Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Enterprise meets a ship of Vulcans who reject the teachings of logic. Boring, and fails to deliver on the small sliver of promise. We’ve always had hints at the ‘primal nature’ of Vulcans (along with some very inconsistent explanations about how this primal nature if controlled). Here it’s reduced to someone being a little bit…

Reed and Tucker are stranded, convinced they’re going to die. Rarely enough for this kind of episode they stay more or less on target the whole time. The cuts away to the Enterprise are kept to the minimum needed to make the plot work, and we spend the vast majority of the show on the…

Vulcan bureaucracy finally catches up with the events of eight episodes ago. The ‘larger plot’ bits of this episode were good – growing tensions between Vulcan and Earth, T’Pols growing divided loyalties, the dangerous but honest Andorians. There’s a good story being told. I suspect some traditionalists are enraged by the portrayals of Vulcans in…

Enterprise rescues a ship lost in a gas giant. A nice little action-exploration story, which managed to not get sunk on the shoals of ‘stupid Klingon stuff’. The material with Reed, T’Pol and Hoshi on the ship was particularly good. The earlier ‘Hoshi is scared to go on missions’ stuff was boring, this is much…

Doctor Phlox writes a letter to colleague. An interesting story, which for me highlighted the strength of this character at least. Doctor Phlox is one of the most fully realised aliens we’ve seen on Star Trek – alien, with different physiology and culture, but also with his own distinct personality beyond a cultural dictat (*cough*…

Enterprise decides to step up its defences, because of a run-in with some mysterious aliens. There’s been something missing from a lot of the plots so far in this show. I can’t quite pin it down, but there’s a lack of interesting stakes, or perhaps its just a lack of reaction to the stakes. The…

An observation mission turns a lot stranger as the plot arc kicks into gear. Well, clearly the pathetic security of Starfleet ships was part of standard operating procedure from early on, as visitors wander the ship completely unescorted. At least Lieutenant Reed noted that free access might not be the greatest idea. The temporal cold…

The Enterprise responds to a distress call. Another developing theme – it’s the frontier, but things are changing. The tensions between the ‘new way’ and the ‘old way’ are made clear enough, without too much resort to beating the viewer over the head. The freighter officer comes across as a bit too obsessed, but there’s…

Archer explores an alien planet, falls in love, saves the day. Y’know, Captain (Kirk) stuff. The lightest outing so far. While there’s an attempt to create some stakes, we never get a really good feeling for the aliens suffering from the disease (compare, for instance, with *The Quickening* in DS9). So it’s more of a…

T’Pol turns out to be the ‘cool’ Vulcan, at least by comparison. The other developing theme of the show, other than the ‘space is dangerous’ message, is ‘we don’t trust the Vulcans yet’. It makes sense – a whole lot more sense than the relationship we see in TOS and beyond. Relationships are based on…