Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Sisko is challenged to a game of baseball by an old rival. This is an awful episode. It’s based on understanding and enjoying baseball (witness the around ten percent of the episode spent simply reading the rules at different points). The premise involves a racist Vulcan, which seems inconsistent with everything we’ve seen about Vulcans…

Voyager goes through a region of space with no stars, and everyone goes a bit wiggy. The scientific contortions aside, the ‘becalmed patch’ thing they were trying for here was potentially interesting. It doesn’t work, because they give up and head into the action story far too soon, and Janeway appears to strangely overreact. I’m…

Ezri Dax comes to terms with herself. This story fell quite flat with me, and I’m not really sure why. The performance is pretty good, although I would’ve liked to see a bit more ‘Jadzia’ in Ezri (as there was in the previous episode). The real problem might be that the story is simply too…

Sisko turns out to be the child of a wormhole Prophet. … Yeah, that’s about how I reacted too. That is an *incredibly* silly plot development. OK, maybe that’s going too far, but it comes out of left field, and it doesn’t seem to actually add anything to the story. The ‘Sisko thinks he’s really…

Sisko soul searches, and nothing else moves forward. This is a strange episode, which spends most of its duration just paddling in place, doing nothing. The main revelations are that Sisko’s mother wasn’t who he thought she was, and has something to do with the prophets (by which I mena – C’mon…), and the last…

While Voyager has been getting better, Deep Space 9 has had its worst year so far. Only 3 episodes made it to ‘very good’ or better (*Honor Among Thieves*, *In the Pale Moonlight*, *Waltz*), compared to nine that were overall bad (with the egregious *Profit and Lace* leading the way, followed by *The Magnificent Ferengi*…

Sisko leads an attack on the Dominion. Some TV shows are very very bad at writing characters out. It’s done very badly here. Jadzia dies for no reason beyond being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and her death serves no broader purpose other than ‘Dukat is a bad dude’. We don’t get…

The Defiant heads off to rescue a downed starship. Dull, with an ending that was honestly a big dose of ‘huh?’ – what was the point of that? To underline that their efforts were completely pointless? The time anomaly thing seemed to serve absolutely no purpose. So, at *no point* during this episode did someone…

Sometimes retooling works. This season sees some big changes in the setup of the show. Kes was replaced by Seven of Nine. And then Seven of Nine got a *lot* of screen time – she was the main plot driver in 7 episodes, had the B-plot in another handful, and played a significant role in…

Voyager finally decrypts the message from Star Fleet, and may have found a way home. It’s been a while since the last ‘false hope return to the Alpha quadrant’ episode. I liked the fake out in this one, as I was expecting things to go wrong in an entirely different way. As alien revenge plots…