Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

The Romulans and Cardassians try to deal with the Founders once and for all. A bit of ‘two parter’ syndrome at play here, but still a pretty good story. The best part is Garak’s mental journey. Initially I was a bit unclear about whether he was just faking or not, but the torture scenes made…

Voyager finally gets a start on an important Star Fleet tradition – the holodeck malfunction. The first 15 minutes is a strange combination of bizarre technobabble and bad period drama. It’s quite simply not very good. The decision to use the Doctor as the main character is a good one, as it turns a pretty…

Garak’s shop has a little bit of an explosion. Another one of those ‘so good I don’t have much to say’ episodes. This is the payoff to a lot of parts laid through the season and before – the secret Cardassian fleet from *Defiant*, the Romulan intelligence exchange from *Visionary*, finding the Founders in *The…

Sisko is kidnapped by the mirror universe O’Brien. Something just felt a bit off about this one. Perhaps it was as simple as the terrible costume design for Jennifer Sisko, which just looked wrong every time I looked at it. I appreciate what they were going for, but somehow it just didn’t work. Other than…

Someone on board is leaking information to the Kazon. A nice episode that uses up what could have been a really interesting ongoing plot with a bit more work. The idea of a traitor in the crew is a good one, but it gets bought up and resolved in a single episode. We’ve now got…

Bashir is trapped inside his own mind. Ultimately this was a failure of imagination. The possibilities for logical leaps and strange occurrences in dreams should provide for great potential. But other than a couple of hard cuts this episode does nearly none of that. The one good idea they try is the ‘crew equals aspects…

Voyager finds a race with the power to send them halfway home. For the first 15 minutes or so this felt like an unwelcome step back to the bad old days of TNG Season 1. Something about the staging and set design of the planet rubbed me badly the wrong way. Super-advanced aliens are hard…

Harry Kim is dying to get back to Voyager. I enjoyed this. It was a pretty successful attempt to look at a trickier issue, and for once didn’t feel like all the answers had to be there for the episode to be complete. And it was nice that the solution came from Harry’s actions and…

Tom is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. So he says, at least. This fell pretty flat. The science fiction element (the ‘relive the victims last moments’ thing) didn’t get a lot of use. It would have been nice, for instance, for the repetition to cause Paris to start to doubt his innocence. And…

O’Brien becomes unstuck in time. Time travel episodes are pretty tricky to get right. It’s a fun story when you write it down in 200 words, but once you have to start working out the internal logic it’s very hard to do something that has strong internal logic without spending half the episode in exposition.…