Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Archer is put on trial by the Klingons. Ah, the venerable trial plot. We’ve seen it so many times: Star Trek VI, *Tribunal*, *The Drumhead*, *The Menagerie*, *Court Martial*, *Rules of Engagement*, and even *The Magicks of Megas-Tu’. But I suspect the Greeks were the first to use this plot. I thought it was all…

Enterprise runs into some non-corporeal aliens. This episode really clicked for me. It’s a pure science fiction tale, and would not be out of place in either TOS or TNG. There’s a good mix between the purer ‘exploration’ side of things and the more menacing side of the aliens. And the build up into the…

Archer and Trip get themselves taken prisoner. A collection of cliches – mistakenly taken prisoner, swept up in the prisoner revolt, etc – that somehow rises above its components to deliver an entertaining story. I think a big part of it is the sheer menace of Kuroda, who I was a bit disappointed to see…

Enterprise finds an abandoned ship with a mummified Human corpse. Mostly more confusing time travel arc stuff, without the benefit that we normally have in those episodes of someone to do the exposition scene. I’m really not 100% sure about what really happened in this episode. Certainly someone (the writer?) needs to go revisit temporal…

Archer mediates a dispute between the Vulcans and the Andorians. There’s a lot to like in this episode. Involving the Vulcans in a war puts them in a very strange position relative to the rest of Trek, and Shrank and the Andorians have also been consistently interesting. But we spend a lot of the episode…

Enterprise visits a medical conference. The main plot here is pretty uncomfortable stuff. We learn that T’Pol has a stigmatised Vulcan disease, which she acquired in what was essentially a rape. And Vulcan society is deeply intolerant of anything at all do with it. It’s frankly not the Vulcans that we’re used to, although I…

Trip and a random hostile alien are stranded and lost on an asteroid, and will die when the sun rises. Solid but not brilliant. It’s not exactly a new story – *Darmok* covered similar ground, as have several other episodes. And while it’s interesting to see Trip under a bit of duress, we don’t learn…

The crew has to shelter in the nacelles during a storm. This looked interesting to start with – let’s just throw the crew together in close quarters for a week, and see what happens. But the writers lose confidence in their own idea about two thirds of the way through, and we go for a…

At long last, the much maligned final Star Trek TNG movie. Rather than write a normal review this time, I thought that I’d go for a more scientific process. Here’s the minute-by-minute ‘worm’, tracking how much I ‘liked’ this film. There are some good moments, but it’s all undermined by the main protagonist character. I…

Tucker has to rescue a stuck-up princess. The vast majority of this episode is some of the most out of date crap I have seen in a long time. Tucker and a princess (a literal princess) have to escape together. She’s stuck up, she’s never been out in the real world. There’s even a ‘fight…