S1E05 The Last Outpost

Season 1 Episode 5: The Last Outpost

Watchability: Recommended
Short Answer: A good episode that introduces an often used alien race.
Notables: This is the first appearance of the Ferengi. But more notably, the first appearance of Armin Shimerman, who is more famous for his role on DS9.

This episode is the first in the season that has a lot going for it. For one, it introduces the Ferengi. At the time, they were supposed to be the big bad of the show. In fact, when you watch this episode, you can see a lot of similarities to how the Klingons were portrayed in TOS. I am not sure what changed, but later in the show the Ferengi became much more comedic and less threatening.

I also feel like there are a lot of allusions to the Cold War. The Chinese finger trap is a great example. It is symbolic, not only of the plot of the episode itself, but of confrontation and compromise. In addition, the characters reference the writings of Sun Tzu at several points in the episode. These "history lessons" seem to be a common element throughout the series.

At times they are trite, but the idea of present day actors portraying how people in the future view our past is give the show writers an interesting way to comment on the present as history. There are a lot of references to China in this episode. I feel that the Ferengi represent the 1980s view of China (in relation to America) in the same way that the Klingons are a reflection of a 1960s view of Russia.

If you take that to its conclusion, there are some unfortunate aspects of how these races are portrayed (and perhaps that is a topic for a separate blog post), but the main take away is that the question of the episode seems to be "How do you trust someone you have no reason to trust?" Like the finger trap analogy that permeates the episode, I think the take away is that there points where the only option to survive to blindly trust.