Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Janeway reminisces about an ancestor. What a strange, strange episode. The vast majority is set in 2000, with pretty much no science fiction elements other than the background ‘Millenium Gate’ project. There are some cuts to Voyager, and their implausibly vast historical databases. There is an element of fantasy though – a project like this…

Part 5 of 10. The Defiant has been blown up, Earth attacked, and a Cardassian revolt has started. I’m starting to feel like they might be starting to throw too many balls in the air. This episode adds internal conflict within the Klingon side, tensions over Kira as an advisor to the Cardassians, and some…

My Fair Borg. It is objectively remarkable that there have been so many Star Trek stories, and this is the first time the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady story has been rolled out at full strength. That takes serious commitment, given that practically every other show on Earth gets there sometime in the second of third season.…

Worf and Ezri return, and the Breen attack Earth. Here’s a useful measure of how well this serial story is working – I was annoyed that there was an episode of Voyager getting in the way here. And I’m even more annoyed about the fact there’s another one. I said before that it’s hard to…

Can we be done with the Malon now? They’re a one-note “evil polluting capitalist” species who have no interesting stories to tell. Star Fleet has never had of radiation suits? The best response to radiation is running around the ship in singlets? But I think this was about setting up expectations. By halfway through the…

Sisko gets used to married life, Ezri and Worf get sentenced to Death, Damar gets sick of his deal with the devil, Kai Winn has a crisis of faith, and the Breen ally with the Dominion. Or, to put it another way, all of the plots move forward again a little bit. It’s pretty hard…

Dukat has an evil plan, and Kai Winn is falling for it. And him. I was a bit surprised to see Dukat move towards literal seduction of Kai Winn. I hope that this moves along a little bit quicker, as while tricking Winn into believing him is interesting, it’s not going to sustain things for…

The beginning of the end for DS9, with the first episode in the 10-part finale. Worf goes missing, and Ezri tries to find him. There’s a sharp turn in structure here, with very little set up in this episode resolved. We get back to the Bajoran Prophets plot, and get some more cryptic threats about…

Voyager meets an unusual group of aliens who go around solving problems. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire them. They don’t have a [cool van](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team#The_GMC_van) though. Oh, and if you don’t mind being blackmailed or outright manipulated. The ‘twist’ in…

Chakotay hallucinates a boxing movie. Without quite noticing, I see we’re in another patch of movie pastiches. We’ve had gangster, 1950s SF serial, war movie, spy thriller. And now ‘boxing movie’, probably the greatest stretch seen to date. Or, I should say, boxing movie with an overlay of *A Beautiful Mind* for no reason that…