Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

The Xindi arc comes to an end, as the weapon reaches Earth. I’ll say something about how this whole season turned out in my season review shortly. But I thought this was a fairly good ending (until the last five minutes) to the season – the story was wrapped up in a satisfactory way, and…

Some Xindi try to launch the weapon, while others help Enterprise’s attempt to destroy it. My main disappointment with what was generally a fairly enjoyable episode is that we didn’t get to see more of the aquatics. They’re actually the most ‘alien’ of the Xindi species, compared to previous Star Trek. And it would have…

Archer confronts the Xindi council. This is what Babylon 5 used to call a ‘WHAM’ episode. A clever drawing together of a lot of the threads from the season, with appropriate consequences. And a quick pivot onto a slightly new path for the conclusion of the season. My lingering discomfort is the anthropomorphism – it…

It’s Tomorrow’s Enterprise, as Enterprise runs into an Enterprise crewed by everyone’s great grand children. A potentially great concept that, after a fun twenty minutes or so, finds that it doesn’t really have anywhere to go with the setup. There isn’t much of a sense that this is a crew full of the descendants of…

Archer makes an alliance with some of the Xindi. Like the previous episode, there’s a lot going on. Unlike the previous episode it just didn’t quite hang together as well. The major plot is nicely advanced, with Mulder-Xindi convincing Scully-Xindi to believe (maybe I should watch the X-Files next, hmmm…). But beyond Degra’s growth and…

Enterprise tries to repair damage, as some of the Xindi begin to doubt. Wow, a lot happened. Let’s take it one at a time. First, the Xindi are looking a lot more interesting now, with a bit more internal dissent and conflict. A lot better than I feared from their first appearance. Second, the T’Pol…

Enterprise finds the Xindi weapon, and Archer goes on a suicide mission to destroy it. Another two-part episode, another difficult write-up. Enterprise’s achilles heel has been the time travel plots. I think the original motivation was to give the writers some degrees of freedom relative to the established ‘future history’. There are some good ideas…

Archer goes a little buggy, and the crew re-enacts *Crimson Tide*. Another one of those great stand-by episodes – the Captain might have gone nuts, and the crew has to decide what side their on. This one strained its credibility a little, particularly given the previous emphasis on decontamination for even small things – hard…

Enterprise passes through a nebula where all the Humans need to be put into a coma for the passage. Even though I picked the twist in this episode pretty early on, it was concealed well enough that I began to doubt my conclusion right up to the end of the episode. Nicely done – just…

Enterprise retrieves a strange alien from a large anomaly. In one sense the ‘main’ plot of this episode was a shaggy dog tale – the only important bit was the last five seconds, where we get a sense that the people building the spheres are involved with the Xindi. Well, we did kinda know that…