Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

The Enterprise gets caught in the middle of some Andorians holding Vulcans hostage. Now that is not a twist that I was expecting. Everything we know about Vulcans tells us that the Andorians are the ones going over the edge – finding out that they were right, and the Vulcans were hiding a military base…

The Enterprise investigates the site of a lost Human colony. Well developed, with a nice presentation of the ‘fallen humans’. The SF idea of ‘only the children survive, what did they grow up to be’ is one that is so old as to border on cliche, but it’s nicely handled here (primarily due to some…

Tucker gets a little surprise from an away mission. The episode largely manages to rise above the idea, which had the potential to go quite wrong. But the pregnancy is played fairly seriously, and isn’t used for a lot of comedy. But it’s a more uneven outing than the previous four episodes, with less of…

The away team comes down with a case of the hallucinations. This story wouldn’t have worked as well in the other series. Everyone turning on each other would have made the viewer go ‘Oh, they’re drugged’ almost instantly. But there’s enough distrust established with respect to T-Pol that what seems to be going on initially…

Enterprise finds a disturbing scene on an abandoned ship. This episode serves two main purposes – first, establish a different tone to the previous series. This isn’t the incredibly powerful Enterprise of TOS or TNG, or even Voyager. This is a weak ship, and a crew who are out of their depth this far out…

Archer has to find and rescue Klaang. I enjoyed the general plot of the episode, with some good action sequences mixed with some insight into the characters. I might well be wrong about T’Pol, as she’s certainly appearing to be a bit more complex than I feared. And Archer is shaping up to be an…

Earth’s newest ship goes on a mission to return an injured Klingon. So far it’s an interesting start to a series. The show is clearly trying to do something quite different to the previous series, but still connected in history. Choosing the prequel route is a mixed blessing – you get a lot more freedom…

Farewell Voyager. You did not have a good year. Overall Voyager has had a curious trajectory. From a weak start it started to find its feet, and in season 4 had a pretty good run. But since then the quality seems to have been in decline. Season 7 is as weak as Season 2. The…

Voyager goes home. The core of the episode is ’Janeway versus Janeway’ – a fitting conflict perhaps, for a show that frequently didn’t have a clear enough picture of Janeway’s character from episode to episode. But the ‘future’ Janeway is given enough distinct character to make the conflict believable, and the resolution to the conflict…

Admiral Janeway tries to save Voyager from 16 years in the Delta Quadrant (out of 23). A great episode with a couple of small missteps. About half the episode is spent in the ‘future’, and other than some dodgy special effects makeup it’s everything that you would want. The ‘present’ Voyager part is also strong,…