Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Worf and Dax (and Leeta & Bashir and Quark) go on romantic vacations to Risa. This episode crystallised for me the problem that I’ve been having with the portrayal of Worf since he joined the show. We oscillate from ‘Worf with the strict sense of duty’ to ‘Worf whose anger gets the worst of him…

Voyager is taken back in the past so it won’t destroy the future. Dear Deep Space Nine – I see you did a cool episode that involved time travel. Therefore we shall do a time travel episode and it will be cool. Signed, Voyager. All Star Trek travel episodes star with the ‘how do they…

Sisko meets Kirk. Dear Voyager – this is how you do a tribute to Star Trek. Signed, Deep Space Nine. Putting the crew of DS9 in period uniforms, integrating them into an older (beloved) episode, even interacting with Kirk, Scotty and the others. It’s probably a bit self-indulgent, but after thirty years that’s probably been…

Janeway goes through a religious ritual to save Kes’s life. Janeway the empiricist learns that the mystical has value. I actually kind of hated this episode, with its predictability and didactic approach, for 95% of the duration. A lot of it could be seen coming a mile off, such as the ‘make your own ritual’…

Keiko is taken hostage (kinda), and O’Brien is forced to follow instructions. Really creepy, but probably falling short of potential because there was just something missing. It was good to see O’Brien driven to panic by the threats to his wife. And it was also good to give Rom a little bit of development to…

Jake has a pretty bad time helping Doctor Bashir on a combat medical mission. Great, wait until *after* the cease fire with the Klingons to give us an episode that actually makes us feel like there’s a war going on here. This is really the closest we’ve ever gotten in Star Trek to ‘real’ combat…

Step 1. Download ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’. (Optional: just go watch [*Roxanne*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxanne_(film)). Step 2: Change the names to Worf, Quark and Grilka. There is (apparently) no step 3. I’m being a bit unfair. Despite the fears I expressed only a few episodes ago, the inevitable Klingon/Ferengi episode turned out OK. That was because by putting Worf…

B’Elanna dreams a dream of time gone by. Everything is delivered well enough, it just seems very strange that it’s B’Elanna here. We haven’t seen her as being the empathic, caring one very much in the past. Here it seems like ‘we have to give this to a female character to make the story work,…

Sisko tries to retrieve a crashed Jem’Hadar ship. The best Red Shirt episode ever. It’s tremendously redshirt-y – five people die. And for a while it’s awfully standard Star Trek. But then one of the deaths is treated seriously, as a matter of importance. And then there’s a great scene at the end where the…

Voyager manages to find a way to do a Ferengi episode. Funnily enough it’s another callback episode, this time back to around 300 episodes ago and [*The Price*](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/04/trekathon-163-the-price-tng/). Close readers may have noticed that I’m not a huge fan of Ferengi-based episodes, but this one was actually pretty good. It was also not as huge…