Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

It’s everyone’s favourite SF theme, elections for a religious post. Overall the structure of this episode is quite clever, and it manages to avoid a lot of the cliches the ‘investigation’ plot often has. It felt a bit light on, like there wasn’t quite enough story to fill the hour. The best bits are Vedek…

The Maquis and the Cardassian DMZ are back. That’s four episodes now, must be a thing. At last, a good episode of TNG. It’s been a while, as there’s been one of the worst runs the show has ever experienced lately. This is the last regular episode of the show, and yet we spend the…

293 episodes later, it’s time to back to the [Mirror universe](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/01/trekathon-033-mirror-mirror-tos/). Outside of Tribbles it’s hard to think of a more beloved story to return to than the mirror universe, although a couple more [goatees](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeardOfEvil) would have been nice. Everyone gets to have a whole bunch of fun chewing the scenery as the evil (or,…

The Enterprise evolves into another life form. It’s another strange symbolic episode, only this time with an even less enjoyable ending as rather than resolve the problems on their own logic it’s external technobabble that saves the day. It was nice to see the Holodeck back as it’s been a while. But there was never…

‘Plain and simple’ Garak has a complicated medical problem. Fantastic stuff. Not much I can add really. It takes the pieces set up earlier in terms of Garak’s mysterious past, and while it looks like resolving everything ends up opening up as many questions as it answers, and then some. And has the courage to…

Picard’s son is threatened by the Ferengi. Hang on a minute… Strange that there’s been a kind of family trilogy here – Crusher’s son, Worf’s son, and now Picard’s ‘son’. It wasn’t a huge surprise to see that he wasn’t really his son, but the development of the relationship worked pretty well. A lot of…

The fight against the Maquis continues, although it’s a bit more complicated than that. Unusually for a Trek 2-parter, this episode actually delivers. It all gets messier than before, but there’s a nice story told, particularly the parts involving the enigmatic, and always slightly suspicious, Gul Dukat. But the thing I liked the most was…

Worf’s son Alexander struggles with his future. In general, Klingon stories work best when it’s about politics or battle. Simple interpersonal stories just don’t fare as well. The story tries very hard, but falls down. A lot of that is due to the fact that the actor playing Alexander just isn’t that good. So we…

The recent Cardassian treaty isn’t going down well with some colonists. And hey, it’s that plot thread from the previous episode of TNG being picked up in another series, and one that is very important for the background of Voyager. Unfortunately it’s the only time this is done – there’s only a few episodes of…

Ensign Crusher is back, and everyone’s off to evict a Native American colony. The Wesley plot starts off being a bit annoying and predictable (Wesley is a teenager, Wesley is angsty, Wesley doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life), but turns around a bit in the second half simply because his change…