Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Kira faces her past actions as her resistance cell is killed off one by one. OK, it’s a bit of a return to earlier themes in terms of the consequences of the war. But I don’t mind so much when it’s done so well, and when we feel it has real consequences. It’s the first…

Sisko receives visions from the prophets following an accident. This is an episode that deals with some very complex political and religious themes. Sisko’s role as the Emissary finally comes into conflict with his role as a Star Fleet captain. And my main complaint is that he switches from one to the other without any…

Janeway single-handedly saves the Enterprise from giant bugs. There is one of the boldest sequences I’ve seen in Trek at the end of the first half of the episode, when Janeway is alone on screen for almost ten minutes, with hardly any spoken dialogue at all. It’s a long way outside the norm for TV,…

Q wants to end a civil war by having a baby with Janeway. The idea of a civil war in the Q continuum is an interesting one. The idea of introducing a change such as reproduction as the solution works. But the execution just doesn’t bring things together. We’re told that what we see in…

Quark and Odo crash land on a remote planet. ‘Tonal whiplash’ is the easiest way to describe this episode. We have a lighter story about Jake and Nog learning to be roommates, contrasted with Quark and Odo facing death on a remote planet. Every time they switched from one to the other, I was disoriented.…

The TNG crew return to save the Earth from the Borg. This is a very solid movie. It has some great moments, a plot that moves along at a fair clip, some interesting action scenes, and some good performances from the non-core cast. There are even some very nice directing choices, like the shot early…

Kes’s mind is taken over by an alien Warlord. I’ve found Kes to be an intermittently interesting character. Sometimes she’s the exposition backup in the medbay. Sometimes she’s just Neelix’s love interest. And then, every now and then, we get a glimpse of a more complex character, such as in *Cold Fire*, and here in…

Everyone takes a trip back into Odo’s memories of Terek Nor. I dislike episodes that change important elements of a character in order to tell the story. Here Garak suddenly becomes quite racist (speciesist?) towards Bajorans, and an apologist for the occupation. It’s new, and out of character for him – he’s been sold as…

Voyager saves the future. This episode has a *really* bad case of the stupids. The evil businessman has captured the Doctor, and then takes the communicator off him? During a conversation about him being a hologram? READ THE SCRIPT! It makes no sense to remove an object from him, it’s not real. Then we have…