Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

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…

A strange disease strikes the Voyager crew. Interesting idea, and it’s clever to show us the consequences of one of the previous episodes – Star Trek is too often a ‘no consequences’ show. But at the same time this episode is a pretty good argument against such a show. The writers didn’t have any new…

Dr Bashir goes to Romulus to play spy. They really tried. But at the end of the day this episode just circles around and around getting more complicated without any point. The plot is convoluted, and poorly explained – there’s a series of ‘explanation’ monologues, each harder to understand than the one before it. So…

Harry falls in love like a rebel. Dear ‘writer’ of this episode, As it turns out, I have watched Star Trek before this episode. As a result, I found the abrupt introduction of Star Fleet sexual purity confusing. Perhaps you haven’t watched *The Original Series* and Kirk’s liaisons. That was a while ago. Or any…

DS9 does a 1950s heist movie. You remember, less than 10 episodes ago, when I loved a holodeck episode that was a flashback to an older genre? Well, here’s some proof that it does actually have to be good for me to like it. I love a good heist movie. This is not that. How…

Seven of Nine gets to know the Borg queen. They were shooting for epic here. I respect the ambition, but the result is bogged down by the pacing and structure of weekly TV. There are some decent action sequences, for instance, but they’re obviously broken up by ad breaks (as well as weighed down by…

Janeway decides to try and break into a Borg sphere. What better way to say ‘movie for TV’ than to steal a character from one of the movies. Say hello to the Borg Queen, a character who makes little sense given the established Borg lore (but I’m going to just let that be). Mostly it’s…

Odo meets another of the changeling orphans. An interesting opportunity to explore ‘what does it mean to be a changeling’ without the baggage of the Founders and their objectives. The new changeling is a bit of a dick about it, but that’s part of the point. We do manage to get a good sense of…

The most direct ‘false hope’ episode, with the Voyager crew hypnotised into thinking they’re going home. I think I would’ve preferred the episode done around the other way. We see Seven’s perspective, as she tries to stop the fantasy. But the other version, with Janeway et al convinced that Seven is trying to sabotage them,…