Lower Decks S4E6: Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place

One thing Star Trek doesn’t get enough credit for is cleaning up its own messes. The original series’ Klingons were one-dimensional villains in brownface who didn’t have any defining characteristics beyond “warlike.” As they were the best-known villains in the Trek universe (especially after several appearances in the movies), Next Generation couldn’t dismiss the Klingons, so instead they went deeper, giving the Klingons a rich culture, and a noble set of ideals that their fading empire had lost touch with.

That being said, Next Generation wasn’t without its own issues, and their first attempt at an original villain were the Ferengi, snarling hunchbacks with no defining characteristics beyond “greedy,” who some viewers saw as having roots in anti-Semitic stereotypes. It would have been very easy for future series to write off the Ferengi and pretend they never existed, banishing them to whatever planet Poochie and Jar-Jar Binks were exiled to.

Instead, Deep Space Nine also went deeper, giving the Ferengi a rich culture that the show could use both as a critique of capitalism, and to show a clash of values, as conservative businessman Quark chafed against his brother Rom’s lack of interest in the pursuit of profit, and his nephew Nog’s eventual embrace of Starfleet’s values over the ones he was brought up with.

So while Decks certainly embraces Trek’s sillier ideas, the Ferengi are no longer one of them, and this week’s mission is a serious one, as Captain Freeman meets with Rom, now the Grand Negus, and Leeta, now his wife (Max Grodénchik and Chase Masterson, reprising their DS9 roles). Rom has liberalized Feregniar under his rule and is applying to join the Federation. It’s a big step up from the low-grade missions the Cerritos usually draws, and Freeman is determined to make the most of it.

As part of that mission, our four Lower Deckers are chosen to go down to Fereginar to update Starfleet’s travel guide — a cushy assignment that mostly involves reviewing bars and restaurants (and sites of cultural import, but as Mariner insists, that’s mostly bars. Ransom doesn’t disagree.) For anyone else, it would be a fun vacation, but Bradward Boimler isn’t anyone else. On a mission where the only expectation is that he relax and enjoy himself, he’s determined to overachieve by cramming in so many experiences he can’t possibly relax or enjoy himself.

We’ve seen this side of Boims before and think we know where this is going… except he immediately gets sucked in by trashy Ferengi pop culture, staying in to watch TV shows like Pog & Dar: Cop Landlords and an office drama where everyone’s secretly in love with everyone. It’s a nice twist, using the Ferengi to spoof post-capitalist mass entertainment, instead of capitalism itself, and nice to see the episode veer away from the usual “Boimler is tightly wound” storyline.

For reasons that the show doesn’t bother explaining, Tendi and Rutherford have to pretend to be married for the purposes of their tour of Ferenginar. The overenthusiastic BFFs have a blast pretending to be overenthusiastic newlyweds… until the realities of their fake relationship force them to confront the fact that they’ve never really addressed whether there is or isn’t any romantic tension behind their friendship.

But the episode doesn’t really address that either, instead saddling the duo with Parth, an overbearing “hugcierge,” who puts them in increasingly high-pressure (and increasingly unlikely) situations to publicly show the sexy, not-at-all-platonic feelings they’re supposed to have for each other. Which forcefully pushes them back into their usual mode of refusing to acknowledge whether those feelings exist or not.

Mariner’s story, however, goes the opposite direction. It seems like a typical, “Mariner feels the need to act out and rebel, even when there’s nothing to rebel against,” except after getting drunk and starting a bar fight over nothing, her Ferengi drinking buddy calls out her behavior. He’s outgrown boozing and acting out, and tells Mariner it’s past time she did the same.

Decks is always good at making the characters face up to their flaws. But it refuses to go a step further than that. Why does Mariner have this deep-seated need to rebel? Why are Rutherford and Tendi so terrified of intimacy? These issues have been hanging over the characters since season one, and the show refuses to even try to answer them, despite using them for story grist again and again. It’s more of a big-picture quibble than one about this particular episode, which is a good one. But a show that refuses to move its characters forward can end up being as stale and formulaic as Landlord Cops, and the show seems as scared of examining Tendi, Rutherford, and Mariner’s issues as the characters themselves are. (Pathologically insecure Boimler, funny enough, is the only one who seems completely secure in who he is as a person.)

At least things work out for Freeman. After being deferential to an admiral who’s quickly outfoxed by Rom and Leeta’s dumb-negotiator/ruthless-negotiator routine, she manages to out-Ferengi the Ferengi and come out on top, while still giving us a reminder that Nog is shrewder than he appears. Unlike our lead characters, both sides’ motivations are crystal clear — they both want to hammer out an agreement, but beneath that, they both want to be shown the respect they feel they deserve.

The Ferengi have grown a lot since the snarling, cartoonish villains who menaced Riker in “The Last Outpost.” Here’s hoping our Lower Deckers get room to grow too.

Stray tachyons:
• The title is a reference to Garth Merengi’s Darkplace, Richard Ayoade’s 2004 UK comedy that purported to be a “lost” low-budget sci-fi/horror series from the 1980s.

• We open on yet another alien riff on Lower Decks, this time with low-level Ferengi officers bitching about their jobs before being destroyed by the mysterious probe we’ve been getting glimpses of all season. Place your bets as to which alien ship is going to be destroyed in episode 8 before we finally find out what this is about in the season finale.

• This episode went all out on guest voices. Besides the two returning DS9 actors, Mariner’s Ferengi pal is voiced by Tom Kenny (also the voice of Spongebob Squarepants), and Kids In the Hall’s Dave Foley as the hugcierge.

• Somebody’s leaving a heap of gold-pressed latinum on the table if they don’t start selling the Enterprise-shaped cutting board set out as part of the spread of food for the Ferengi delegates.

• Fereninar’s sites of cultural import include the Museum of Gambling, right next door to the Museum of Haggling.

• The Ferengi memorial to the Dominion War doesn’t tally lives lost, but money. It’s very emotionally resonant to the Ferengi.

• “Wow, it’s what heaven would look like if God was stupid!”

• This also isn’t specific to this episode, but as frustrating as the Tendi/Rutherford won’t-they-won’t-they can be, it’s to Decks’ eternal credit that, while they essentially re-created the Fry/Leela dynamic in Boimler and Mariner, they’ve taken pains to avoid Futurama’s single worst element — Fry having feelings for Leela that are in no way reciprocated, and never, ever, ever taking the hint and letting it go. It’s a monstrously unhealthy dynamic that the show consistently celebrated as sweet, but there’s thankfully no room for that kind of behavior on the Cerritos. Boims may end most episodes with his pants around his ankles and covered in alien goo, but he at least has his self-respect.