Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

O’Brien returns from a mission, but everything seems wrong. This episode makes a leap from ‘good’ to ‘great’ with the last second *Sixth Sense* style twist. The film noir style paranoia was nicely done, and creates a great sense of menace. But it feels a bit empty until the final reveal, at which point everything…

Beverly falls in love with a ghost. So, what was the worst part of this episode? Oh, so much to choose from: * The head of the colony discussing the coming caber toss. * Beverly and Deanna discussing Beverley’s erotic dreams. * Scottish stereotype #7 as the house keeper. * “What’s happening to me? Right…

O’Brien and Bashir get caught behind enemy lines together. For the most part this is a fairly nice little character piece, following the old trick of forcing two antagonists together and seeing how well they worked. The let down was in the framing plot and the Sisko story, which just never really resonated for me.…

Oh, hey, the Prime Directive. Quite frankly, I couldn’t see the episode for the trees here, as I spent the entire hour thinking about the morality and ethics of the prime directive. At one point Crusher is overwhelmed by the thought of making a decision that will ‘affect the future of a species’. But not…

The wheel of ‘when does my character get a story’ comes up Riker, and he’s drawn back into a shadowy incident from his past. It’s odd to remember that back in Season 1 the idea of Star Fleet admirals being bad was one that could only be explained by alien possession. Now we can have…

A clue to Odo’s background is found in the Gamma Quadrant. Good idea, poor execution. The idea of a disease affecting a shapeshifter was an interesting one, and the exploration of Odo’s past could be interesting. But we spent so very much time on Dr Mora’s utter inability to see the obvious, and Odo’s inability…

Quark battles a rival bar, while O’Brien has a racketball rivalry with Bashir (Gee, I wonder what the episode title could possibly mean…) Fluff, but entertaining and reasonably well done fluff. It would have been nice to do a bit more with the idea of a probability altering machine, but that would have been hard…

‘Captain, we’re receiving 285,000 hails’. It feels like a long time since the last ‘great’ episode (it was *Duet*, 24 goes ago). But I found this episode nearly flawless. There’s a great slow, steady development of something being ‘not quite right’, and then mercifully little time on the technobabble before we move in to the…

Star Trek hits 300 episodes. And Bajor deals with unauthorised starship arrivals. The entire first act screamed ‘this episode is short’. Breaking the universal translator can be interesting (q.v. *Darmok*), but here it’s just annoying and time consuming. Once past that, things picked up a little. The conflict resonates well with the similar issue in…

Data meets his mother. This episode ended up as just a great big pile of ‘meh’. While I like Data as a character, this journey into his past just ended up as dull. The story is well executed, with a good subtle sense of there being something just a little ‘off’ about the mother, and…