Retro Review: Ferengi Love Songs

[TrekToday]

Quark discovers that his mother is in love with the Grand Nagus and plots to sacrifice her happiness in order to regain his status in Ferengi society. Plot Summary: Miserable at the news of Rom and Leeta’s engagement and his ongoing ban by the Ferengi Commerce Authority, Quark runs home to his Moogie (a.k.a. Ishka) […]

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[DS9forever]

The scenes in the episode where Quark finds somebody in his closet are pretty funny. I've always found that the Ferengi episodes have pretty sharp dialogue; Frasier-like, nearly.

 

[Dal Rassak]

hahaha I LOVE the bit where he finds the Grand Nagus in his closet! I read the actor was fetting in retrospect that maybe he'd overdone the "WTF" reaction in his facial expression a bit, but I think it was spot on. I mean how would YOU look if you found your head of state in your wardrobe?!

 

[USS Triumphant]

The scenes in the episode where Quark finds somebody in his closet are pretty funny. I've always found that the Ferengi episodes have pretty sharp dialogue; Frasier-like, nearly.

You rang?

Actually, while I love most of DS9, I hate this one. Dax and O'Brien are racist (specie-ist, whatever) to Quark, which is bad enough, but the way the Ferengi behave in this episode then makes it hard to blame them, because they're a bad parody of a species all the way around. Not that that's unusual for the way Ferengi are frequently portrayed whenever anything about their society was shown in the series after TNG, and it makes me a little uncomfortable, because it is almost like someone took every negative stereotype, exaggeration, and lie ever told about the Jewish people and turned them into a Star Trek species.

 

[Dal Rassak]

Not sure about the "Jewish" bit... according tothe writers themselves, at least, the Ferengi were meant to represent an OTT version of 21st Century humanity in general; what with profit and the markets being the measure of everything.
The name "Ferengi" itself is a play on Arabic "farang", i.e. originally "the Franks", hence "strangers" - so a little linguistic joke, since the Ferengi are presented as beyond-the-pale outsiders to the audience but they're actually representing us.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Not sure about the "Jewish" bit...

You would be a denier about this, wouldn't you, Cardassian? After all, we all know what YOUR species is meant to echo, don't we?

(To be perfectly clear, none of the above was meant in a hostile way at all - all in jest, I promise. )

More seriously, though, I see DS9's Cardassia as Nazi Germany, the Bajorans as the real Jews, and the Ferengi as the hateful stereotypes of Jews (toned down because they are also part-time comic relief, where the stereotypes as taken seriously at times by some in the real world just aren't funny at all). That's just the general metaphor I see, and of course, there were exceptions depending on who was writing and what was going on in specific circumstances, and YMMV.