Voyager Flashback: False Profits

"The Price" was hardly a stellar episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But two of its ideas -- a stable wormhole, and a ship becoming stranded in a distant quadrant -- would become the core premises of the next two Star Trek series. And one of those series, Voyager, would serve up a direct sequel in "False Profits."

When Voyager finds a migrating wormhole that could take them back to the Alpha Quadrant, they also find two Ferengi who came through it in the other direction years earlier. They've set themselves up as gods on a primitive planet, and Janeway is determined to remove them (within the constraints of the Prime Directive) before returning home.

By the time this episode aired, Deep Space Nine was more than halfway through its run, and had figured out how to build a solid, comedic episode featuring the Ferengi. This episode is Voyager's attempt at the same, using one of the few stories Voyager even could pick up on from an earlier Star Trek. But it's a decidedly mixed bag.

There are some legitimately funny moments through the episode. There's an old school comedy vibe to how the Ferengis put upon their servant Kafar, and he also gets some nice digs back (including when he refers to them as "Greater Sage" and "Lesser Sage"). The bard with his moving eyepatch is a fun (if broad) bit of business.

But also, the whole episode is premised on these two Ferengi getting the best of Our Heroes, again and again -- and it's a really bad look for them. Janeway's resolve and careful arguments are stripped away by one improvised speech from Arridor. Neelix folds immediately in the face of the slightest pressure from them. They overpower a security officer (off-screen) and steal their shuttle without being stopped. And in the the end, the Ferengi escape through the wormhole, "destroying" it in the process, as Voyager's crew stands by helpless. The reason why Ferengi work on Deep Space Nine is because they're mostly siloed in their own stories where they backstab and outwit each other. But when aliens routinely portrayed as this dumb get the drop on Starfleet? It strains belief and diminishes the main characters

Add to it all one truly terrible casting decision at the heart of the episode. No, not Dan Shor actually returning as Arridor from the original Next Generation episode. And not omnipresent Leslie Jordan, who was brought in for the previously non-speaking role of Kol. (Though I will say, Jordan is suppressing his usual comic personality here, and he's not as funny as usual because of it.) No, I'm talking about the choice to put Neelix in Ferengi makeup to pose as the Grand Proxy.

In the real world, that's a perfectly logical choice. Phillips had actually played a Ferengi himself on Next Generation, was used to extreme makeup, and this would give him a chance at playing broad comedy. Within the fiction, Neelix is pretty much the last person you'd want for the job. He's from the wrong quadrant and knows nothing about the Ferengi, and has rarely proven himself to be reliable under pressure. Even Tuvok would have been a more... well, logical choice; no, he probably couldn't plausibly act like a Ferengi, but at least he does have undercover experience!

Other observations:

• Every once in a while, an alien race on Star Trek just looks 100% human, with not even a minor makeup to alter their appearance. That was probably done here to help an already burdened department, so they wouldn't have to make up a bunch of extras. Or so that the babes attending the Ferengi could be maximally near-naked.
  

• You see Dutch angles (tilted camera) a lot in film and television, but rarely do you see the angle tip in the middle of a shot, as it does here on the Ferengis' "kill the messenger" line.
  

This episode is better than the Next Generation one that spawned it. But that's a pretty low bar. I give "False Profits" a C+.