As noted, I’m gonna try a thing where I do two episodes a week! Let’s see if it works. With that in mind, here is the planned August schedule:
- August 6: “Move Along Home”
- August 8: “The Nagus”
- August 13: “Vortex”
- August 15: “Battle Lines”
- August 20: “The Storyteller”
- August 22: “Progress”
- August 27: “If Wishes Were Horses”
- August 29: “The Forsaken”
This was a great character-driven episode that I hadn’t watched in many years, mostly because I really cringe at the Ferengi episodes now and skipped them on past rewatches. I didn’t like them all that much when I was younger and this was first running, although I can’t say it was because of any consciousness of the stereotypes, which I wholly lacked. Mostly I thought they were just embarrassing – Trek attempts at comedy that failed because they were too broad. I did appreciate – and appreciate more now – that the writers were working with several non-Federation cultures as a way to contrast with the Federation, and if I’d known that by the end of the series they would have illuminated the Ferengi as fully as they did, I would have been surprised. I’m still not sure it would have helped me enjoy the episodes any more, frankly, especially now that I’m a little more tuned-in to some of the cultural baggage the portrayal of the Ferengi is carrying.
That said: Armin Shimerman. Armin freaking Shimerman. The guy is really giving it his all. It’s pretty impressive, when he could have been forgiven for phoning this in. This caused me to go back and research and I realized that Shimerman played one of the first Ferengi in Trek, in TNG’s “The Last Outpost”, back when they were very weirdly physically performed and overall just ridiculous. Based on that experience alone, he could have been forgiven for giving this a hard pass, and it’s not like he needed the work in the early 1990s. (He played a tougher Ferengi in “Peak Performance,” maybe that helped… or maybe he just saw something interesting in the character.)
Why would Chief O’Brien serve as substitute teacher with Keiko still off the station? There have to be any number of people who would make more sense in that role. Dax would have made A TON more sense in that role, and it can’t have been that she’s *busier* than O’Brien given that O’Brien oversees all the maintenance and engineering activities on the entire station.
Speaking of Dax, “Space Galadriel” is *perfect* as a description of what they were trying to do with her originally. The more they get away from that with her, the better it works.