“Little Green Men”
Written by Toni Marberry & Jack Treviño and Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Directed by James L. Conway
Season 4, Episode 7
Production episode 40514-480
Original air date: November 15, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Nog is engaging in a ritual whereby a Ferengi boy leaves home for the first time and raises capital by selling his boyhood possessions. In this case, he’s off to attend Starfleet Academy. Quark drags Rom away from this flea market because their cousin Gaila has finally, after ten years, made good on the promise the latter made when Quark loaned him the money to start up his munitions consortium: he gave Quark a ship. Since Quark doesn’t trust his cousin, he wants Rom to give it a once-over.
But to Rom’s shock and Quark’s glee, the ship is perfect. No flaws whatsoever. Quark wants to take it for a test flight, so he decides to bring Nog to Earth to report to the Academy.
Nog and Jake have one last hang-out at the railing over the promenade, and Bashir and O’Brien give him a going-away present: a guidebook to Earth (which, disappointingly, does not have the words “Don’t panic!” inscribed on the cover in large friendly letters…). Jake walks Nog to the airlock, and off goes the vessel Quark’s Treasure toward Earth. En route, Rom reveals that he knows the real reason for Quark being so generous: he’s smuggling kemocite. Rom is willing to stay quiet about it for 20% of the profits. As for Nog, a Starfleet cadet is obligated to report any illegal activity to his superiors—but he hasn’t been sworn in yet, so he takes 10%.
When they approach Earth, they can’t take the ship out of warp. Apparently the command sequencer was designed to fail. Nog points out that Gaila never did like Quark much. Rom pulls some technobabble out of his ass, using the kemocite to trigger a reaction, and the ship comes out of warp—
—but also travels back in time to July 1947. The ship crashes in a farm in the American Southwest, and the farmer brings it to the Army’s attention. Quark, Rom, and Nog wake up locked in a lab, being observed by General Denning, Captain Wainwright, Professor Carlson, and Nurse Garland. Unfortunately, communication is difficult as their universal translators (which for Ferengi are implanted in the ears) are on the fritz. When the Ferengi bang their ears, the humans do likewise, thinking it’s a form of communication. Nog recognizes the uniforms from his guidebook as being from the 20th century, and he also recalls that humans used crude nuclear fission for weapons, which would account for the interference with the translators. There’s also a stray dog wandering around the base.
Quark is generally appalled at the humans’ stupidity—banging their ears, irradiating their planet, smoking tobacco—and sees a perfect opportunity for fleecing. Once Rom gets the translators working, Quark introduces himself as the “chief financial officer of the Ferengi Alliance,” and he has a business proposition for them. He offers Denning warp drive and transporter technology and 24th-century medicine and replicators and phasers, disruptors, and photon or quantum torpedoes. Denning doesn’t have the authority to make any decisions, but Quark also mentions that, if the general won’t go for it, he can always go to another nation-state—the Russians, say.
Carlson talks with Rom and Nog about various Ferengi traditions while also petting the stray dog. When Quark returns, the humans leave, but the dog stays behind—and then changes shape into Odo. He knew about the kemocite smuggling and hid on Quark’s Treasure, and now he’s stuck with them. He’s located the ship and determined that the engines are functioning. Rom’s figured out a way to get them back to the future (ahem) involving the kemocite and an energy source—but Quark doesn’t want to go back. Unlike the humans of the Federation, the greedy, venal, corrupt 20th-century humans are ones he can understand, exploit, and manipulate, and he figures to be running the planet inside a year.
President Truman apparently isn’t convinced by Quark’s sincerity (smart man, was Truman), and puts Denning in charge of finding out more—Denning in turn has Wainwright interrogate them. Unfortunately for them, sodium pentathol doesn’t work on Ferengi—unfortunately for Quark, they don’t accept this until after Garland’s stuck him with his fifth needle. So Wainwright threatens Quark with a scalpel to his throat. Rom, of course, breaks first and tells the truth about their accidentally travelling back in time—punctuated by a plaintive cry of, “I want my Moogie!”—which Wainwright doesn’t actually believe.
