor?
Rick: that’s a really good point. They should be much better at tactical stuff……
Devin Clancy: I agree in the abstract that some of the Maquis should have refused the uniform, but having said that, the ship needed to be run in an orderly fashion with a crew complement smaller than generally required. A crash course in procedures should’ve been part of it all along……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@8 And yet they served aboard Chakotays ship, where presumably there was a strict hierarchy, even if there were not uniforms.
@15/Christopher: DVDs and streaming still use the original airing order. That’s how I did my own Voyager first-time watch last year – through Netflix international (mixed with my own DS9 re-rewatch; I used Memory Alpha as a guide to recreate the original airing dates and program my viewing accordingly; for instance, I rewatched First Contact right after Voyager’s Warlord, which also came right after DS9’s Things Past).
As for the two parters, I’m not completely ignoring Berman, Taylor or even Menosky. But most Voyager interviews put Braga front and center as he discusses creating these particular episodes. Since most Menosky solo episodes tend to focus on myth, memory and symbolism, I’d argue the basic ideas for the two parters began with Braga (doing an LA time travel story; doing an alliance with the Borg story), who then used Menosky as a sounding board and reliable partner in order to get the scripts out in time. They’re different in scope from the average Menosky story. It’s also known that Scorpion started with Braga, given it was his idea to create Seven of Nine.
@18/Eduardo: Ugh, I hate it when DVDs and streaming sites use airdate order even when production order clearly makes more sense.
And just because Braga talks the most about these things now doesn’t mean he was the guy most responsible for them at the time. It’s probably just that he gets more attention from the media than Jeri Taylor because he was a showrunner more recently. Or maybe he just seeks out more publicity. Even if he did do the bulk of the work conceiving the plots of the 2-parters, that doesn’t mean it was his sole idea to take the show in that direction at all. It would’ve been Berman’s and Taylor’s decision at that point, since they were above him in the hierarchy.
And come to think of it, whence comes this idea that big 2-parters were something that had to be “developed” for VGR? Aren’t you forgetting that they were the norm for TNG finales/premieres ever since “The Best of Both Worlds”? And DS9 did a few too — “The Maquis,” “The Search,” “Past Tense,” “The Way of the Warrior.” If anything, since they were more common on TNG and VGR than on later DS9, I’d assume the main creator pushing for the 2-parters was Berman, especially since he had a story credit on so many of them.
@10: Regarding UPN’s decision to end the season early on “Learning Curve” not being smart, I’d have to beg to differ. While that episode was certainly not a strong one to end the season on, the point of it was to hold over those last 4 episodes to start Season 2 “early” ahead of the other broadcast networks so as to have less competition and get a ratings edge. I was tracking the show’s ratings at the time and that strategy did in fact work, although the ratings continued to slide throughout the season.
@2: Thomas Dekker’s acting was a highlight of this episode for me too and I was more intrigued by the holo-mystery than the actual A-plot! I also recalled Dekker being used to hilarious effect in two different appearances on “Seinfeld” as different characters. He was quite the in-demand child actor in the ’90’s apparently.
https://www.facebook.com/seincastpodcast/photos/a.871975289496510/1207788242581878/?type=1&theater
This episode is mostly worthless, containing many flaws which have been pointed out here in detail. I remember watching this for the first time back when it aired and the group of us who’d been diligently watching the series run were anticipating a season finale that would leave anxious for the next season. Instead we got this turkey. As the episode progressed each of us were commenting aloud about how Tuvok should know all about these people – heck, he spent several months with them. And they should hate Tuvok too for being a traitor, a back-stabber, a lying S.O.B., a…..well, I digress. It was a silly script concocted from what was actually a great idea.
A few things I recall that we all liked were the line about the cheese (which has been mentioned here a few times already), Chell was quite memorable – and it was a funny scene where we see him degaussing the transporter with a minuscule device, and when Chakotay knocked Dalby on his ass unexpectedly in the mess hall. Other than that this episode is forgettable….and that may well have led to the cause for disappearance of the four Maquis we get introduced to here. The episode was poorly conceived and written and likely fell flat with the creative staff as well who could have decided to simply not return there again. It’s a shame because I really liked the character of Dalby, and it would have also been good to see how (or if!) Garron grew out of his sullenness.
