Deep Space Nine 7x24 "The Dogs of War"

rating: ***

the story: Zek finally names his successor.

what it's all about: Parts of "Dogs of War" act as the first act of the final episode, "What You Leave Behind," which like the final episodes of Next Generation and Voyager is already two hours long.  You get Damar preparing to be the leader of a full-scale Cardassian resistance movement in the basement of Garak's childhood home, Kasidy announcing her pregnancy, and the build-up to the massive final battle.

All that is well and good.  It's also the final "Ferengi episode."  Ha!  "The Emperor's New Cloak" seemed like the final "Ferengi episode," but buried at the end of he final ten hours of the series is another!  Unlike "Cloak," "Dogs of War" gives the Ferengi some closure.  In the first-ever "Ferengi episode," in the first season ("The Nagus"), Zek visits the station intending to announce an heir, convincing Quark he's got the job when it was really just a ploy.  This time he finishes the job and it's...Rom!

Yeah!  "Ferengi episode" became something of an epitaph, a signal that the good qualities of the series were going to vanish and a bunch of weirdo business freaks would spend the hour wasting time with nonsense.  That's how some fans found it, anyway.  But these were some of the best character work of the series, doing everything no other aliens had ever really gotten, a full series arc and a dramatic revision, a chance at redemption.  "Ferengi episode" became a thing well before Deep Space Nine even began, after the Ferengi made a dismal debut in Next Generation as the would-be successors to the Klingons.  Obviously that never happened, so they became something else, such a broad sketch of a society that their stories could literally be about anything, as long as it ridiculed...our worst failings. 

The funny thing is, it was always Quark who showed the most depth, but his brother Rom who got all the credit for it, willingly bucking every Ferengi tradition while Quark seemed to uphold it.  Quark has no real moment in the final episode, so his career statement is in "Dogs," where he seems to claim he'll continue being a true Ferengi even as Zek and Rom and his own mother Ishka have smashed tradition all asunder.  Sounds like he becomes the character who least develops during the course of the series, right?  Well...

He's actually the one who had the shortest distance to cross.  He'd already been willing to work with fate in whatever shape it took.  He was the most adaptable resident of the station, even if the one with the seeming least amount of scruples.  But by Ferengi standards (all this is spelled out in "Body Parts," by the way), he was a very bad Ferengi indeed, no matter how things looked.  He was the ultimate opportunist, and because of him, his brother was allowed to develop into the new-style Ferengi he became. 

Anyway, I think Quark ends on a good note, the usual chaos around him as always driven by his actions, regardless of the outcome, which here means the very idealistic vision Gene Roddenberry always expounded, that the future will always be better than the past.  And that leaves the series with nowhere else to go but the end. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Casual fans will never forgive the Ferengi for being such an epic disappointment, but it will forever be their loss.
• series - The conclusion to an arc that began all the way in the first season.
• character - Quark's closing argument.
• essential - Things turn out well for his family.

notable guest-stars:
Casey Biggs (Damar)
Jeffrey Combs (Brunt/Weyoun)
Aron Eisenberg (Nog)
Max Grodenchik (Rom)
J.G. Hertzler (Martok)
Barry Jenner (Admiral Ross)
Salome Jens (Female Founder)
Penny Johnson (Kasidy)
Chase Masterson (Leeta)
Andrew Robinson (Garak)
Tiny Ron (Maihar'du)
Wallace Shawn (Zek)
Cecily Adams (Ishka)
Vaughn Armstrong

Deep Space Nine 6x23 "Profit and Lace"

rating: ***

the story: Quark is forced to defend everything he stands against as Ferengi society prepares to undergo a massive revolution.

what it's all about: Well, here we are, the "Ferengi episode" of all "Ferengi episodes."  Frequently cited as the worst episode of the series.  What I can never quite decide is how badly it betrays Star Trek fans to fall horribly below their own standards.  No, not on what makes a good, or bad, episode, but the social standards the franchise always represented.  With twenty years hindsight, the extreme hate for this episode actually kind of represents the most extreme bigotry the fans ever expressed.

For one episode, Quark becomes transgender.  That's perhaps the one-sentence summary I should've used above, and every fan would know instantly what I was talking about, and come up with their own summary of its worth: "Profit and Lace" is a farce.  That's exactly what they've been saying since it originally aired.  I've tried to come up with the reasons why the pejorative term "Ferengi episode" came into being, but it's probably because of "Profit and Lace."

