Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Tom enters into a race rather than trying to have a relationship with B’Elanna. Another great big pile of ‘dull’. Voyager stops to join in a ship race – potentially interesting, but ends up just being dull. Harry Kim falls for another girl who turns out to be a saboteur – dull. B’Elanna gets snippy…

Seven of Nine breaks down. Mechanically, that is. This is one of those episodes that I find difficult to pin down precisely. There were some good elements – Seven’s reaction to her mortality, Icheb’s growth as a character, and the moral discussions about risky surgical procedures. But that’s balanced by some straight out puzzling choices…

Janeway’s Cunning Plan (™) saves the day and starts a Borg civil war. Yay, I guess. I’m not sure starting wars is the Star Fleet way, even if it is with Borg. Not that I really cared very much about the other side – ‘Unimatrix Zero’ continues to be as uninteresting a place as it…

Voyager Season 6 in one word: ‘Meh’. In two words: ’Not Great’. There’s some good stuff here: *Pathfinder* and *Blink of an Eye* in particular, but also *Survival Instinct*, *Life Line*, *Memorial* and (controversially it seems from some Internet searching) *Fair Haven*. The ‘contact with Earth’ plot worked quite well. At the other end of…

Seven of Nine discovers a Borg dream world, and Janeway decides to use it to destroy the Borg. Rarely has a cliffhanger annoyed me quite this much. Janeway et al have a special secret plan that requires them to get assimilated? Pretty sure that’s going to turn out to be one of the stupidest plans…

Neelix tells a ghost story to the Borg children. So, where were the Borg children while all of this was happening? Apparently all they saw was a single section being closed to access. They didn’t notice the ship-wide emergency, power outages, significant numbers of casualties, and the presence of nebula gas across the ship? Not…

The Doctor goes on a house call to the Alpha quadrant. So, to get this straight – this episode stars Robert Picardo as the Doctor, guest stars Robert Picardo as Lewis Zimmerman, and was written by Robert Picardo as well? Was he too busy to direct? It’s a fairly good episode, which works best if…

Kes is back, and she’s mad as hell. This entire episode is predicated on the assumption that: * A: Kes’s personality can change so dramatically in just a year or two that she wants to kill the Voyager crew; but * B: She hasn’t changed so much that she can’t be talked out of it…

B’Elanna is held hostage by a writer needing inspiration. Whenever a writer appears on screen, you can know that you’re in store for some self-referential circularity about the sheer awesomeness of writing. This is worse than most, with the rant in the middle about ‘writers who just want to write excitement, rather than good story’…

Voyager gets conned by some of the worst con artists in the Delta quadrant. Maybe my standards are too high (cough *Leverage* cough), but this was a pretty dull and uninteresting con. For a start, it was pretty much just straight lying and then running. A *good* con is one where the mark doesn’t go…