Just for fun, I put together a little write-up about the Ferengi in "The Holiest Thing"--kind of a Snopes.com/Fact Check thing. Despite being tongue-in-cheek, I think it wasn't appreciated by our team; it appears to have been deleted by Admins from our STNV/P2 website.
With the release of “The Holiest Thing,” some Star Trek fans have commented that there might be some canon inconsistency in the episode. Some fans have commented that no one had ever seen the Ferengi until Picard and the Enterprise NCC-1701-D saw them in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), and that Captain Kirk and the Enterprise NCC-1701 encountering the Ferengi in “The Holiest Thing” constitutes a canon and Trek timeline “error.” Conversely, other knowledgeable fans have commented that Picard makes reference to having had some interactions with the Ferengi some years earlier, even creating and performing what became known as “The Picard Maneuver” against the Ferengi —back when Picard was in command of the U.S.S. Stargazer.
In a bit of a fun homage to web sites like Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, and PolitiFact.com, I put together a silly little write-up on the Ferengi aspect of “The Holiest Thing.”
The first comments we ever hear in Trek about the Ferengi were a couple of cryptic comments in the very first episode of Star Trek TNG ”Encounter at Farpoint” (episode 1, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and directed by Corey Allen). Groppler Zorn—leader of the Bandi people—indicates that if he can’t strike a deal with the Federation for the use of Farpoint Station, he might have to strike up an agreement with the Ferengi Alliance. Picard hopes that the Ferengi find Groppler Zorn and the Bandi to be “as tasty as the Ferengi’s past associates.”
The next reference to the Ferengi in TNG comes in the episode “The Last Outpost” (episode 6, teleplay by Herbert Wright, story by Richard Krzemien, and directed by Richard Colla). As the episode opens, the Enterprise-D is in pursuit of a Ferengi vessel. Although there had been some minimal contact with the Ferengi in the past (“mostly rumor”), there had been no actual visual contact before.
“Captain's log, Stardate 41386.4: We're in pursuit of a starship of Ferengi design. Our mission is to recover a T-9 energy converter--which the Ferengi stole from an unmanned post on Gamma Tauri IV—a theft which scanners recorded, providing us with the opportunity to make close contact with a Ferengi vessel. If we succeed, it will be Starfleet's first look at a life form which, discounting rumor, we know almost nothing about.”
I am reminded of a very similar dynamic in the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” (episode 9, written Paul Schneider and directed by Vincent McEveety). As Spock said about the Romulans:
“As you may recall from your histories, this conflict was fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter; no captives; nor was there even ship-to-ship visual communication. Therefore, no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other. Earth believes the Romulans to be warlike, cruel, treacherous, and only the Romulans know what they think of Earth.”
So it seems that although there might have been a smattering of human/Ferengi contact over the years, there doesn’t seem to have been any visual contact with their species, and they remain enigmatic. Small interactions with the Ferengi, but we still had never actually seen them.
It seems pretty clear that as of “The Last Outpost,” Starfleet had no history of ever actually seeing a Ferengi. It’s not that this is the Enterprise’s first look at the Ferengi, or that this is the crew’s first look at the Ferengi; Picard is explicit: as of “The Last Outpost,” it is Starfleet’s first look: no one in Starfleet had ever seen a Ferengi.
People sometimes cite an encounter Picard had with the Ferengi some years earlier as a possible earlier “sighting” of the Ferengi. In the episode “The Battle” (episode 9, teleplay by Herbert J. Wright, story by Larry Forrester, and directed by Rob Bowman), there’s a bit of dialogue that clarifies the nature of this encounter that Picard had “nine years ago”—in Star Trek TNG time:
Picard: “We were travelling through the Maxia system. An unidentified ship appeared and fired on us, point-blank range. It must have been lying in some deep moon crater. Their first attack damaged the shields. In the confusion, they hit us again.
Riker: “No clue who they were?”
Picard: “No names, no reason. With the enemy vessel coming in for the kill, I ordered a sensor bearing. When it made the return arc...”
Riker: “…you performed what Starfleet texts now call ‘The Picard Maneuver’.”
Picard: “I did what any good helmsman would: I dropped into high warp, stopped right off the enemy's bow, and fired!”
Riker: “By blowing into maximum warp, you appeared for an instant to be in two places at once.”
Picard: “Our attacker fired on the wrong one.”
Riker: "’I did what any good helmsman would’. You did it first, sir!”
Picard: “It was a ‘save-our-skins’ maneuver. We were finished--on fire. We had to abandon ship; we limped through space in shuttles for weeks before we were picked up.”
During the course of the episode “The Battle,” Picard learns that the “unknown enemy vessel” from nine years earlier had actually been a Ferengi vessel. But at that time, back when Picard created “The Picard Maneuver,” there had actually been no visual contact with these unknown aliens. They remained unseen by Starfleet until “The Battle.”
It seems clear that like with the Romulans nearly two centuries earlier, Starfleet had no direct visual contact with the species later known to have been the Ferengi. There had been some very minimal interaction, but as Captain Picard indicated, Starfleet’s first look at a Ferengi came during “The Last Outpost,” not nearly a hundred years earlier by Captain Kirk and the Enterprise NCC-1701.
My decision:
CANON VIOLATION!
“The Holiest Thing” contradicts Captain Picard—who said that Starfleet had never seen a Ferengi—and even "The Picard Maneuver" nine years earlier was done not against the Ferengi, but against “an unknown enemy vessel.” (Although it’s a bit of an after-the-fact justification, perhaps this entire account is simply the faulty memory of an aging “Old Scotty.”)
In the interest of completeness, it should be mentioned that there were a couple of comments regarding the Ferengi even as far back as the Captain Archer era of the Enterprise NX-01. In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Dear Doctor” (episode 12, written by Maria Jacquemetton & André Jacquemetton, and directed by James A. Contner), the Enterprise NX-01 encounters a pre-warp-capable species, the Valakians. There’s this bit of dialogue between T’Pol and the Valakian:
T’Pol: “You've encountered other warp-capable species?”
Valakian: “The M'klexa and the Ferengi. They both visited our world. Do you know them?”
T'Pol: “No”
So, although the Ferengi seem to have been warp-capable for some time and had encountered the Valakians, T’Pol (and presumably Vulcans in general) have never even heard of (much less actually seen) the Ferengi.
In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Acquisition” (episode 18, teleplay by Maria Jacquemetton & André Jacquemetton, story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga, and directed by James Whitmore, Jr.), Starfleet had what might have been their first encounter with the Ferengi, although Starfleet would actually not realize it for two more centuries. This initial encounter took place when four Ferengi marauders boarded the Enterprise NX-01 after rendering its crew unconscious using a "Trojan Horse" device. The pirates attempted to plunder the starship of items they believed held value, but their plans were ultimately foiled by the Enterprise crew and by the Ferengi's own greed. With the Enterprise back under Starfleet control, the pirates were allowed to leave with a warning not to plunder any more ships in the area. It’s important to realize that these “marauders” never actually identified themselves as “Ferengi,” so no one knew that the Enterprise crew actually had seen the Ferengi for the first time as early as the very earliest days of Starfleet.
