Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

The Doctor goes rogue to save the Captain. A few bumpy moments, but overall a clever story that actually makes some good use of the Doctor’s holographic abilities. As lampshaded at the start of the episode, in many ways the Doctor is the most capable crew member, as demonstrated by his successful takeover of the…

Neelix falls in love and leads a revolution. Even knowing that this is the last season, and only three episodes left after this one, it was a surprise to see an actual ‘series changing’ thing happen. Neelix’s departure is earned here. We get a good review of what he means to the crew, and why…

Tom Paris gets a speeding ticket. OK, fine, that’s just the idiotic B-plot. Perhaps if the humor it was so obviously played for had worked I wouldn’t have been so annoyed. The rest of the episode is pretty standard ‘noble savage’ stuff, with Seven of Nine learning another lesson about the ‘value of primitive cultures’.…

Voyager gets its second real mission in the course of the show. Not a bad defence of the Prime Directive, although I think that it’s a bit unfair to really blame Humanity for the planetwide catastrophe that this kicked off. It would be nice if people remembered that there are quite a few non-Humans in…

The Doctor writes the great Holo-Novel. There’s a lot of different plot going on here! First, the Doctor turns out to be a terrible writer, who is lucky that defamation law appears to have been weakened in the future. Second, we have a ‘is the Doctor a person’ legal dispute that harks back to some…

Q’s back, looking for some baby sitting. Q must be the most unreliable plot device in Trek. Some episodes are great (*All Good Things* in particular), some are quite bad (*Qpid*). This episode recapitulates that in microcosm – it veers from good (Q’s final test of his son) to dull (the extended training montage) and…

Seven tries to learn how to be a real girl. Or, to put it another way, Seven of Nine does exactly the same thing that Barclay got in so much trouble for (making holographic replicas of crew members). Except this time rather than freaking out, the Doctor encourages her to keep her holodeck program. Seems…

The Voyager crew stumbles towards rescue. The idea of using the aliens to drive the action in this half of the episode was a good one. But it’s a decision that makes it more difficult for us to really care about what’s going on, as everyone pretty much gets rescued without having to do very…

Almost all the crew is kidnapped and brainwashed to work in a factory. I’m a sucker for ‘[in media res](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res)’. This episode has a great mysterious start, with Janeway, Seven, Tuvok and Tom all working in a strange alien factory, with a good 10 minutes before any explanations start. The truth, it turns out, is…

Voyager gets stuck in a hole. The plot’s nothing to write home about, but well delivered. In short, Voyager finds itself in a bad situation, and Janeway builds an alliance that allows them to escape. Along the way there’s the unreliable ally, the implacable foe, and the misunderstood aliens. It’s a little sad that this…