Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Enterprise gets robbed. Not a terrible story, but it’s starting to not feel very much like Trek to me. Archer has become so angry that we have a mysterious ancient alien space station, and no one on the crew bats an eyelid. There’s no sense of exploration or wonder. There’s just violence and action. Archer…

Enterprise tries to find the Xindi homeworld. Not a goods start to the season. That opening scene felt like a scene of the Trade Federation in Star Wars. And the sequence on the mining facility was pretty tedious. Archer gets betrayed by the obviously horrible alien, and absolutely no one is prepared for it. Just…

For the most part this is a show without clear direction There’s a general flailing around from theme to theme, never quite sure what kind of story will work. And very little is landing. It’s generally a pleasant way to spend an hour, but it’s not rising to the heights established by the other series.…

Earth gets attacked for no known reason, and Enterprise has to go find out who’s responsible. There’s a pretty bald attempt to draw everything together here – the mysterious future guy, the Klingon bounty on Archer’s head, the Suliban. It makes for an over packed episode that doesn’t really hold together as a coherent story.…

Reed is proved very correct about Archer’s lax attitude to security, as Archer gets captured by a bounty hunter. Dull and uninteresting stupidity. Archer gets himself taken prisoner by being stupid, tries a couple of stupid things that don’t help him get out of the situation, then tries a stupid thing that does help him.…

Archer has a flashback to the days of the NX Warp Project testing. Not great, but not terrible either. It’s nice to see the ‘what they were like back then’ type stories, but this one is limited in scope (just Archer and Trip), and it seems that basically everyone is just the same. There was…

The Borg show up, jumping up and down lightly on continuity. There’s a great episode of the Doctor Who reboot, *Dalek*, that manages to take back a villain that had become so overused we’d forgotten the menace. This episode is not as good, but it still reminds us of just how significant the Borg threat…

Enterprise runs into a race with three genders,one of which is a third class citizen. This episode dances right on the edge between ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘stupid’, until in the second half Trip apparently has a brain extraction and the episode lands in ‘stupid’ with no escape. It seems incredibly out of character for him to…

Phlox has to decide whether to treat a member of his race’s deepest enemies. So, what can make even the incredibly phlegmatic Dr Phlox crack? How about someone who accuses his whole race of being war criminals (and who is apparently right), and that he was raised to hate. Yeah, that’ll just about do it.…

Ensign Merriweather visits home. Gah. I know I sometimes call for episodes that tell us a bit more about the character of the main cast, but this is a good example of how not to do that. Sure, we get to see a lot of Travis’s background and family, but the plot is just not…