1x11 The Nagus

[6.0/10] Many of my friends have dived into a Deep Space Nine rewatch before I did. And I’ll confess, it puzzled me to hear them gripe about Ferengi-focused episodes. I loved the Ferengi-focused instalments when I was a kid! One of the best things about the series is that it took the audience out of the Federation perspective in a way The Original Series and The Next Generation rarely did. Getting to see the world Quark and company inhabited, apart from the button-down confines of Starfleet, was always a treat.

But returning to the series myself, I get it. The Ferengi material is Broad with a capital-B. This is The Godfather by way of a Saturday morning cartoon. Every single Ferengi in “The Nagus” chews the scenery, mugs for the camera, and gives a caricatured performance that is, for better or worse, not at all out of step with the tone of the episode. It’s big comedy here, with a score that signifies the wacky, over-the-top vibe that this episode wants to convey.

As a grown adult, rather than a mostly pre-critical kid, that approach doesn’t succeed with me in the same way. Watching the legendary Wallace Shawn tear into a high-pitched cackle, or Quark start buying his own hype as the new impresario for his people, or listening to a gaggle of his compatriots exalt over the new folks they can swindle seems so darn cheesy. Star Trek is no stranger to broad comedy, but it’s all just too much.

It’s not like the franchise has always taken such a nuanced approach to other cultures. There’s other dimensions there, but you can pigeonhole the major alpha quadrant species pretty easily. The Klingons are warriors. The Romulans are conniving. The Vulcans are logical. The Andorians are paranoid. To quote another fictional exalted leader, “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

And yet, there’s something so absolutely cartoony about the “Ferengi are greedy!” caricatures “The Nagus” has to offer. There’s effectively no realism here. The auditorily-endowed aliens would sell their own grandmothers for a stick of gum. That’s all there is to them in episodes like these. Gone is the intricate cultural exploration of Spock reconciling his Vulcan heritage with his human friendships, or Riker adjusting to life on a Klingon ship. In its place are these over-exaggerated stereotypes who lack enough humanity for us to care and enough potent humor for us to laugh.

The best you can say is that I genuinely like the plot here, even if the execution is too silly and overdone for it to work. The grand leader of the Ferengi stopping by Quark’s bar, in view of his success at anticipating Gamma quadrant demand is a good setup. The titular Nagus faking his death as a means of testing whether his son is ready for the duties of command is a solid idea. Hell, Quark ascending to the throne, only to find that the threats on his life make power less comfortable than he might have thought, while his overlooked brother aims to get revenge for years of being put down is nigh-Shakespearean.

There’s something here! And I’m not saying Deep Space 9 had to play it entirely straight, but if they just toned down the wacky humor by half, this story might have some resonance. Instead, it’s just a dose of the zany which makes the Ferengi seem too caricatured to take even a little bit seriously.

And yet, there’s this lovely, comparatively down-to-earth story about Jake and Nog and Commander Sisko in the midst of all this buffoonery. Benjamin has one of those relatable dad moments, where he doesn’t like his son’s friends and, more personally, suffers at his child growing up and no longer wanting his parent to be his best friend. He’s worried about the bad influence someone else’s kid is having on his precious boy, but he’s leery of intervening for fear that it’ll drive Jake further away and make rebelling that much more attractive.

There’s a fallibility and vulnerability there we don’t always see with Picard, if for no other reason than the bridge crew is devoid of parent-child relationships ninety percent of the time. (We get Alexander stories a couple times a season, and even when Wesley Crusher was aboard the Enterprise, there were more parent-child stories with him and Jean-Luc than with him and Beverly.) Sisko is hurt. He’s conflicted. He’s even a little un-Starfleet-like, when Jake rightly points out that their mission is to make contact with other species, and Benjamin lauds his son for internalizing those values, but insists that the Federation and the Ferengi lack common ground.

And it’s a two-way street, with Rom forbidding his son from going to Keiko’s school any longer given how un-Ferengi the lessons are, and Rom himself protesting to Jake that there’s no profit in the education they’re receiving. Neither parent gets it here, and both resent the influence of the other’s child.

So when Sisko’s worried about his son, when he thinks Jake’s up to no good while off palling around with Nog, there's such catharsis when it turns out the young man is actually teaching his friend to read, despite his dad’s wishes. Even if Benjamin and Jake are growing apart a little, as most anxious parents and maturing children do, even if their parents and the civilizations they represent have struggled to find a common bond, it’s a wonderful sign that Jake is a good still a good kid and that he and Nog may be able to escape the entropy of antipathy between humans and Ferengi.

(Plus hey, not for nothing, it’s nice to see a Star Trek installment where teaching literacy to folks from cultures who don’t value it is implicitly praised. Hello Trip Tucker fans!)

And maybe it’s a good sign for Deep Space Nine as well. The Ferengi story in “The Nagus” feels bizarrely out of step with the usual tone for DS9 even in this early batch of episodes. It feels like a particular aberration from the usual tenor of Star Trek up to this point. (Give or take a few comedy episodes from TOS.) The stories of Quark and The Nagus and the other loony mishegoss play like they’re plucked from a different show entirely, one more broad and wacky that Trek can usually withstand.

All that said, the episode also tells a much more grounded story of two young people of different cultures connecting with one another and resolving their people’s differences in ways their parents can’t fully understand. Without giving anything away, eventually Deep Space Nine manages to achieve a similar harmony, finding better ways to tell Ferengi stories that make sense in a traditional Trek setting, and building on the foundation Nog and Jake establish here. It means suffering a few more zany Quark tales, but eventually, the glimpse we get into the intersection of his family and Sisko’s families becomes one of the strongest elements of the show. Maybe it’s worth waiting for the series to find that harmony and the same time its characters are.