Overall Rating: 4.0
Apparently, Behr and Wolfe think that three hundred MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEs and a few well placed throw-away lines from Quark and Brunt make for comedy gold. They're apparently the only ones.
Plot Synopsis:
Quark receives a visit from the Ferengi homeworld indicating that his mother has done the unthinkable - she's earned a profit (three bars of gold pressed latinum). To prevent the Ferengi Commerce Authority from crushing his little bar like a Klingon glob fly and keep his mother out of indentured servitude, Quark must convince her to sign a full confession of her misdeeds and make restitution (pay back the money she earned). What he doesn't realize (but quickly learns when he returns home along with Rom to pay her a visit) is that the three bars is just what she's been caught holding. In fact, she's got a small business empire and has in fact earned more in a couple of short years than he himself has managed in his entire time on DS9. He threatens to out her if she doesn't sign the confession for the much smaller crime they've nailed her for and eventually, after some arm twisting by Rom, she agrees to the deal to hide her much bigger profiuts and shares some of what she earned with Quark. Brunt is turned away with only a minor infraction repaid. Meanwhile, Sisko meets Jake's "fix up" - one Kassidy Yates - a freighter Captain with a cousin on the outer colony Cestus III who is apparently a good baseball player!
Yeah...one paragraph synopsis...that tells you how freakin' bored I am with this episode.
Writing: 3.0
It's the third season, and I've already hit the end of my tolerance for Ferengi-centric episodes. Awesome. Four long seasons to go - including another SEVEN Ferengi-centric episodes. And believe it or not...it's going to get significantly worse from here. This episode is filled with so many horribly executed cliches (from the sibling blow-up, which, between Ferengi boys, looks like a slap-and-tickle contest, to the "hard" lesson about the failures of their father, to the ridiculous and frankly insulting reducto ad absurdem anti-feminist world that is Ferenginar) and so little relevant dialogue that I don't particularly care to comment too much on it except to say that it just plain wasn't worth my time watching.
Acting: 6.0
Armin Shimerman does an admirable job with the plot he's given (as does Max Grodenchik (Rom)), and we get introduced to another very solid recurring guest star - Penny Johnson (Kassidy Yates). Unfortunately, Ishka (Andrea Martin) and Brunt (Jeffrey Combs...who will later make a much more convincing Weyuun) are pretty mediocre, so I can't sing the praises of the acting. At best, it was par.
Message: 3.0
Nothing annoys me more than when someone is so caught up in smacking me with a 2X4 of righteousness regarding some cause that they don't stop to make sure the wood isn't rotten. Not only does my face hurt from the beat down, but I get mold all over me. The shrill speechifying Ishka delivers in defense of woman's rights (a cause which I would normally stand behind without question) fails to ring true because Ferenginar is too ridiculous to ever exist in the real world. No capitalist society would ever prevent women from earning a profit. The Ferengi race is supposed to exist only because Ferengi are extremely intelligent and know how to survive and make profit. No intelligent race would ever subjugate half of its' population and kneecap their productivity like this. If ROM! can make that argument without even thinking about it in the seventh season...surely some Grand Nagas would have realized it too.
It leaves me feeling like the authors really BELIEVE that they're showing a viable reducto ad absurdem - that in some ways our world is (or was) actually like this. In the harshest of male-dominated societies in this country (which incidentally come from the MUSLIM! world...capitalism PROMOTES woman's rights...theocracies have the potential to do the opposite), it is NOTHING like it appears on Ferenginar. I'm sorry, but scripts like this are just so detached from reality that I can't get behind their moral messages. The writers will later go on to do much...much worse with their Ferengi plots...but this is not a good entry either.
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