This is another candidate for “worst episode ever” that (like the previous episode) belongs squarely in the “what in the name of god could the writers have been thinking” category. I scarcely even know where to begin here. The major sins of the episode, I suppose, are its purposeless, meandering plot and its bafflingly botched attempt to introduce a major new…um, enemy?…for the Federation—but huge problems with tone, the handling of the characters, and various other issues plague it as well. I want to go through this one in some detail, as a sort of case study of some of the things that are so very wrong with so many of these first-season episodes.
For starters, while it’s universally recognized that this episode utterly failed in its alleged attempt to introduce the Ferengi as TNG’s exciting, scary new adversary, I would actually go a step further; I don’t even get the sense (despite the deliberate foreshadowing in previous episodes) that the episode is trying to introduce a menacing new enemy. On the contrary, the episode seems to go out of its way to depict the Ferengi as completely backward, incompetent, childish, laughable, and fantastically stupid. And on top of all that, they aren’t even, ultimately, what the episode is primarily about!
But let’s talk about the plotting and overall style of this episode. We open with a way-too-expository-and-verbose captain’s log entry establishing a lame, clunky story hook about the Ferengi having stolen a “T-9 energy converter.” This is merely an excuse to set things in motion, however, and the episode isn’t really much more interested in it than a typical audience member would be. The Ferengi eventually defend their action by claiming that the outpost from which they took the device lies within their territory, but the matter is dropped soon thereafter and left entirely unresolved. Instead, after an admittedly passable teaser-ending in which the Enterprise is (apparently) unexpectedly immobilized by its quarry, about half the episode is devoted to a seemingly endless standoff in which each ship believes itself in the power of the other, since neither can tell that the source of its problems is actually the planet that they are both (for some reason) orbiting. This seems like the sort of thing that the Enterprise would normally be able to figure out right away—and while their inexplicable inability to do so might be an easily overlookable flaw if it were a necessary element of a worthwhile plot, all it accomplishes here is to allow half the episode to be squandered on a lot of pointless posturing, strategizing, and speculation that goes nowhere. In other words, it comes across as a stalling, time-filling crutch leaned on by writers who have no idea what they are doing.
A notable example of this pointless stalling is the “Riker and LaForge in engineering” scene and its aftermath. The setup for the scene is that, with intraship communications mysteriously disabled, Picard sends LaForge to engineering to find out what’s going on down there and report back to him (fair enough). A few minutes later, Picard then grows impatient and sends Riker to go check on LaForge (which seems pointless). We then cut to engineering, where Geordi—who apparently found no one on duty down there capable of telling him what was going on and thus resorted to investigating the status of the engines himself (?!)—reports to Riker on the details of the force immobilizing the ship, and the two of them come up with a plan to try to overcome it. Now, the thing is that despite the completely ridiculous setup, this scene actually works fairly well in itself: it provides a glimpse of the knowledgeable, professional Geordi whom we will come to know as Chief Engineer in future seasons; the interaction between him and Riker is (apart from Geordi’s overexcited “Woo-eeh!”) reasonably well written (it feels similar to how they’ll interact in later seasons, except with less familiarity between them—which is appropriate); and the logic of the plan that they come up with seems sound and actually comes across as reasonably clever. However, despite its sound logic and its having an amount of airtime, dramatic tension, and character confidence devoted to it that would normally be reserved for a plot element that actually went somewhere, their big plan ends up failing to achieve anything at all—and no explanation for its failure is ever suggested, nor does an investigation or follow-up of any kind ensue. They just try it, it fails, and they then throw up their hands and move on to killing time in the episode via other pointless plot meanderings.
Eventually, Picard opens a “dialogue” with the Ferengi by asking them to state their terms, and the fantastically dim Ferengi somehow manage to interpret this as a demand that they surrender. By way of contrast, Picard and company instantly realize what is really going on based on the Ferengi response, showing that a human can outwit a Ferengi with one brain hemisphere tied behind his back (intimidating new foe?). When the episode then finally moves past the standoff and on to dealing with the planet, the away team that beams down demonstrates its incompetence for a while until Yar (apparently the only member of the away team who brought a weapon) eventually shows up and single-handedly takes control of the situation. Meanwhile, back on the ship, a few “look how high the stakes are” scenes are thrown in, in which the episode very unnecessarily establishes that life support on the ship is failing and everyone is going to die if the away team doesn’t resolve the situation within mere minutes. Planetside, the Ferengi proceed to confirm impressions from earlier in the episode that they are nothing but posturing, sub-sapient imbeciles. Then eventually, with no obvious prompting event (so that it just feels like something that gets around to happening once the writers have succeeded in filling enough time), the mysterious entity who’s behind everything that’s been going on suddenly manifests, apparently reads Riker’s mind, and is then for some reason impressed when Riker proves to understand the very ideas that he (the entity) just read from Riker’s mind. They become sudden buddies, the whole plotless travesty of an episode resolves itself, and Riker and the entity pass a few minutes chatting amiably about Federation values and about how fucking backward and stupid the Ferengi are.
