Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Dukat and Kira track a Klingon ship attacking outposts. The first half of this episode feels like a seminar on sexual harassment. Dukat clearly wants Kira, and will do anything to try and get her. It’s a bit icky, but more importantly it distracts from the main plot. But things pick up in the second…

Tom Paris tries to break a warp barrier (which we’ve never heard of before). Janeway and Paris ‘hyperevolve’. That’s worked well [before](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2012/03/trekathon-317-genesis-tng/), after all. And then they mate, which is way more information than anyone wanted. It’s an episode that could have been fun, but it’s played for gross and horror. So – they invent…

Odo learns the first lesson of being in love: don’t keep it a secret. Against the odds I kind of liked it. It’s a silly premise, and relies too much on people choosing to not talk to each other like adults. But because it is mainly Odo, with his ‘fish out of water’ background, it…

Voyager tries to make an agreement to stop Kazon attacks. This picked things up a notch for me. It was messy, political, and enough action to keep the plot moving along. But it also felt like an episode from a different Voyager, one with more ongoing plots and less week-to-week stories. It’ll be interesting to…

B’Elanna becomes obsessed with a robot found floating in space. For the most part a big ‘meh’. B’Elanna’s desire to help seems to come more out of ‘hey, look what I can do’ rather than any ethical connection. This issue has been done time and again by TNG, and so the only novel element here…

Things go from ‘changeling infiltrators’ to ‘civil war’ pretty quickly. This story would have been completely unimaginable only 5 years ago. Previously the rule had been ‘Star Fleet can do no wrong’. Now we can have some parts of Star Fleet try to conduct a coup. It makes for a good story, but it’s resolved…

The changelings turn up on Earth, and Sisko and Odo have to go help out. You never quite know when you are going to get a case of the plot holes. You know, when you cannot watch something without seeing all the plot problems that, usually, you would just let slide. It can be a…

Janeway has to rely on a delusional resistance fighter to rescue Tuvok and B’Elanna. Overall a miss for me. The episode tries to do something a bit deeper with the delusional man insisting that Janeway is his daughter. But the arc of the episode (denial, compliance, acceptance at the end) is too obvious. And while…

Bashir infringes on James Bond’s trademarks. OK, this is getting a bit silly now. We’ve had a Submarine movie, a 50s Science Fiction movie, an Indiana Jones movie, and now a James Bond movie. Perhaps someone needs to at least find a new section of the DVD store to rip off plots from for a…

Seals returns, staging a raid on Voyager. So far Voyager has been fairly free of recurring villains, or much in the way of external plot drivers at all. This episode, and in particular the ending, represents a significant change in that. Fortunately Seska is a pretty interesting villain, although her motivations are pretty opaque. None…