Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Last Outpost Review (S1E05)
★★☆☆☆ A farcical new foe features in another underwhelming episode
In pursuit of a group of Ferengi pirates, the Enterprise and their adversaries are ensnared in the orbit of a planet that begins to drain the energy of both ships.
With time and life support rapidly running out, the crew team with their capitalistic quarry, hoping to learn the secret of the mysterious planet in a desperate bid for survival.
At the time of its airing, The Last Outpost was arguably the best episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Faint praise for a show that up until, and including this episode, was struggling to live up to its lofty potential and sheer expectation.
The centrepiece of the episode — the debut of a new enemy the writers had touted to be TNG’s answer to the Klingons or the Romulans, remains its enduring legacy, but for all the wrong reasons. Casually namedropped during the show’s premiere episode, the Ferengi were primed to serve as Picard’s foil, a marauding antagonist whose lack of physical appearance gave the episode a good degree of early intrigue.
But all that early excitement evaporated on actual first contact, the mysterious race revealed as an unintentionally hilarious rabble of squawking hustlers, all ears and no fears. If Gene Roddenberry had gotten his way, it could’ve been worse still, with reports the monkey-suited menaces were supposed to have “prodigious sexual appetites”; well-endowed with sexual organs as tall as the D’s warp core. Seriously.
The Ferengi were an instant flop, another gawky attempt by the show’s writers to punctuate the crew as an enlightened one. In a way, they pulled this off, but probably not in the way originally intended.
There is an interesting concept at the heart of the episode with the discovery of the Tkon Empire, an ancient civilisation that has curiously never been revisited by any subsequent on-screen Trek. But even this was a tad disappointing, with Riker’s climatic showdown with Portal 63 feeling less like a suitable resolution and more like a writer desperate to reference Sun Tzu in an attempt to show how smart they really are.
Dead-on-arrival Ferengi aside, The Lost Outpost squanders its promising premise. Another episode that struggles to balance tone, stage action, and appropriately convey its consequences. Its main characters still feel wobbly, particularly Geordi, who I can only assume was purposely directed to clap and whoop every line for some reason.
And the less said about those bloody Chinese finger puzzles the better.
