Learning Curve

I really started out thinking I was going to like this SVU episode, but it went badly off track along the way.

Ernest Waddell whom we met almost a decade earlier first as Ice-T's son has in the intervening years come out as gay. And now that same sex marriages are legal in New York has now gotten married.

This episode starts out with the gaybashing of Waddell's spouse who Ice-T who has long accepted his son's gayness refers to as his son-in-law. His crime is solved within the first fifteen minutes of the show. But in the course of the investigation looking for a pattern of other hate crime incidents, the SVU squad uncovers an incident involving a prep school teacher. After that the whole thing goes off track.

I was really hoping to see some more concerning Waddell and his spouse with Ice-T. It was like we popped into a different SVU episode all together. Not well written at all.

When Season 13 hit, like with "Spiralling Down" and "Rhodium Nights", it was brilliant. Most of the episodes were decent to very good and the season itself was much better than expected, considering how much (necessary) change there was. Some episodes having said that did disappoint, and while none of the disappointments were quite on the same level of misfire from Seasons 10-12 they were really not good. "Learning Curve" is for me one of them.

"Learning Curve" is not quite the worst episode of Season 13, my vote for that dubious dishonour goes to "Strange Beauty", but it was a case of a quite intriguing premise executed in a messy and majorly flawed fashion. Well more than just messy, more all over the shop and one of the worst cases of the season's disappointments of trying too hard. There are things that "Learning Curve" does quite well, though these aspects were done better in other episodes, but the many major problems sadly stand out more.

The good things will be started off with. The production values are still slick and suitably gritty (without being too heavy in it). The music is not too melodramatic and is not used too much, even not being too manipulative in revelations.

Although "Learning Curve" has a lot of flaws, the performances of the regular cast are far from being among them with no exception. The chemistry doesn't look disconnected and it's cohesive. The episode does start off intriguingly with quite a neat set up.

It is very annoying however that it went quite quickly downhill drastically and never really recovered. There are too many characters and too many plot strands with too little done with all. The first crime is treated in too throwaway a fashion, resolved too quickly and too early and then discarded. The more prominent crime, which felt like another story entirely, is also over stuffed to the point of muddled later on and bland.

Did think too that the over obviousness of the perpetrator's identity which is also too prematurely revealed takes away from any tension. Pacing throughout is pretty dull. The supporting cast have to work against very one dimensional characters and come over as forgettable. The dialogue is too often stilted and needed to be tighter and edgier.

Overall, lacklustre and all over the place. 4/10.

This episode is all over the place! Too many story lines and they never finished any of them probably!

This was way too confusing and frankly got boring to follow.

This is a poorly written episodes which tries to touch on way too many issues and does justice to none of them. It starts off in one direction and winds up going many different directions with the result that it just loses your interest. Too bad. Any one of the story lines could have been the subject of a riveting single episode