Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

O’Brien goes undercover with the Orion syndicate. This episode rests on a knife point. On the one hand, it’s ridiculous that O’Brien would be chosen for this mission – he doesn’t really have the skills or background, there must be a hundred more qualified people than him, and even within the DS9 crew Bashir would…

Voyager runs into two old friends at once – the Hirogen and Species 8472. You know that thing I said a couple of episodes ago, about how the Hirogen wouldn’t support any interesting stories? Wrong, as it turns out. While the Hirogen themselves are still disappointingly one note, the conflict between Seven and Janeway is…

A runabout gets shrunk down to a tiny tiny size, and then they rescue the Defiant. I did not have high hopes for this episode from the opening sequence – the ‘shrunk down’ story is so old, and usually played for (bad) laughs. But with the exception of one silly sequence, everything works out very…

Voyager gets some letters home. Oh, and some vicious alien hunters. A strange, meandering episode with no clear tone, and that serves little purpose that couldn’t have been achieved using 30 seconds of the previous episode. We’ve already set up the new alien menace, and the ‘communicate home’ Macguffin could have been blown up last…

Sisko has a vision where he’s a 1950s pulp SF writer. I am really torn about this episode. On the one hand, it’s an interesting conceit, and is pretty well delivered (apart from the ‘breakdown’ scene at the end, which is a bit too scenery-chewing). It deals with real issues, without resorting to crude analogy.…

Morn dies and leaves his estate to Quark. This entire episode is based on an in-joke – Morn, the bar rat (an anagram of ‘Norm’ from Cheers), who we’re told talks a lot but never talks on screen. He’s been a background character since episode one, but he’s never been given any interesting character, except…

Voyager finds a way to phone home. It’s very nearly halfway through Voyager as a series, so I suppose it’s time to contact home. The network they use is a bit implausible (it just happens to start near their location, and finish near the Federation), but it was good to finally force the Doctor to…

Voyager has a bad case of the nightmares. Or, alternatively, the Voyager travelling players present *Inception* (12 years before the film, of course). The dream-within-a-dream stuff seems pretty predictable now, but for the time it’s very well done. I was a bit worried that this was going to be another ‘horror’ episode, something that has…

Dukat and Sisko are stranded together after a crash. Really great, but not quite spectacular, stuff. It’s really a one man show, with Sisko not doing much other than move the action along a couple of times. It’s mainly Dukat coming to terms with his demons, and deciding once and for all to be a…

Quark assembles a rag-tag group of Ferengi to rescue his mother. Some truly horrible moments: Quark and Nog just wandering into the Captain’s office accidentally, many scenes of the five Ferengi fighting, the reapparance of Empok Nor, screaming Ferengi, ‘To the Infirmary’, the inevitable final act conflict over money, ‘let’s do it for equal shares…