Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

Three great Klingon warriors visit Deep Space 9: [Kor](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/01/trekathon-026-errand-of-mercy-tos/), [Koloth](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/01/trekathon-044-the-trouble-with-tribbles-tos/) and [Kang](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/02/trekathon-062-day-of-the-dove-tos/). I am an absolute sucker for for ‘mythology’ episodes. But I think you could easily get through the entire episode without noticing the Original Series callback. It would’ve been nice to have at least a passing reference to the change in appearance since…

The crew catch a virus that de-evolves them. Everyone turns into a monster? Really? That is not how evolution, or even viruses work. Not even close. I’m normally pretty liberal with my definition of science fiction, but this isn’t anywhere near what’s needed. So there’s bad acting as everyone starts to de-evolve, some really terrible…

Quark’s old flame turns up, with the Cardassians in pursuit. It’s another fairly flat episode, that while not compelling provides some good moments of character interest. It’s a very Quark heavy episode, and it provides a bit of insight into him, but they never quite bridge the gap back to the Quark that we’re used…

Someone commits suicide, Worf and Troi try to find out why. The first 15 minutes of this episode come across as very ‘after school special’, with a lot of hand wringing about suicide. It’s nice to see a show like Star Trek try to deal with this kind of issue, but then it kind of…

Dax evaluates a Trill student, and finds a new universe on her windscreen. Overall I found this a nice, but fairly flat episode. The bulk of the time is spent on the ‘be yourself’ advice to the young trill, giving short shrift to the pocket universe growing in the science lab. An odd choice of…

Odo and Dax investigate disappearances in an isolated colony, Jake wants to escape his father’s influence, and Kira rekindles a romance. The setup of this episode screamed ‘we’ve run out of ideas, lets just slam together three plots from the unused ideas on the wall and hope it works’. It’s incredibly uneven. The Odo/Dax story…

Data loses his memory in an alien version of the 16th century. A lot of this episode can be covered under the ‘amnesia defence for breaking the prime directive’ banner. Starfleet had better look out, there could be a lot more amnesia cases coming. Data’s amnesia was quite odd, as it affected parts of scientific…

Sisko and O’Brien are trapped on a planet where gadgets just don’t work. My idea of hell, by the way. It’s a very predictable plot – of course the charismatic, cult-like leader is the one behind the original crash, etc etc. It’s pretty well done, and the show does a reasonably good job with the…

A view of the lives of the junior officers on board. This is an incredibly well known episode, as it set a premise that has been used again and again by science fiction TV shows since. I can remember thinking it was fantastic when I watched it the first time around. But this time it…