Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Quark travels to the mirror universe to rescue the Grand Nagus. Oh goody, the Mirror Universe *and* a Ferengi episode. But then Vic Fontaine got shot, so I decided to give things a try. And while this is an overall bad episode there are some glimmerings of something better in there. In a few places…

Voyager can only be saved by finishing Tom’s Holodeck Program. OK, we can all be honest here. This episode is a flimsy excuse to have the Voyager crew run around re-enacting a 50s Science Fiction serial. I loved it. I’m a bit surprised that I did – I hate most Holodeck episodes after all, particularly…

The Doctor has a little meltdown over choosing one patient over another. A more successful-than-usual attempt at an episode heavy on the philosophy, and light on the action. Maybe even a bit too much is tried – the nature of causality *and* the nature of humanity might be a bit too much for one go.…

O’Brien’s past with the Orion Syndicate somehow manages to get Ezri involved. A total ‘bleh’ of an hour. We really don’t care very much about Ezri (as distinct from Dax, that is), so spending the whole episode with her family ends up meaning very little to us. O’Brien shows up about halfway through, but he…

Nog tries to get over his injuries by burying himself in the Holodeck. I give DS9 credit for trying to deal with a difficult subject. While it’s common in movies, the ‘recovering soldier’ story isn’t as common in TV. Unfortunately it looks like the counselling methods are going to go backwards massively in the future,…

Janeway smuggles telepaths across a volume of space. Perhaps a little bit too predictable in the end, but this is a nicely written and acted piece that gives Janeway a good story to herself. Barely anyone else even gets any screen time this week, other than the charismatic alien inspector. The entire episode would have…

Picard protects the fountain of youth. A weak movie, suffering from a range of significant flaws, and rescued (slightly) only by the strength of the actors, and our connection to the characters. It’s generally pretty slow and dull, or it would be if there wasn’t apparently someone sitting around with a stopwatch triggering a pointless…

Tom gets thrown in the brig. An interesting story weighed down by a clunky narrative device, and some overall didactic environmentalism. I generally dislike framing stories pretty strongly, and starting with Tom being thrown in the brig doesn’t help. It’s an old writing trick to start with the climax of the story, as it creates…

The Doctor befriends a Cardassian [Mengele](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele). Baby’s First Ethical Dilemma, also substantially undermined by the fact that the Cardassian doctor is a hologram. And one who was created pretty easily too. It means there’s no stakes involved in whether he lives or dies. And the complexity of the ‘should we use unethical research’ issue is…

Seven of Nine suddenly starts having different personalities. Jeri Ryan is an excellent actress. I have never seen the ‘multiple personalities’ thing done better in Star Trek. And we’ve seen it a *lot*. This episode is a new approach, in that it’s laden with a technobabble Borg thingie, and there just isn’t much interesting that…