The huge, huge irony is that this is not even the first time in Deep Space Nine featured a Ferengi posing as a member of the opposite sex.  Way back in the second season, "Rules of Acquisition" featured a female struggling to be taken seriously.  It was actually the foundation of the arc Ferengi society would take across the series as a whole, ratcheted up considerably when a different female, Quark and Rom's mother Ishka, took up the struggle in "Family Business" in the third season, the more obvious predecessor to "Lace," which follows the effects of Ishka ending up in a relationship with Grand Nagus Zek, the leader of the Ferengi.  In "Rules," the female poses as a male, and much like the ending of "Lace," it's unwanted sexual advances that end the experiment in discomfort.

"Lace" is about a lot of things, but it's kind of the episode where Quark must really decide how much he wants to struggle against the tide of history.  Tellingly, it begins and ends with him interacting with one of his hired girls at the bar, and how he decides to treat her, which in itself has nothing to do with the few scenes where he's a woman (except from his firsthand experience fighting off unwanted advances).  True, by the end of the series Quark is the one character who seems to be in the same place he was at the beginning of the series, but he's also the one character who had settled into his new life well before the end, when massive change had already rocked the foundations of his world.  As in, this episode.  As in everything that preceded and followed it, but mostly this episode.  Quark stops being such a desperate man after this.  That's really the best characterization of the bartender, previously; he was always so desperate to validate his existence, trying to be the ideal Ferengi when everyone around him kept telling him it was a horribly backward mistake.  If he didn't make the outward advances his brother Rom and his nephew Nog did, Quark still managed to make peace with the universe.

What, you were expecting it to look different?

But getting back to the transgender thing, I still find that shocking.  Of course the scenes of Quark as a female will be hard to take seriously, if you're already predisposed to the idea of the "Ferengi episode."  Quark's basic character, again, remains entirely consistent.  Complaints about this concept stem either from problems with Ferengi in general, or a failure to take the concept of changing one's gender seriously.  It could be one or the other, or both, but I'm inclined to believe the hate is really directed at the gender issue.  I'm fully aware of how complicated this concept is, how it's not any closer to being mainstream now than it was in 1998, when "Lace" originally aired.  Today we see transgender people as visible for the first time ever, but they haven't even begun to approach the level of acceptance of the homosexual community, which still faces its own hurdles.  Star Trek did analogies for years, but didn't begin incorporating gay characters themselves until 2016's Star Trek Beyond. 

But fans consider "Lace" an abysmal episode, for the scenes of Quark as a female, and for those scenes alone.  They don't seem capable of incorporating those scenes into the rest of the episode, or the rest of the series, for that matter.  And maybe that's a good thing.  Maybe that makes them more powerful.  I don't know.  I just know that it makes the episode more important, for being impossible to ignore, one way or another.  And probably not even what the producers remotely had in mind when they conceived it.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A groundbreaking episode still ahead of its time.
• series - I'm inclined to knock it here, as it does seem to reiterate previous material.
• character - Unlocks the course of Quark's development.
• essential - Became the definition of must-see when fans insisted that it was must-miss, for all the wrong reasons.

notable guest-stars:
Cecily Adams (Ishka)
Wallace Shawn (Zek)
Jeffrey Combs (Brunt)
Max Grodenchik (Rom)
Aron Eisenberg (Nog)
Chase Masterson (Leeta)
Tiny Ron (Maihar'du)

Deep Space Nine 6x10 "The Magnificent Ferengi"

rating: ***

the story: Quark assembles the least likely commando squad ever.

what it's all about: "Magnificent Ferengi" is an interesting riddle.  On the one hand, it's an episode that might actually help convince reluctant fans to give the Ferengi another shot.  On the other, it may actually be the episode responsible for the dreaded "Ferengi episode" reputation.  What fun!

It's actually a nice culmination of the work Deep Space Nine had put into the Ferengi, tying together pretty much every significant representative of the species the series had introduced over the years, from the Grand Nagus (absent but crucial to the plot) to Ishka (Quark's mum) to Brunt (the evil would-be uber Ferengi) and even Gaila ("the one with the moon"), and even suggesting that the path to the future for even a perennially hopeless culture (in terms of the Federation ideal) wasn't as dim as it sometimes seemed. 

...On the other, the Ferengi were always going to be a hard sell.  These were the guys Next Generation botched so badly in its first season, so badly that even in a whole season filled with creative botches, the introduction of the would-be successors to the Klingons felt like the worst one.  Successors to the Klingons?!?  Surely not!  But at the time, they really did seem like they'd be more menace than punchline (see how one of their number was even set up to be Picard's archnemesis!), until fans actually saw them in action.  Their subsequent appearances in that series were concessions to the obvious conclusion that they hadn't worked out as planned, and so they became intergalactic weasels instead, comically obsessed with prophet and just as comically inept. 