I’m really liking following along with the episode rewatches as they’ve been posted and appreciate the terrific write-up given to each by our ‘rewatcher’, and reading the comments from the others as well. For waht it’s worth, my favorites from this first season have easily been the fantastic ‘Heroes and Demons’ and the superior ‘Jetrel’. I’m looking forward to the second season rewatches!
The running shoes the ‘cadets’ have to wear are pretty hype.
“Get the cheese to sickbay!” (Sorry, I was feeling left out.)
It’s been a while since the show remembered that some of the crew didn’t want to be there and don’t actually like Starfleet, so it was probably time for a reminder. It’s hard to be sure who’s most at fault here. Tuvok does treat them like Starfleet cadets and expect to get the same results, but Dalby in particular is continually confrontational. The result is some interesting character conflict, although the bonding moment of a shared near death experience is perhaps a bit of a cliché. It’s a shame we don’t see most of these characters again since it would be nice to see whether or not they integrated into the crew. (I’ve used a couple of them in my fictions: Hanley ended up as chief conn officer of the USS Andromeda largely as a result of my forgetting who was on which ship, and Dalby is Voyager’s chief engineer as of 2393.) I must admit I’d completely forgotten Tuvok was on the Maquis ship!
And yes, that slightly infamous B-plot. It’s not clear how poor a shape Voyager’s in with regards supplies by the end, and I’m not sure if the bio-neural gel packs have been largely abandoned or not. And yes, the Doctor cheerily declaring that the danger’s past and the camera panning over to Kes dripping with sweat and shooting him a dirty look is my favourite moment of the episode: Cute and funny at the same time.
Another look at Janeway’s holonovel. I didn’t realise they drip-fed a few things this early. I also had no idea that girl was the Doctor’s daughter from “Real Life”!
So, the big question: Which running order are we using? The one I’m familiar with is the originally intended running order, as reflected in the stardates and as used in the UK broadcasts and VHS releases, where the first season continues with “Projections”, “Elogium”, “Twisted” and “The 37s”, and the second season opens with “Initiations” and “Non-Sequitur”. But I’m aware that the original broadcast order, used for the DVD release and in streaming, ended the first season here and began the second with “The 37s”, “Initiations”, “Projections”, “Elogium”, “Non-Sequitur” and “Twisted”, before we synch up again with “Parturition”. I don’t really mind which we use but I need to know which tape to grab next! I agree that “The 37s” as the finale and “Initiations” as the premiere works better than the airdate order, but I think the only real continuity issue is that the airdate order results in Janeway’s hairstyle yo-yoing back and forth.
I’ve been thinking about the whole Maquis tension thing, and how it relates to other Trek series that introduce tension and quickly disperse it, like DS9 and Enterprise. In all three series, you have a human Starfleet captain and a first officer with a different background. But whereas the others have them slowly (but not that slowly) coming to work together and having a bonding moment at the end of the first season, Voyager doesn’t quite go that way. We get the occasional scene, in the first season and later, of Chakotay suggesting Janeway do something the Maquis way. But for the most part, our “regular” Maquis characters fall into line pretty quickly, so the tension isn’t between the Starfleet and Maquis in the regular cast but between the main characters and other crewmembers: Initially it was Seska (who it turned out wasn’t even Maquis!) causing much of the tension, and here it’s four newbies, with Jonas and Hogan coming in to fill the role in the second season. The bonding moment between Starfleet and Maquis at the end of this episode isn’t between Janeway and Chakotay but between Tuvok and Dalby. Similarly, “The 37s” has its big “we’re all in this together” moment, but it’s not Janeway and Chakotay realising they’re on the same side but them realising as a team that everyone else is on their side as well. Maybe that’s why people think Voyager lost the tension two quickly.
@12 – Not just in Berman Trek. TOS was pretty much like this, especially with Prime Directive episodes. Show up, tell them what they’re doing wrong, make them change (usually at phaser point) and fly off.
David Gerrold referred to the Enterprise crew as a cosmic Mary Worth.
On a non-related note – microviruses are too small to be picked up on sensors? Really?? They’re composed of atoms and the sensors have no problem picking up various elements. And I’m assuming that they came up through the transporter. If that’s the case, the bio-filter may not have recognized them but the sensors certainly could see them since they were beamed aboard.
