Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

The Federation finally decides to take the offensive. Well, clearly we’re headed back to the status quo. Or, at least, I’ll be very surprised if we don’t end up with the crew back on the station within another couple of episodes or two. Once again the DS9-side plot is a lot more interesting, following on…

The station resistance hits a few snags. Wow do things get worse here. Rom arrested, Odo (apparently) changing sides to the Founders. It’s really just a fairly standard cliffhanger, but it’s more effective given the buildup. And the buildups of Kira and Odo’s relationship really pays off, as there is a genuine sense of betrayal.…

Worf deals with his son, Dukat with his daughter. Gee, I wonder what the name might mean? If you’d told me a few episodes ago that we’d have a Klingon story with a Bajoran politics B-plot, and the Klingon story was the better part, I’d have thought you crazy. But here we see the continuation…

Seven of Nine has a bit of a relapse in the whole ‘Borg’ thing. Overall, I thought this was an inevitable story told too early, and not told well enough. I think the show would have benefited from taking a leaf from DS9’s books, and stretching some of the memories of her youth out over…

Sisko and crew crash on a remote planet. I felt like we’d seen the Sisko half of this episode before – fighting the Jem’Hadar, betraying the Vorta, we’ve all been there before. It’s all well done, but it does nothing interesting and adds little to the development of the characters. The Kira bit was a…

The Doctor and B’Elanna transport into a horror movie, while Ensign Kim is in a… different genre. I’ve discussed the problem of the horror movie tone in Star Trek before. It’s pulled off here, but mainly by cheating. We know that the alien hologram is bad from almost the first moment we see him on…

Sisko heads off to war. Yikes this is a big change for Star Trek. Firstly, there’s the tone. They capture a pretty good war feel (albeit not exactly as gritty as *Nor Battle to the Strong*). Then, there’s the story telling – this is now almost completely serial story telling, with the story being told…

Chakotay falls in with an alien militia when he crashes on a planet. Clever and bold. While I spent most of the episode expecting a twist (in particular, that Voyager would have contacted the other side), I was expecting something more along the lines of ‘war is hell, both sides are terrible’. Instead we get…

B’Elanna has a pretty bad day, what with the being marooned in space and all. This is the kind of thing that Voyager has done badly in previous seasons. We’ve got the alien race of the week being annoying, one of the crew learning a Very Special Lesson ™ about the value of being in…

Kes’s psychic talents accelerate, and Seven of Nine comes to terms with being apart from the Collective. This is the most ‘continuity heavy’ episode that isn’t a 2-parter in just about all of Voyager. The episode opens with the Borg-modified Voyager, and Seven’s modified cargo bay. Things pick up just moments after the last episode,…