Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Hoshi thinks she’s turning invisible. Memo to the writer: no, it’s not OK to do ‘It’s all a dream’ just because it was really ‘It’s all just the transporter buffer’. It’s still a frustrating plot device. Fundamentally nothing at all that happens in this episode is important. Hoshi will be saved regardless of her actions,…

The Enterprise has a very strange time when monitoring a black hole. OK, foreboding opening, everyone is passed out except T’Pol, the ship is doomed. What’s the next item on the cliche check list? Well, I guessed ‘8 hours earlier’, and it was actually ‘2 days earlier’. A stupid way of showing the episode that…

Reed loses a communicator while on a pre-warp planet. Probably the firmest attempt at a Prime Directive story. But the little moral at the end seemed to emphasise that the biggest damage they did was actually the coverup story, not the other contamination. Should we protect people from higher technology for their own good? Perhaps,…

T’Pol and Archer go on a secret mission. It turns out that T’Pol is basically the worst spy ever, and must have pretty much been fired for cause from the Vulcan security services. Through this episode she’s easily manipulated, gullible and foolish. Not to mention that the plot seems to basically turn on what I…

Enterprise helps out a remote mining settlement being bullied by Klingons. OK, so ‘bullied’ is a bit loaded – but a lot of the final act felt like the bit in a movies like BMX Bandits where the kids turn the tables on the bullies/mean adults. There’s really less violence than in the average *Home…

Archer discovers the risks of letting dogs go on away missions. Wow. I have never been this tense through an episode before. Normally when one of the main cast is sick, it’d be easy to believe that they’ll pull through without any problems. But Porthos is not ‘main crew’, and I was genuinely worried that…

Enterprise has to find somewhere to repair their damage. OK, so really everyone thought this was a good idea? Mysterious space station offering a deal too good to be true, and we’ll just go park our ship in the middle of it? Real sensible. They were lucky the station was only after spare brains, and…

Enterprise runs into a Romulan mine field. So, first up – I hope they’re going to be pretty careful about continuity with the Romulans here. Remember, it’s not until *Balance of Terror* that Starfleet sees the Romulans. So far so good, but maybe we shouldn’t be using them too much, hmmm? The best bits of…

The true story of Vulcan first contact. This felt a lot like Voyager’s *11:59* in setup, but it delivers a much more interesting story. More importantly, I felt that this episode started to deal with the problem of non-T’Pol Vulcans. Here we see that there’s almost a natural fit between Vulcans and Humans – that…

Enterprise saves the future. For a time travel episode that was surprisingly free of overly complicated plots. You could have rewritten the entire episode with Archer just being stranded off on another planet without very much effort at all. So rather than being all *Back to the Future II*, the episode is much more *Die…