Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

A little trip on the Defiant turns paranoid when a changeling is found aboard. Another escalation in the cold war with the Dominion that has been running since the start of the season. Slow to get going, and a couple of drawn out sequences in the middle. But plenty of *The Thing* style paranoia, which…

Jadzia experiences her past selves. This kind of episode is a big opportunity for the actors to do something new. Most of them don’t do that much with it: Kira overacts, O’Brien is nebbish, Leeta is hard to distinguish from her normal self, Quark is a one note joke, and Bashir seems mostly like himself…

Voyager’s first year has some promise, but it hasn’t hit its straps yet. But it’s a lot better than I’d heard it was. There isn’t a single fantastic episode, but there’s also only one awful one (*Cathexis*, yuck). *Caretaker*, *Faces* and *State of Flux* all showed a lot of promise. But the stories have all…

Tuvok tries to whip a ragtag group of Maquis crew into shape. Not exactly a groundbreaking story, but still well told. It was a bit hard to believe that Tuvok was a good teacher though – I suspect that the other lecturers at the academy were fixing a lot of his mistakes. But the ‘come…

Kira and an old friend nearly start a civil war. Several episodes so far have followed a pretty similar ‘escalation’ pattern to this one. Things start out nice and simple, and kind of spiral out of control as the episode goes on. DS9 is pretty good at it, but I worry that it’s getting a…

Neelix runs into a war criminal from his past. This is pretty heavy handed stuff. The number of not-so-veiled allusions to [Hiroshima and Nagasaki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki) got really annoying fast. And too much of the weight of the episode rests on Neelix being serious – possible, but a big ask given how he’s only been given comic…

Quark’s mother breaks Ferengi law. Grading on the ‘Ferengi episode’ curve this was pretty good. That means it comes out slightly above ‘mediocre’ on the normal scale. My main problem in enjoying this is just the sheer offensiveness of Ferengi culture’s treatment of women. But the story works in the end, and other than one…

Torres gets split into a Klingon and a Human half. From the summary line I was expecting to hate this episode a lot, but it turned out to be really really good. The story is able to teach us a lot about one character, while managing to avoid the deep dive into technobabble that’s been…

Sisko goes all [Thor Heyerdahl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl). A strangely quieter episode, the trickiest thing here is adjusting to the suddenly slower pace than the episodes around it. It’s a good story, well told in a way that builds useful character elements, it’s just a bit of a whiplash in change of pace from the ‘Romulans trying to…

Chakotay’s brain gets drained. How would you make a really bad episode? * Stupid Holodeck opening sequence with no point other than using up a few minutes. * Ridiculous technobabble explanation for the main inciting incident. * Painfully long ‘oh, he’s native american’ sequence with a medicine wheel. * Kes having strange psychic visions that…