Trek always like to point out that they have science advisers. I just wish they’d listen to them on occasion.
@17/ad: I’m not sure why that’s presumed. An organization like the Maquis would almost certainly not be a top-down hierarchy, even within a single cell.
That’s not the only effective means of organization, even on a spacegoing vessel. Seems just as likely to me that Chakotay directed things due to his experience and the other members of the cell listened to him based on the strength of his ideas and skills rather than because of him holding some erstwhile command over them. That they made the individual choice to listen to him, a choice that could be rescinded on an individual basis as needed.
Sometimes a group listens to someone because they’re right, not because they have some sort of power over the others. Especially an insurgency like the Maquis.
Was there ever a good Maquis centric episode? I mean not just in Voyager but in any series. The only one I can recall enjoying was when Eddington went rogue and gave Sisko that speech about why he hates the Federation. Other than that, I can’t recall any standouts.
“he fell in love with a Bajoran woman—who was then raped and killed by three Cardassians.”
That’s strange. Because I’ve been told again and again the last two months that terrible things like this just don’t happen in the utopian, enlightened 24th century. In fact, such things totally violate the Spirit of Real Trek and Gene’s Vision. What’s even stranger, is that this happened in what some people insist is Real Trek, to the exclusion of “Fake Trek” like Discovery and Picard.
As a certain Vulcan would say: “Curious.”
“The EMH realizes that the gelpacks aren’t designed to fight off an infection the way living beings are, by getting a fever.”
Really? They put bio gelpacks in a ship and didn’t think of that?
@26 – JFWheeler: VOY’s “Nothing Human” is a good episode.
@27 – Almuric: Yup, it’s all in our imagination. :)
@23: I never really understood why people thought there would be a lot of tension between Starfleet and the Maquis anyway. Both groups come from the same culture (the Federation), and indeed a lot of Maquis members are former Starfleet, so there really shouldn’t be any significant cultural conflict between them. The major difference between the groups is a political dispute which is wholly meaningless in the Delta Quadrant. There also shouldn’t be that much bad blood between the groups since at the point Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant, the Starfleet-Maquis conflict was hardly war to the knife. (Witness the battle in the DS9 episode “The Maquis Part 2” where neither side seemed to be trying to kill each other, or the battle at the beginning of the STTNG episode “Preemptive Strike” where the Enterprise just drives off the Maquis ships attacking the Cardassians rather than trying to destroy them.)
It would make sense that some of the Maquis would resent being subject to Starfleet regulations (just as any group of civilians would resent suddenly being conscripted), but Starfleet is such a mildly military organization that I can’t imagine its regulations feel all that burdensome (and especially not when considered the extreme situation the crew is facing), so it’s not surprising that most of the Maquis would integrate relatively easily.
@29/bguy: “I never really understood why people thought there would be a lot of tension between Starfleet and the Maquis anyway.”
Because that’s the specific reason the Maquis were created in the first place. They may have appeared on TNG and DS9 first, but all of that was done specifically to set up Voyager. The Maquis were created for Voyager in order to provide a source of conflict in the cast, or at least a diversity of viewpoints, similar to the DS9 cast makeup where you had a mix of Starfleet and non-Starfleet characters who didn’t always see eye to eye or have the same priorities. Since Roddenberry’s rules required that Starfleet officers always got along, you had to introduce viewpoints outside of Starfleet to generate conflict among the core cast. That was the entire purpose the Maquis were created to serve. And then they weren’t allowed to serve it on the show they were created for.
Although it proved to be a clumsy choice, because as you point out, it was a conflict predicated in Alpha Quadrant politics that became irrelevant the moment they ended up in the Delta Quadrant. So it didn’t work out as well as the DS9 situation, where the Starfleet characters were the outsiders in someone else’s territory, and the non-Starfleet characters were directly invested in the storylines developing there. So the conflicts among the core characters were more likely to be directly relevant to the story situations they faced.
@28 The impression I get from this episode is that they didn’t think the biogel packs would get infected.
I imagine that in a more serialized decade the training of the Maquis crew would be spread out over the course of the season, much in the same way that Battlestar Galactica handled the training of several new pilots.
What I liked about this episode was the unintended consequence of converting the captain’s dining quarters into a kitchen – a purpose for which it was not designed.
