Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Sisko dies, and Jake is obsessed with bringing him home. This is the best episode of Star Trek I’ve seen in a very long time. Quite possibly ever. It’s not a big, galaxy wide story. It’s a small, personal story, but a deeply affecting and incredibly well written one. The performance of the adult Jake…

Voyager becomes a lot harder to navigate. So, a quick summary of the episode: weird things start happening, weird things get worse, everyone turns maudlin and despairs, then everything turns out all right without any intervention. So, this one jumped off the rails for me when Torres ended up in the Transporter room, but never…

The Klingons go to war, and Sisko is in the middle. This episode moves so fast I got whiplash. We go from everything happening at a safe remove to Klingons invading the station inside of about 20 minutes, adding on to the Klingons only having been the bad guys for about 20 minutes more. It’s…

A Klingon fleet visits the station, and a certain ex-Enterprise Klingon is called in to help. For the most part this is a really clunky course correction. It introduces a lot of new stuff, and brings back some Klingon plots not touched much in years. But the decision to introduce a new war between the…

Harry Kim finds himself back in San Francisco (and in nearly 400 years they *still* haven’t knocked down the hideous [Transamerica Pyramid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transamerica_Pyramid)). Voyager’s first ‘return to Earth’ (I’m betting there will be more yet) is ultimately a bit underwhelming. The how and why of getting there and getting back is all done through some pretty…

Kes goes through space-puberty. Probably one of those ideas better left alone. Accelerated puberty, like any accelerated ageing, is hard to pull off well. A couple of the characters run around going ‘am I ready to be a parent’ – such an old story, with nothing new done here. And then a cop out at…

The Doctor is left all alone on the ship. Apart from the actual explanation of what was going on in the last act (yuck, technobabble city), this was a pretty good piece of paranoid ‘what’s real here’ storytelling. It’s always an uphill battle in this type of story within an ongoing story, because the audience…

Chakotay gets caught up with a Kazon child going through his initiation rite. So far we’ve seen quite a bit of Chakotay’s spirituality. And it’s certainly a nice change for Star Trek to allow a character to have that side. But it all feels very shallow, like a Fisher Price religion. I don’t know very…

Voyager meets Amelia Earhardt. A strange episode that started out bad but somehow redeemed itself by having an interesting problem to resolve in the final act. The whole ‘finding ancient alien abductees’ thing has been done very often, and isn’t fundamentally a very interesting story. There’s way too much time spent on the ‘this is…

Ouch. Not a good season. There are a few pretty strong moments, such as the Romulan/Cardassian 2-parter, *Shakaar* and *Visionary*. But there is nothing close to the great episodes of the previous season. And against that there are some real stinkers – *Fascination* and *Meridian* are the two worst, but the surplus of Ferengi episodes…