Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Archer interrogates the Xindi mastermind. I was disappointed about the caution the episode took in the end, it would have been nice to keep us in suspense (at least a little) about what was going on, rather than reveal the elaborate set up. Gee, they really had to work for it back before the holodeck…

The Andorians show up to help the mission. So I think this plot development is normally called the ‘deus ex shran’. Forgiven, because Shran is the best recurring guest star this show has developed so far. Also, things turn out to be more complicated than they first appear. There’s some first rate flirting between Reed…

Enterprise is taken over by religious terrorists. Gee, I wonder what possible real world parallels they were trying to draw… Although if you missed the moral, clearly you stopped the episode a few minutes too early, as the last scene wielded a true sledgehammer of subtlety. The mechanics were mostly pretty good. Often the problem…

Archer and T’Pol travel back to Earth 2004 to stop a Xindi bioweapon plot. This makes surprisingly little use of the time period. T’Pol’s moralising asides are annoying, overly arch, and to be frank out of character for her. I doubt she honestly sees much difference between 2004 and 2154. It was good that they…

Enterprise finds a colony of humans living a 19th century Western. Bland silliness that’s so impressed with itself for making a point that it forgot to make a coherent episode. It feels more like an attempt to get some use out of the Western set than any kind of real story. So we mainly get…

Archer follows a trail to a mining facility supplying the Xindi weapon. Now we have some complexity and variety in the Xindi – they aren’t all a threat to Earth. Some of them could be on our side. And Archer is becoming less angry, more willing to act like a Star Fleet Captain. Not that…

Hoshi makes contact with a creepy psychic. Yay, we finally noticed that the enormous sphere from a few episodes ago was significant. Only when they worked out there were 50 or so of them. And now maybe, just maybe, the mystery of the why and how of these spheres has made something workable. And theres…

T’Pol turns out to be allergic to MacGuffin-D. An interesting development – I was expecting that this trellium-D plot was going to eliminate the silly anomalies, and we could just move on. So on the one hand it’s a bit disappointing that we’re still going to have the weird anomalies. But on the other we…

Archer brings a spy on board. It’s pretty hard to do this plot without some people coming across as morons. There’s a little bit of stupidity (not locking Rajiin in her quarters), but it’s at a reasonable level. Really, this Rajiin is just a very effective spy, quite good at her job. Still, I’m sure…

Archer, Hoshi and Reed get mutated by an alien virus. Unlike previous attempts at similar stories (*Genesis* most notoriously) there’s no attempt to try and relate what happens to any kind of underlying nature of the characters. This episode is more reminiscent of *Masks* actually, but unlike that episode the regular cast don’t take any…