So much for the overall story of the episode; what about tone, characters, and ideas? I’ve already alluded to the “present the stakes as astronomical at all times” problem, and one of its effects is to do a huge disservice to the main characters, who tend to be portrayed as seriously freaking out over the tactical situation in a way that not only feels fake, but also makes them seem petty and childish. The writers really didn’t seem to understand, early on, that you can’t present every episode’s events with the same “holy crap, look at the unbelievably dire and hopeless situation that the Enterprise is in this time!” tone and expect it to ring true or keep having any impact; instead, as a viewer, I end up wanting to smack the characters in the head and remind them that exploring the unknown and engaging with “new life forms”—with all its potential dangers—is what they do! For them to act all panicky and put out every time an unforeseen situation arises to disrupt their damned routine is deeply unbecoming (and highly unrealistic). Picard’s impatience two minutes after sending Geordi to check on things in engineering is in a similar vein. And even when the episode gestures toward having the characters behave more like professionals, it often botches the effort. Gathering in the observation lounge for a conference to discuss whatever situation they are dealing with will be a signature element of the collaborative problem-solving style of Picard and his senior staff as TNG evolves, and this episode features, I believe, the first instance of such a conference—but nothing about it works. First, the scene is introduced in a very clunky way, with Picard simply abruptly announcing a conference while everyone is already together on the bridge. They then walk into the observation lounge, where they proceed not to seat themselves around the table, but instead to stand in a cluster and converse; why couldn’t they have just done this while still on the bridge? As for what is said, it consists mainly of Yar and Worf enthusiastically suggesting dumb ideas and Picard rudely shouting them down, then ends with Troi having to prod Picard (a character later famous for his diplomatic prowess) into realizing that the unknown Ferengi might be more likely to respond to his hails if he reaches out to them with something other than threats and demands.
It’s notable that having the Ferengi be shocked and sickened to discover that humans work with (and clothe!) their “females” made this the second episode in a row to feature the Enterprise dealing with profoundly sexist cultures who are bemused by the notion of female professionals. It makes one wonder whether the writers themselves felt uncomfortable with the idea! In this episode, too, the scene establishing the Ferengi as barbarously sexist is immediately followed by one featuring an exchange between Picard and Crusher in which Crusher accuses Picard of pushing a “male perspective” on her. I’m not sure what the writers were thinking here, but if they wanted to contrast 24th-century humans with the Ferengi as a civilization that has moved beyond sexism, then this scene (and its timing) was an odd choice.
Various other scenes and bits of dialog are problematic on a character level as well, in a way that might best be summed up simply by observing that the writers seemingly had no idea how to write plausible stuff for the characters to say to each other that would make them feel believable as people or interesting as characters. Data, in particular, continues to come across as not at all “androidy”—making comic asides to Geordi in response to things said by the Ferengi, editorializing for no reason other than dramatic effect when talking about the Ferengis’ apparent technological abilities, and (reminiscent of his “what we’ve just heard is impossible” from “The Naked Now”) proclaiming at one point that what his console is telling him “shouldn’t be.” The whole scene in which Data describes what is known about the Ferengi by using highly implausible references to early American history, and Picard gets misty-eyed about France, is really painful as well. And even with all of this said, I have yet to so much as mention what is probably the single stupidest aspect of the entire episode—namely, everything having to do with fucking Chinese finger puzzles.
So, a few of the characters convene in the observation lounge for another briefing, this one about the mysterious planet below—and for some reason, Data finds a toy sitting on the conference table. What is it doing there? Well, I suppose we’re meant to understand that it was left there by the children whom Riker shoos out of the room at the start of the scene—but this is ridiculous; there is no way that a couple of anonymous kids would have access to this room. Anyway, Data proceeds to pick up the puzzle and fiddle with it absently while giving his briefing. Really? He is an android and a Starfleet officer, but he gets distracted by irrelevant doodads in the middle of official business with life-or-death consequences? Worse yet, he promptly gets his fingers “stuck” in the puzzle. Again—he is an android. Though allegedly possessed of amazing strength, he can’t pull his fingers (or arms) in opposite directions with enough force to tear a few strips of bamboo? He has a fantastically complex and sophisticated positronic brain capable of performing I-don’t-know-how-many-millions of computations per second and provided with encyclopedic knowledge, but he can’t figure out how to release his fingers from a puzzle that any human five-year-old could defeat in about twenty seconds? And over and above all of this—what, in the name of god, was the point of putting this garbage in the episode? Being absolutely as charitable as possible, it may be that the writers envisioned the Chinese finger puzzle as some kind of symbolic analog to the situation in which the Enterprise and the Ferengi find themselves—i.e. mutually trapped, with conventional approaches to freeing themselves proving fruitless. The metaphor, however, is not particularly apt, and it has little to offer in the way of insight about the situation—and it is definitely not worth the character assassination, contrivances, and general descent into absurd silliness that the episode relies on to get us there. Even Picard’s impatient reaction to Data’s predicament—while understandable if you swallow the context—comes across as more petulant irritability from the captain, especially since everyone else seems (smackably enough) to find the situation smirk-inducingly entertaining. Everyone comes off poorly.
And finally, the icing on the shitcake: Before mercifully coming to an end, the episode cannot resist simultaneously reprising the awful finger puzzle business and once again transparently “borrowing” from an original series episode (for the third week in a row!) by having Riker suggest (and Picard agree to) the “terribly amusing” idea of beaming a box of finger puzzles (tribbles) onto the Ferengi (Klingon) ship. This is presented as high comedy, but it’s just really, really unfunny.