So Nog tells Wainwright what he expects: they’re the advance scouts of a Ferengi invasion force. Wainwright almost grins: “I knew it!” Nog proceeds to give all the details of the fake invasion. When he goes to show Wainwright the spot on the map where the first Klingon shock troops will land, he elbows the captain in the gut. With the help of Garland and Carson, they take down the other MPs. Odo helps them escape the general and more MPs. There’s a bomb detonation scheduled in Nevada for 5am, and Rom can use the detonation to ignite the kemocite.
It works, of course, and they’re contacted by Earth for a tow. Quark has to sell the ship to pay for passage home, but Quark, Rom, and Odo drop Nog off at the Academy and get back to DS9—at which point Odo arrests Quark for kemocite smuggling.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The quintessential technobabble conversation between Rom and Quark:
“The kemocite! If we vent plasma from the warp core into the cargo hold, we may be able to start a cascade reaction in the kemocite. Then we can modulate the reaction to create an inversion wave in the warp field and force the ship back into normal space! If I time it just right, I should be able to get us close enough to Earth to make an emergency landing!”
“Rom, you’re a genius!”
“You think so?”
“How should I know? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko makes it clear to the entire senior staff that it’s important for them to attend Nog’s sale. Given that he sponsored Nog’s application, this makes sense (it’s also the only reason why Worf attends).
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira discovers among Nog’s sale items her springball racquet that had been missing for years. Nog feigns surprise at its presence rather poorly.
The slug in your belly: Dax buys Bashir Nog’s favorite holosuite program (which is very obviously porn). So Bashir is given an adolescent Ferengi’s favorite holosuite program by his erstwhile lust object. That’s not weird at all…
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo’s appearance in 1947 is a delightful surprise, as the dog running around the Army base just comes across as an extra bit of business, a stray that wandered in, barely noticed by anyone. And the episode is set up in such a way that we don’t expect to see any of the non-Ferengi cast except maybe at the very end. He winds up saving the day, since he can sneak around and effect repairs to Quark’s Treasure so they can take off, plus it gives Rene Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman more opportunities to snark at each other, never a bad thing.
There is no honor in being pummeled: Worf is apprehensive about a Ferengi in Starfleet, prompting O’Brien to remind him that someone probably said the same thing about a Klingon in Starfleet back when he applied to the Academy. Worf is equally apprehensive about being at Nog’s sale, but then he finds that Nog has a tooth-sharpener for sale, and he eagerly asks, “How much?” after trying it out. (Ew…)
Rules of Acquisition: We once again hear Rule #62, “The riskier the road, the greater the profit” (first quoted in “Rules of Acquisition”), and also get Rule #203: “New customers are like razor-toothed gree worms—they can be succulent, but sometimes they bite back,” which would prove prophetic.
We also learn that the Ferengi have universal translators implanted in their ears and that as a civilization, they didn’t discover warp drive, they bought it, though Nog is interrupted by Quark before he can identify the seller.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Carlson and Garland are engaged, because of course they are, and they’re regularly distracted with talk of their impending nuptials. And they share a big kiss at the end.
There’s also a bit where Nog asks Garland to massage his ears again, with Garland blissfully (and creepily) unaware of the fact that it’s an erogenous zone.
Keep your ears open: “All I ask is a tall ship, and a load of contraband to fill it with.”
Quark, repurposing John Masefield’s famous quote, “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”—quoted (for realsies) by Kirk in “The Ultimate Computer” and Star Trek V, and also on the dedication plaque of the Defiant.
Welcome aboard: Charles Napier returns to Star Trek in a role that is 180 degrees from his first one, as one of the space hippies in “The Way to Eden”—here, he’s the cigar-chomping General Denning. (Amusingly, both Jonathan Haze, who starred in Roger Corman’s TheLittle Shop of Horrors, and Gregory Walcott, who starred in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, auditioned for the role of Denning.) Napier would go on to appear in an episode of the TV series Roswell (a show for which Ronald D. Moore served as co-executive producer), where he plays a character who was an Army officer who witnessed the 1947 UFO incident at Roswell, New Mexico.
