Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

It took the best part of a season, but Deep Space 9 now officially has an episode to rival the best of Next Generation. The greatest strength of this episode is that it draws almost solely on the setting on Bajor, and outside of that is barely science fiction. It’s a bold, courageous approach to…

Time for DS9 to take another run at the ‘possessed by alien energy’ plot. This one works a lot better than *The Passenger*, but that’s not a hard bar to clear. There are some nice bits and pieces – Sisko as the disengaged yet vicious leader was nice. It was also a nice touch that…

The most interesting transporter malfunction so far. In a call back to the TOS episode *The Enemy Within*, Riker is duplicated in a transporter accident. Only this time it’s not an evil twin. It’s a refreshing take on the older idea, and my only quibble is the lack of trauma in ‘Thomas’ Riker. He’s been…

Oh dear, it’s Lwaxana Troi. Despite that handicap, I liked quite a bit here. O’Brien’s relationship with the computer seemed quite real to me – I’ve had similar thoughts about some of the computers that I’ve worked with. And while Lwaxana’s normal predatory approach was annoying, we learnt quite a bit about Odo that made…

Y’know, if I was Gowron I’d just go in the other direction whenever I saw Worf – he always seems to be caught in the middle of complicated difficulties for the Klingon Empire. This time around he’s rewriting the Klingon constitution by reforming it into a constitutional monarchy. It’s a good episode, driven by Worf’s…

A good teaser should make you eager to see the rest of the episode. If, even with my project to watch everything, I very nearly turned the episode off after the teaser then clearly things have not gone well. The only thing that was keeping me watching by the time Odo says “please refrain from…

I have some helpful advice for any writers considering using narration of any type for TV or movies: don’t. It has never, ever worked. It certainly doesn’t work here. I have similar remarks for people who want to use framing scenes and tell their story almost entirely in flashback. There isn’t a lot to like…

So far Deep Space 9 is painting a puzzling picture of Bajoran society. So far we’ve seen terrorists, farmers and priests. Not exactly the kind of rounded picture you’d expect from a society being considered for admission into the Federation. Anyway, this week we have the ex-terrorist (Kira) facing off against the stubborn farmer who…

The ‘nothing is real’ plot is very hard to pull off in TV. In a movie we don’t know the background, but here the viewer knows for certain what the ‘reality’ for Riker should look like. That makes it harder to write the story. But this episode takes those constraints, and actually uses them to…

Another important marker in the development of the series, the start of the friendship between O’Brien and Bashir. It’s been said before by others, but what the writers (and Siddig el Fadil) did with the Bashir character here is very brave. They started out with a deeply unlikeable, arrogant person, and then over the course…