Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

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…

Chief O’Brien’s daughter goes through a time thingie and ends up spending 10 years in the wilderness. So, I was bored with this until about halfway through. Then, as it became clearer that it wasn’t going to be a miracle cure it became a little more interesting. But finally we end up with a pretty…

Seven of Nine has to pilot Voyager through a nebula single handed. A little heavy handed towards the end, as Seven really begins to lose touch with reality. But what worked was the hallucinations made sense in terms of her internal struggle, without *too* much literalism. It should also contribute usefully to Seven’s character development.…

The worst Ferengi episode yet, as Quark dresses in drag to save the Grand Nagus. Terrible moments: * Quark sexually harassing an employee. * The continued inherent sexism of Ferengi society. * “The headquarters of the sole legitimate government of Ferenginar” (whatever happened to the Ferengi Alliance?) * The Nagus’s idiotic plan to win his…

Ultimately an interesting idea that gets a bit too weighed down by technobabble, and a little bit too much forcing of the plot towards where the writers wanted to be with the ending. And nothing felt particularly new either – unaware duplicates have been done better before (*Whispers* in DS9, most recently). There was some…

Nog and Jake end up on a ship crewed only by Star Fleet cadets. There was a lovely moment here where one of the cadets describes living on Earth’s moon. It’s one of the few times where there’s been a real feeling of actually *living* in the future, of people living in a place other…

The Doctor ends up in the middle of a dispute about what he did 700 years ago. An interesting and brave narrative structure that only just works. I enjoyed the ‘here’s Voyager as villains’, although I felt that the picture was just a bit too much of a caricature to be credible – for instance,…

A Bajoran prophecy almost ends in the destruction of the station. Strange episode. Up until halfway through it looks like it’s going to be a Bajoran politics episode, with a bit of religion thrown in. And then about halfway through it goes stark raving bonkers, and we end up with a possessed Kira and Jake…

Chakotay falls in love with a block of wood. Oh wait, that was an actress? Sorry, have to re-evaluate the whole episode now. That might seem a bit mean, but the poor acting (or, more fairly, the fact that the acting didn’t work for me) kills the episode. There’s a good premise here – the…