Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

After 42 episodes Voyager is yet to produce a single great episode. At the same point into their runs every other series had at least one, normally more. It generally stays out of truly awful (with the exception of *The Thaw* this year), but never really clicks. Mediocrity at work. There was no common thread…

Voyager loses a game of cat and mouse with the Kazon. The Kazon have never been an interesting villain. Seska has helped a little bit, but not enough. They just don’t have enough dimension to them. That makes the events here pretty shocking – all they needed as slightly better tactics to capture the ship?…

Dr Bashir tries to cure a Jem’Hadar punishment plague. The first real Bashir character piece in a while – he doesn’t get very many, either. Here we finally deal with his biggest flaw, his arrogance. But while there’s a nice bit in the middle where he questions himself, I got the impression that by the…

Chakotay and Janeway catch a fatal illness, and have to be left behind. An episode of (deliberately) two sections. There’s the ‘Tuvok disobeys orders to find a cure’ bit, and the ‘Swiss Family Janeway’ bit. The Tuvok sections are fairly by the numbers, although there is a nice action sequence towards the end where we…

A rouge Jem’Hadar group leads to the first joint Federation/Dominion operation. Finally we see a bit of a third dimension to the Dominion. There have been several Jem’Hadar episodes, but none of them have worked particularly well. Here it finally clicks, and we get a much clearer sense of what they believe. The use of…

Harry Kim’s incompetence maims Tuvok and Neelix. This could have been a lot, lot worse. The concept of merging Tuvok and Neelix into a single person could have been played for comedy. Instead this episode takes a much more difficult philosophical path. Unfortunately the decision made at the end rings false. No matter how justified,…

Sisko’s girlfriend could be an agent for the Maquis. Did not see this one coming. OK, the Eddington thing I saw a mile off. But the Kassidy Yates thing was out of left field. And, honestly, it still feels a little arbitrary – we’ve never had a reason to suspect she might be on the…

Voyager tries to rescue some people from a bizarre virtual reality. Not since [The Royale](http://www.exasperatedcalculator.com/archives/2010/03/trekathon-144-the-royale-tng/) have we had to put up with such an annoying, pointless ‘allegorical’ world. I have never understood the [Comedia dell’arte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_dell’arte) obsession that American writers have, it’s incredibly obscure and yet comes up all the time in shows like Studio 60.…

Lwaxana Troi again. Excuse me, I just need to go get my nail gun. OK, that’s probably a little harsh. This is more a story about Odo than Lwaxana, and making the story about a character care about rather than hate makes things much more palatable. For once the relationship Lwaxana is thrown into during…

Back to the mirror universe again. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The mirror universe started out as interesting and refreshing. But by now it’s just silly. The only new element is the mirror universe Worf, and frankly that gives us absolutely nothing interesting at all. Other than that,…