Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Farewell Deep Space 9. You never quite lived up to your promise, but you came closer than most shows ever do. But not this year. As for this season? Not good. Not good at all. There isn’t a lot of awful, just *Take Me Out to the Holosuite* and *The Emperor’s New Cloak*. But two…

The End. So, all that build up for the Pah Wraith thing? Weeks of setting this up between Dukat and Winn, foreshadowing across years? Sisko gets a feeling that he has to run to the Fire Caves, Dukat does a quick evil monologue. And then Sisko does the self-sacrifice thing, and it’s over. It’s just…

The final battle for the Alpha quadrant begins. This is – sadly – not very good. There is a lot of terrible padding. Do you know what’s never ever funny? Or interesting? Or ever worth showing on TV? Morning sickness. And of course we need a last visit to Vic Fontaine, this time with Quark…

There are two main highlights from this year for Voyager: Timeless and Bride of Chaotica! Both were up there with the best that Star Trek has ever done, although with quite different tones. Chaotica might be one of the best ‘light’ episodes ever in any series. There were a few other fairly good episodes -…

Voyager finds another Federation ship in the Delta quadrant. Ho hum. The other crew has a dark and terrible secret. Good old upright Janeway just won’t understand, but somehow they manage to get the upper hand. About the only thing unexpected in this episode is that it isn’t all neatly wrapped up with a moralistic…

The Cardassian revolution goes badly, and Odo is cured but angry. Once more unto the stupid Ferengi plots. Quark thinks he’s going to be Nagus, but actually it’s going to be Rom. Oh my gosh, this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen on screen. It’s painful, and a pointless distraction from the…

The Doctor makes friends with a missile. [The Quality of Life](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/04/trekathon-243-the-quality-of-life-tng/) meets [Dreadnought](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2012/06/trekathon-407-dreadnought-voy/) – or to put it another way, [Dark Star](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)). Oh, and there’s a small touch of [The Ensigns of Command](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/03/trekathon-157-the-ensigns-of-command-tng/) as well. About the only thing we get here of any real interest was the Doctor getting to play a different role…

Bashir tries to outwit Section 31. Just at the end they lose their nerve, and we get a much more conventional piece of story telling. If we were spending an hour in Kai Winn’s mind, or Dukat’s mind, this would have been worth while. But an hour in Sloan’s mind? A character we’ve seen twice,…

Seven of Nine goes back in time to save Voyager. Then forwards in time. Then back again. To be honest, I lost track. I’ll have to watch this episode with a whiteboard next time around. It fully embraces the logical consistency problems of a time travel episode, and instead just decides to have fun with…

The Cardassian revolution strikes a real blow, and a Klingon coup is needed. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find much to say about these episodes. The plot is moving on, big things are happening. It’s all pretty good, pretty interesting. Unlike the previous go, it doesn’t feel like we’re just killing time – there’s…