I’m doing my own rewatch in Johnstonsarchive.net order, and this is the point where I’m in sync with the Tor rewatch, so it’s fresh in my mind, and I’m wondering how the Maquis raider is a big enough ship that the crew don’t all know each other.
@19/Christopher: Some of the TNG two parters were done that way as a way to spread the costs of doing a big enough story in a more economical manner, not because the stories themselves had that scale in terms of action and scope. Birthright was an example. A small, introspective, character-driven story that had enough legroom to cover 90 minutes (give or take a Data subplot).
Voyager two parters came right at the time when computer technology had become cost-effective enough to replace old methods for visual effects. Seasons 3, 4, and particularly season 5 of Voyager are the tipping point where CGI becomes more and more prevalent*. Even single story contained episodes like Timeless and Thirty Days rely heavily on it. Thus the stories gain a much bigger scale, especially when it comes to developing big set pieces (something like Future’s End would likely feel truncated had it been done as a single episode).
*also a blessing for DS9, which was able to depict the full-scale war across those two seasons.
And none of the TNG two parters had the technology to do visually what Voyager did with a story like Year of Hell. The worst pounding the ENT-D ever took was in Yesterday’s Enterprise, which had maybe 8-10 simple effects shots?
I feel Voyager had at least that distinction, despite its many other shortcomings. It could do old-fashioned blockbuster event episodes, even if they were mostly self-contained in their own right.
The fact that the Maquis conflict is an Alpha Quadrant thing is irrelevant. The Maquis despise Starfleet and the Federation because they felt they abandoned their planets to the Cardassians. One does not get over that easily, much less when you discover that someone who you thought was one of you was actually a Starfleet spy. (Not to mention feeling betrayed by your cell commander who joined back up again with Starfleet in what semeed like a heartbeat.)
@33/Eduardo: All of that is true, but none of it changes that fact that Rick Berman, not Brannon Braga, was the guy in charge. The ultimate decisions were his. Braga worked for him — and for Jeri Taylor on VGR’s first several seasons.
@34/MaGnUs: It may not matter to the characters, but it matters to the storytelling, since there are fewer opportunities to devise stories that are actually about the root of the conflict, that allow dramatizing it in some way other than just generic mistrust or resentment. It’s not enough to have the free-floating mistrust exist in the abstract. You need to come up with stories that bring it out into the open, that force the characters to confront it. That was a lot easier to do on DS9, when the characters were right in the middle of the situation that generated those character conflicts and divisions, than on VGR, where they were far removed from it and had fewer direct reminders of it.
@34, Absolutely.
The Maquis slowly integrating and resolving their trust issues over time is one thing and completely realistic. I’d have been fine with that.
Them dropping the grudges so fast and integrating into the crew so fast? Not so plausible, even with the token effort courtesy of Michael Jonas in the next Season.
It goes back to what I said a few episodes ago: The great, tragic irony of the Maquis is they were created specifically to set up VOY — and instead DS9 got far, far more mileage out of them than the intended show ever did.
I’m also reminded Stargate Universe and the presence of the Lucian Alliance survivors who Gated onto the ship at the end of Season One, how it took time for them to be integrated (and trusted), and how some inevitably went rogue.
I’ve always wondered if the SG writers were mindful of where VOY had gone wrong with their own rebel faction and took that into account with the Lucian storyline of Season Two.
@34: At the time when Voyager was stranded I don’t think you can really say that the Maquis despised Starfleet. Later on perhaps after Eddington, who was easily the most extreme of the Maquis leaders, joined them and the Maquis became much more aggressive (and Starfleet began taking more extreme measures against them in response), but the early conflict Maquis (as represented by people like Cal Hudson and Ro Laren) seemed to want to avoid fighting Starfleet personnel, and even Michael Eddington initially told Sisko, “The only reason I’ve contacted you is to ask you to leave us alone. Our quarrel is with the Cardassians, not the Federation. Leave us alone and I can promise you you’ll never hear from the Maquis again.”
Thus the early Maquis didn’t seem to particularly hate Starfleet. They just wanted Starfleet to stay out of their fight with the Cardassians which is a totally irrelevant consideration in the Delta Quadrant. And Chakotay’s crew is early conflict Maquis as they got stranded in the Delta Quadrant long before Eddington took over the Maquis.