Enter: Quark.  The station's resident bartender was a giant reclamation project, meant to showcase the heretofore unknown nuances of the Ferengi.  Actually, he succeeded so well it was almost impossible for any other Ferengi to measure up to him.  His brother Rom actually devolved into such a buffoon that the only direction left to go with him was actually to turn him away from Ferengi norms.  So it became with Rom's son Nog, too, and each subsequent new Ferengi had to either follow the norms or risk being swallowed by them.  Yeah, I don't know how that was supposed to work, either.

The results can be seen in "Magnificent Ferengi."  The ones trying to be true practitioners of the culture (Brunt, Gaila) have tellingly fallen flat on their faces since last we saw them.  This may be due to the effects of an aging leader (Zek) looking to consider reforms with the encouragement of his relationship to Quark and his family, or because of, you know, the Dominion War.

Speaking of that...Following the epic arc at the start of the season, no real fighting had been seen for three episodes, and then along comes this one, in which the fighters are...the Ferengi.  Who are laughably terrible fighters.  The whole episode is about how terrible they are.  I mean, it's a farce!  In any other context, they're so hilariously inept it would undoubtedly make a classic Star Trek farce (see: "The Trouble with Tribbles," although maybe don't because even the Klingons somehow emerge unscathed from that one).  But the joke almost seems like it's on them.  The whole episode focuses entirely on them, with no other species, much less Starfleet, around, except for a Vorta they accidentally kill and then motorize in order to try and complete negotiations with the Dominion.

It must seem like an epic lost opportunity for fans who have little patience for the Ferengi.  I'm hardly saying this is the only interpretation.  I like the Ferengi.  I think they gave necessary color to the series, and this is a great example of how they did so.  I mean, there were several attempts to lighten up the war ("One Little Ship" a handful of episodes later, "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" in the final season), and I think this was the most successful one.  And it does advance the overall narrative of the Ferengi. 

But it may also be the prototypical "Ferengi episode."

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Whether you consider it a good or bad thing, this is arguably one of the definitive appearances of the Ferengi in Star Trek.
• series - Their development as a species, as depicted in Deep Space Nine, reaches a crucial moment.
• character - Quark, and just about every other Ferengi in the series.
• essential - I think it's a terrific farce, but others may simply consider it a farce.

notable guest-stars:
Jeffrey Combs (Brunt)
Josh Pais (Gaila)
Max Grodenchik (Rom)
Aron Eisenberg (Nog)
Cecily Adams (Ishka)
Chase Masterson (Leeta)
Christopher Shea (Keevan)
Iggy Pop

Deep Space Nine 5x20 "Ferengi Love Songs"

rating: **

the story: Quark discovers that the Grand Nagus and his mother are shacking up!

what it's all about: When fans think of "Ferengi episodes," it's actually probably this one they're thinking of.  Taking every "Ferengi episode" that came before it and playing fast and loose with the logic, and generally making as many convenient, logic-defying leaps as possible, "Ferengi Love Songs" has the dubious distinction of actually becoming the crux for every major "Ferengi episode" that followed it, including the much-loathed "Profit and Lace" a season later...

Grand Nagus Zek was kind of the Q of Deep Space Nine, a wonderfully zany character who'd show up about once a season to cause chaos, mostly for poor Quark.  Quark's mother Ishka debuted in the third season, "Family Business."  As you'll note above, the two end up in a relationship together.  It'd the definition of a farce.

This is extremely unfortunate timing, as with certain other parts of the season, as Quark had just experienced his darkest story, "Business as Usual," and this is basically its antithesis.  I'm not going to dock it as much as I suddenly feel like because it is pretty important to the rest of the series, and the notion that even hilariously backward Ferengi could be redeemed to something resembling respectable with enough radical shoves from the irrepressible Ishka.  I think all this would've worked a lot better if Quark hadn't been in the picture, for a change.  But then again, even Rom, about as opposite a Ferengi as you'll find, acts a lot like a typical Ferengi in the episode, which is equally baffling.  It would've been better, I think, to have some other character discover what Zek and Ishka have been up to.

Well, like I said, "Ferengi episode."  This is one you're either going to like or it'll just drive you nuts, not because of something obvious like Quark parading around in drag ("Profit and Lace"), but because it doesn't seem to respect what came before it.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - One way or another, this one's strictly for fans of Deep Space Nine.
• series - It's a "Ferengi episode," for better or worse.
• character - I think the episode best reflects on Zek, all told, shows how far he's come since the first season.
• essential - Because it kind of savages everyone else.

notable guest-stars:
Wallace Shawn (Zek)
Max Grodenchik (Rom)
Tiny Ron (Maihar'du)
Chase Masterson (Leeta)
Jeffrey Combs (Brunt)
Cecily Adams (Ishka)