Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

In a refreshing change of pace, rather than B’Elanna coming to terms with her Klingon heritage, Klingons come to terms with B’Elanna. Well, not refreshing. More ‘not as bad’. It’s mainly Klingon warriors wandering around shouting ‘Grraah’, along with a small touch of ‘mysterious prophecy people are manipulating turns out to strangely true’. And the…

The Voyager runs into a strained death penalty story. The episode was off to a bad start when the writer forgot what the Prime Directive is. Hint: it doesn’t apply to races who have their own warp-capable ships… As for the rest – I suppose it was a reasonable attempt at a SF story, in…

B’Elanna comes to terms with her Klingon side. Again. As my summary suggests, I’m not exactly jumping for joy to return to such a well-trod well. We’ve had about four episodes about B’Elanna coming to terms with her Klingon side. This is the worst yet, suggesting that it’s actually all been about a standard adolescent…

Chakotay and Janeway go on a tour of episodes past. It’s very hard to watch this episode without thinking about *Before and After*. That episode had an incredibly similar structure, with Kes in that instance travelling through the history of Voyager. But while that episode was a great way of understanding a character, this one…

A rogue ship of Holograms looks for its promised land. The Doctor is a total idiot. Otherwise the attempts of the Hologram leader to compare his life on Voyager to his life being hunted would have had no influence on him at all. As it turns out it’s not until he turns out to be…

Federation technology is used to create a crew of killer holograms. Oh, the Hirogen. I thought we were done with them, but sadly apparently not. One of Trek’s major weaknesses is the ‘everyone in a race is the same’ trope, which is actually a pretty unpleasant way of thinking. The Hirogen are one of the…

Harry Kim has his first command. Interestingly enough it’s a new take (for Trek) on the old ‘first command’ story that’s been done about half-a-dozen times now. Here, rather than being unable to work out how to be a leader, Harry has a different common management problem – he can’t delegate. Let’s just say that…

The Doctor ‘borrows’ Seven’s body. First, the good. Jeri Ryan does a fantastic job of capturing the Doctor’s tone, movements and cadence. It makes the idea that someone has taken over her body quite believable. Performing the same character every week must get a bit dull for the actors, so I’m sure she was happy…

The Doctor is kidnapped by an evil Space-[HMO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_maintenance_organization). This is just about as blatant as [that TOS episode with the half-white half-black aliens](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/02/trekathon-070-let-that-be-your-last-battlefield-tos/), as message shows go. Yes, we get it, evil organisations who won’t allocate health care to all, just to the rich. Of course, no need for the Doctor to understand any of…

Tuvok stars as ‘The Manchurian Vulcan’. An overcrowded episode with some really good ideas, some good execution, but a hurried ending that might as well have worn a big sign saying “we didn’t know where to go”. The initial investigation is nicely done, a nice update on the ‘the investigator is really the culprit’ story.…