(I agree with you though that the Maquis members should have felt personally betrayed by Tuvok. That seems a missed story opportunity.)
@37/bguy: Despised Starfleet? No. But they would have resented the Federation for making the treaty that handed their worlds over to Cardassia, and been skeptical that the Federation and Starfleet were as righteous and benevolent as they claimed. And they would’ve chosen to leave the Federation in order to remain on the homeworlds they felt more connected to, so being compelled to submit to a Federation/Starfleet hierarchy again would have been a bitter pill to swallow.
@35 – Chris: I agree that you can’t make it last for the whole seven seasons, but the first two seasons of VOY should have lived off of that conflict, instead of basically just being TNG 2.
@33/Eduardo: I believe the Enterprise-D took quite the pounding in the 2-parter The Best of Both Worlds and there were more a lot more SFX shots compared to Yesterday’s Enterprise. For it’s time (all of the previously mentioned TNG episodes), those were state-of-the-art effects and still hold up very well today.
@39/MaGnUs: I’m not disagreeing with you. Yes, they should have had that conflict. My point is that it did matter that the cause of the conflict was in the wrong quadrant, because that made it harder to generate stories that let you show the conflict. There’s a difference between saying “This conflict exists” in the abstract and finding an effective way to dramatize it, to bring it out in a story. I’m talking about the mechanics of how stories are told and how plot advances character and theme. It’s harder to explore a conflict between characters if the cause of that conflict is totally disconnected from the situations we see them face onscreen.
@40/GarretH: Even Best of Both Worlds was limited in what it could show. As far as damage to the ship is concerned, that episode had even less chaos than Yesterday’s Enterprise. The scene where the Borg use the cutting beam show a brief camera shake, and a scene of LaForge evacuating engineering. No actual explosions or damage are ever shown.
And while that two parter has more VFX shots than Yesterday’s Enterprise – and were state-of-the-art in 1990 – they aren’t up to the standards of what DS9 would accomplish by 1993. Best of Both Worlds couldn’t even show the Battle of Wolf 359, only a few wrecked ships. Emissary showed actual battle scenes, with far more dynamic VFX than anything we see in Both Worlds. And they were still using models during early DS9.
@42: I don’t dispute any of that. Just pointing out that what we got in those particular TNG episodes was still plenty satisfying, IMHO, and still looks good today, even if it wasn’t as dynamic as what came just a few years later. And I have to say, TNG and early DS9’s use of actual models looks far more realistic than the CGI that would show up in later Trek, especially on Voyager. The CGI of ship renderings, although very impressive, were still missing that element of weight to make them feel truly realistic.
Whether it was for budgetary reasons or not, I’m glad BOBW didn’t show the Battle of Wolf 359. Far more haunting to see the admiral’s broken transmission and then to come across the aftermath.
@44: Agreed. In this case, less is more.
@43: Personally, while I don’t dispute the quality of well-made model work, I do appreciate the evolution of CGI, both in movies and television.
The Dominion War likely wouldn’t have had the same scale if it weren’t for computer animation (had it been possible at all). The sheer amount of ships, plus some of the intricate ship maneuvers couldn’t have been done using old-school methods. I’d already gotten to see the early beginnings of live action TV CGI through shows like Babylon 5, paying close attention to how the CG models visibly evolved over that show’s five season run. And then to see that evolution continuing across late DS9, late Voyager, all of Enterprise and eventually Battlestar was a treat for me.
@44 and @45:
Absolutely in agreement there. Not showing Wolf 359 worked. It superbly built up the tension at the beginning of Part II as the 1701-D arrived too late.
That said, it was still great to finally see it dramatized on DS9 a few years later.
@47
Agreed. Better to save it for Emissary anyway, because we get a new POV of an infamous battle in our new main character Sisko. Very novel storytelling for Star Trek at the time.
@47: Agreed with that assessment as well. The unique perspectives worked well for how they were used in those particular episodes/series.
@46: The use of CGI for the Dominion War and ship battles in general from late season 3 DS9 onward was pretty spectacular.
@46: And also, I would add, is part of the shame if DS9 doesn’t get the same remastering treatment that TNG got several years ago.
