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Opinionated Next Gen Episode Guide returns to season 1 to finally see where it all began with the Ferengi, also known as, where it all began to go wrong with the Ferengi.

The moment is finally here.

Yeah, it could've been good. There was a seed and semi-good beginning, but the end result? Oh, damn.

I dont think it could have been good with out a total change in the episode, which is just a new episode really. There is a difference between tweaking a few points, and burning it to the ground and rebuilding.

I confess, I actually enjoy a lot of TNG season 1 and 2. I get that it's goofy and silly, but let's face it, TOS was also goofy and silly. TNG felt kind of "off" in a lot of ways, mostly the people and how they react to things - but realistically, people of the future are going to be like that. Just as we would seem really strange and peculiar to somebody from the 18th century.

But even I have to admit, the Last Outpost really screwed the pooch on the Ferengi. It could have been interesting to make them arch capitalists, versus the Federations post capitalist system. But on the one hand, the Ferengi as so ridiculously over the top as capitalists that it's just impossible to excuse it, let alone take it seriously. As SF points out, they don't even particularly act like capitalists - their version of capitalism is just to lie constantly and try to cheat people. It's like somebody took the guys who write the Nigerian scam emails and said "This represents capitalism, because they are tying to make money". Well yeah, they are trying to make money, but nothing else about them is really "capitalist". And in fact they're pretty much the opposite of what most of capitalism is about.

(Contrast that to some of the DS9 episodes where Quark and Nog actually made a pretty good case for capitalism on more than one occasion, even leaving the Federation folk unable to give them a good counter-argument.)

The other side of that coin is rarely mentioned; it's hard to contrast the Ferengi philosophy with the Federation's, because we don't really know what the Federation's philosophy is, in any detail. Which was true then, just a few episodes in, but it's still true even now after the whole of TNG, DS9 and Voyager. All we EVER get is a few vague phrases as to how "money doesn't exist", "material needs don't exist", and "we strive to better ourselves". As Nog himself put it, "What does that even mean, exactly?" The writers never bothered to establish anything about how the Federation worked, just assured us that it did work, and worked better, thank you very much.

That's it in a nutshell, GK - the Ferengi were supposed to be the antithesis of the Federation in a fiscal-philosophy way, but they were just labelled "capitalist" and then portrayed as pretty stock bad guys with a more-than-passing predilection for money... to the point at which they quickly became a parody rather than a true recurring foil for the UFP, and things like the Borg had to be introduced to fill the void of Big Bad Guy that the Ferengi were supposed to fill.

Add to this the primitve, almost neolithic way in which the Ferengi were portrayed singularly in "The Last Outpost." A race of traders - even cheating ones - should have been depicted as cosmopolitan and erudite in a certain way, not backwards and xenophobic.

The only lasting good that came out of this was the presentation of the fact that not all alien humanoids mouths and larynxes were shaped or conditioned to properly pronounce all English words.