TNG Flashback: The Last Outpost

"The Last Outpost" introduced the Ferengi to the Star Trek universe. A Ferengi vessel steals a Federation device, and the Enterprise is ordered to pursue. Both ships are then captured by an energy draining beam from an alien world, where a sleeping guardian of a long-dead empire awakens to challenge both groups.

This episode did so much damage to the Ferengi as a credible nemesis that they were rarely seen again before Deep Space Nine set about the long process of reforming their image. Not as many of the problems as you might think were baked right into the script. The dialogue establishes many of the qualities that were the hallmarks of the Ferengi even later, such as their devotion to profit and innate instinct to deceive. These aspects don't inherently make them laughable villains. What's more, the whip hand weapons they use here look kind of cool, as does the strange weapon we see their ship fire at the beginning of the episode. On paper, the Ferengi could have been neat.

The writers aren't blameless here, though. They mistakenly have the Ferengi fixate on gold, a substance our heroes have learned how to replicate. (The fixation would later be refined by the DS9 writers into an invented substance, gold-pressed latinum.) They also have the ridiculous dialogue about "forcing women to wear clothing" and threatening to unclothe them. Maaaaaybe the writers thought this might come off like a credible threat to rape or something like that, which certainly would have made them villainous. But seriously, could any actor read that and not have it sound laughable?

Still, it's ultimately the director of the episode that did the real damage -- further proven by the fact that this was the only time he ever worked on the show. Actor Armin Shimerman (who later played Quark, but first appeared here as part of the Ferengi away team) has said the director encouraged them to "jump up and down like crazed gerbils." And they do exactly that, most stupidly during the final conversation Riker has with the alien named Portal. It's just painful to watch, really. The Ferengi also writhe around constantly in response to the thunder, because obviously they have big ears and stuff, so loud noises must hurt them. Get it?

I think you know it's the director's fault and not the actors' because this odd fixation on weird physicality shows up not only in the Ferengi, but in Portal as well. He slumps over oddly on his staff with a half-dead leg, even though he swings that staff around (in sped-up time) as a weapon just moments later. All this is why the Ferengi who appears on the viewscreen, DaiMon Tarr, seems almost normal, and certainly not as ridiculous as the others. The script called for him to just sit in a chair and talk into the camera, so there was no opportunity for the director to push a weird physicality onto the actor.

Some miscellaneous observations on the episode:

• The Ferengi logo appears as a tattoo on the DaiMon's forehead (which I knew before this viewing) and is also stamped several times on the bottom of their ship (which I hadn't noticed until now).


• Data has an oddly human moment in the exchange where Worf doesn't know who "Uncle Sam" is, this fractional smile that reads as "I know something you don't know! Cool!" Brent Spiner is sort of in what I'd call a prototype state here, but he'd eventually become a master at depicting these moments that read as trying to be human.


• Geordi is sent down to Engineering in this episode, and has an early scene where he appears very much in his element there. I wonder how much of moving his character to chief engineer after season one was just driven by the desire to have a regular character in that position, or if seeing LeVar Burton's acting in this episode had any influence.


• Picard says "merde" in one scene, totally cursing on national broadcast television in 1987.


• It seems the ship geography establishing the conference room behind the bridge may not yet have been in place. Or perhaps there are multiple identical conference rooms around the ship. Anyway, there's this weird beat of Riker chasing out two kids who were playing in there before the senior staff has their meeting. Was this to remind us there are kids on the ship? Strange.


• Speaking of weird, why is Data playing with a Chinese finger trap while he's on duty?


• Early on, Troi explains that she can sense nothing from the Ferengi, who perhaps can shield their emotions from her. But later on, when Picard is negotiating with Tarr, she says that she can sense he's hiding something. Sucking up to the boss?


• Down on the planet, we see the Ferengi dragging in the unconscious Worf after a commercial break. Because they couldn't possibly have shown us a logical way those Ferengi would have gotten the drop on Worf.


• There's a really crap moment where Picard tells Beverly that her son Wesley "has the right to meet death awake," and she counters with "Is that a male perspective?" Picard calls it like it is, though, proclaiming the comment "rubbish." But oddly, that's the end of the scene.


• Speaking of weirdness between those two, Beverly calls Picard "Jean" (not "Jean-Luc") at one point.


• It's not really clear how Riker deduces that speaking the unvarnished truth to Portal is the right strategy, since he starts doing this even before Portal drops the Sun Tzu reference as a major clue.


• We get the very first instance of "make it so" at the end of the episode.

All told, we have an episode full of good characterization for Riker. It also includes several fun, if not entirely sensical, moments for Data. But the rest is pretty terrible, and what was done to the Ferengi here was unforgivable and almost unrecoverable. I give "The Last Outpost" a D+.