@51, We got a glimpse of what an HD remeastered DS9 would look like with Behr’s What We Left Behind documentary last year.
Suffice it to say, it’d be gorgeous.
And the remastered CGI holds up pretty well, too. Still dated, but still good.
Watching “Sacrifice of Angels” recently, I was pleasantly surprised with how good those fleet battle scenes still look.
@52: Just a clarification regarding the What We Left Behind documentary. The live-action footage from DS9 was certainly remastered in HD. However, the original CGI elements from the series are lost or for whatever weren’t used so the SFX we saw in the documentary are actually all new CGI. So part of the supposed reasoning the powers that be have for not remastering DS9 is the shear expense in doing brand new CGI for the series, especially in the FX-laden Dominion War seasons. As for the CGI that we did see in the documentary, I thought while it was overall good, it seemed a bit bright/phony, and the original CGI from those episodes looked more realistic even though the image isn’t as clear since the special effects get muddled on video.
@54,
Ah, my mistake.
Yeah, it looked good, but…yeah, it’s not quite up to the level of CGI on DSC or PIC.
@50: Seasons 3 and 4 of DS9 still relied heavily on models, including the big battles. CG was only used on a few select occasions. On the DS9 Companion book, they describe the painstakingly difficult process it was to film the models for the Mirror Defiant battle in season 4’s Shattered Mirror. It was both time and budget consuming. Same with The Way of the Warrior, which used small christmas tree ornaments to fill the background shots, passing themselves as real Klingon ships.
There’s a section in the book that points to the season 5 finale, Call to Arms, as the moment where the decision was made to switch the majority of their VFX work towards CGI, because it was becoming increasingly impossible to film that many ships and still achieve the desired scale within the limited production schedule.
@56: Ah, well that makes the space battles starting with “The Die is Cast” in late season 3 all the more impressive if the production crew were still relying heavily on models.
@krad: Any virus lockdown-related interruptions planned? Or is the rewatch going to remain active and on schedule?
Rewatch is remaining on schedule, as far as I know. I am extremely fortunate in that I work in an industry that can still function under the current horrendous conditions. I can still watch Voyager and Picard episodes and write about them, I can still write novels and short stories, and said novels and short stories can still be published, all while practicing social distancing. This web site and publishers can be run from homes (hell, several of my publishers are run out of homes), so it should all be business as usual.
I know not everyone and not every industry is so fortunate. But I plan to keep giving y’all stuff to read while you’re stuck at home or doing whatever it is you need to do in this crisis.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@59 Glad to hear it, Krad. This situation has me seriously on edge, especially working in essential-retail (I ain’t staying home until and unless someone in my store gets the darn thing). So it’s always nice to have something to distract me from my troubles. This, UFC, WWE and Hulu should tide me over for a good solid while (assuming UFC manages to find empty buildings to hold their fights, still, but I still got WWE and Hulu :P).
i am watching this episode right now, and tuvok just had the trainees going up to deck 2, then down to deck 14. and it struck me, voyager has 14 (actually, 15) decks. wikipedia says its 300+ meters long. and it’s crewed by 141 personnel. so there’s an average of 10 folks per deck.
no friggin wonder they lose the ship so often. they should have 10-20 times the numbers of people.
Haha that picture of Kes is awesome! Can sweat really accumulate to the point where someone’s hair looked like a bucket of water was just dumped on their head? It’s a little over the top, but I guess that’s the point.
I have to say that the scene where Chakotay roughs up Dalby is probably my favorite Chakotay moment in the entire series.
Considering bio-neural gel packs were a new largely unproven technology at this point in the show, I would like to think that if they had isolinear chips as a backup, it would make sense to make switching over much more seamless than it apparently was. Instead, cheese hits the fan (pun obviously intended) faster than the crew can complete the switch. Just a minor nitpick I thought about.
This episode almost made me stop rewatching Voyager. Tuvok acts so wildly out of character; he doesn’t use any logic or knowledge of the Maquis to adapt the conflicting cultures. He also contradicts his earlier insubordination for ethical reasons in Prime Factors; Tuvok fails to comprehend the Maquis are doing the same. The episode could have recovered if Tuvok was killed by the Maquis crew members, forcing Janeway to integrate their culture into the Voyager atmosphere and let go of such strict Starfleet regulations. Actually the entire Voyager series would’ve been greatly improved if such an adaptive culture of leadership was implemented instead of just repeating TNG.
@63/Matador
Wow, that’s going to an extreme! I think the episode could have been more easily improved with some rewriting that doesn’t involve killing a main cast member!
I feel duty bound to note that in a few memorable episodes of Cheers, Derek McGrath also played “Andy Andy,” a deranged murderer Sam set up on a date with Diane. Despite the heavy Bolian makeup, I recognized Chell as “the guy who played Andy Andy” immediately by his voice alone.
I always knew Neelix’s cooking would get them all killed someday and Learning Curve takes this idea and does something rather novel with it – by infecting the ship’s biology instead of the crew’s. The fact it was all started by cheese is wonderfully… well, cheesy! 32: I think you’re getting confused with Phage, because that was the episode where Neelix hijacked Janeway’s private dining room and turned it into a galley, but for a crew of over 150 people so far removed from home, I’m surprised that didn’t occur to them right from the start. 46: I never thought the CGI on Babylon 5 evolved. It always looked very glassy to me, probably because I’ve been spoiled by the much superior effects on Star Trek, where otherwise it might have seemed perfectly acceptable to me before.
66/David Sim:
Oh it definitely evolved, not a heck of a lot, but it did. It was especially noticeable comparing the pilot “The Gathering” to the first normal episode, “Midnight On the Firing Line.” The rest of the series, the evolution was much more subtle, becoming a little crisper over time.
It’s worth noting that while Babylon 5‘s effects were notably less lifelike than the standard miniature effects of the day, they were enormously more versatile, which was their advantage. B5 was able to create FX shots that were vastly more complex, extended, and fluid, with more camera movement, more freely moving spaceships (since they didn’t have to be mounted on a pole and could rotate on all axes), more elaborate settings and action, etc. than you could get with conventional techniques, certainly on a TV budget. At the time, the reduction in realism was an acceptable tradeoff for that dramatic increase in freedom and versatility.
Indeed, I believe it was the Video Toaster CGI system pioneered by B5 that enabled the modern SFTV boom. Before then, SF and fantasy shows were handicapped by the difficulty and expense of visual effects; they cost more to make than conventional shows, yet had more of a niche audience, so it was harder for them to make a profit and stay on the air. But with the Toaster, for the first time, visual effects as elaborate (if not as lifelike) as feature film effects became affordable and relatively easy to make on a TV budget and schedule, which made SF/fantasy shows more affordable as well as letting them do more and go bigger with the action and spectacle they could depict. So new SF and fantasy shows proliferated in larger numbers than ever before.
I loved the expensive SFX dodge that Wizards & Warriors used in one of their episodes. Prince Greystone and Marco had to fight a dragon. But it was too expensive to do a realistic dragon, so they just said it was invisible instead. All your could see was his flame as it was at night Problem solved and in a hilarious way.
The one area where B5’s glassy CGI worked was the Shadows and their vessels. It lent them an unreal quality that never failed to send shivers down my spine.
My family thoroughly enjoyed this episode. It had several laugh out loud moments, from the doctor sarcastically treating the gels like a patient to the “get the cheese to sickbay” to Chakotay’s slug to Kes’s murderous glare.
Yes the writers forgot Tuvok should have known them but frankly so had I.
And the holodeck scene once again seemed to be completely unrelated.
But we had fun watching it, and so got what we wanted from the episode
I usually like kind of silly/minor things that end up having an unexpectedly large effect, but this B-plot just didn’t cut it for me. I might have gone along with it had there been something Delta Quadrant-y about the cheese (kind of like the episode where they found a new element) which (understandably) explains why Starfleet might not have tested for it (emphasizing that they are actually in a new place, not just a different corner of the “known” quadrants that we just haven’t seen on TV), but (apparently) not having considered “living” gel-packs becoming infected and by bacteria/microviruses/whatever “too small for Voyager to detect” is a swiss.
The A-plot was OK in isolation but, as KRAD mentioned, lacks context/history. Was the relatively pat ending meant to “end” any more (people asking to see) Starfleet-Maquis conflict? Given that was marketed as a major feature of the show, I can imagine the people who in charge who decided to de-emphasize that were getting tired of people asking to see some/more of it.