Megan Gallager is back as Garland, having played Mareel in “Invasive Procedures”; she’ll be back in Voyager’s “Body and Soul.” Conor O’Farrell plays Carlson; he’ll be back twice on Enterprise in different roles in “Rogue Planet” and “Chosen Realm.” James G. MacDonald is perfectly cast as the spit-and-polish Wainwright in his only Trek role.
Trivial matters: This episode was, obviously, an homage to 1950s alien-invasion B-movies, with all the archetypal characters from those films. The characters were named after actors who appeared in such movies. Denning was named for Richard Denning, star of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Day the World Ended; Garland was named for Beverly Garland of Swamp Women and It Conquered the World; and Carlson was named for Richard Carlson of The Magnetic Monster and It Came from Outer Space.
The title is derived from a line of dialogue in another Trek time-travel episode, “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” when Captain Christopher says he’s “never believed in little green men.” Dayton Ward tied this episode together with that original series episode, by having Christopher debriefed by an older Wainwright in his short story “The Aliens are Coming!” in Strange New Worlds III. Wainwright and Carlson are also central characters in Ward’s novel From History’s Shadow, which is a semi-sequel to this episode (as well as “Assignment: Earth” on the original series and “Carbon Creek” and the Temporal Cold War storyline on Enterprise). Carlson also appeared in a supporting role in Greg Cox’s two-book series The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh.
This episode was originally pitched by Toni Marberry & Jack Treviño for the first season, but Michael Piller wasn’t enthused by it. By the time the fourth season rolled around, there was burgeoning interest in the Roswell UFO incident as its 50th anniversary approached, and Rene Echevarria suggested producing it. This episode proposes that the infamous incident in question was actually Quark’s Treasure crashing after travelling through time.
In 1980, James L. Conway directed a film called Hangar 18, which was about the Roswell incident. He lobbied to direct this episode for that reason, saying that it was “like coming full circle.”
The nuclear explosion footage was cleaned up from an original negative of a contemporary nuclear explosion.
The pinup calendar on the Army base has the caption “My Love Has Wings,” a reference to the poem “Nightingale Woman,” quoted by Gary Mitchell in the original series pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
At one point, Nog is reading the guidebook to Earth, and sees the same picture of “Gabriel Bell” that Sisko discovered at the end of “Past Tense, Part II.” When Nog asks if this Bell human looks like the captain, Quark just shrugs and says that all humans look alike to him.
Walk with the Prophets: “You mean your people are going to invade—Cleveland?” This is only not the perfect Star Trek comedy episode by virtue of the existence of “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and it is a very close second.
Part of why this episode works so well is that it magnificently incorporates and sends up the tropes of alien-invasion B-movies of the period (which I admittedly have a huge fondness for). The hard-nosed military guys, the optimistic scientist, the compassionate nurse who’s engaged to the scientist—and then the capper on the whole thing is Nog’s fake story, which is right out of every pulp story about alien conquerors out to destroy the puny primitive humans. Everything from the haircuts to the music to the set design to the constant smoking to Garland’s overdone makeup to the clichéd dialogue to the military disdain for milksop scientists is right out of every ridiculous B-movie, and it’s awesome. Major points to Conor O’Farrell’s romantic nerdiness, Megan Gallagher’s sappy earnestness, James MacDonald’s straight-laced lunacy, and especially the great Charles Napier’s cigar-chomping sneer for perfectly selling their archetypes.
The whole thing is also inverted beautifully by Quark, who is in hog heaven in 20th century America. Even as all hell breaks loose, he keeps insisting that he has no political ambitions, no desire for conquest—“We just want to sell you things!” There’s also the usual Star Trek critique of the foibles of modern humans (poisoning the atmosphere, using nuclear weapons, smoking), but done in a manner that straddles the line between strident and hilarious.
Indeed, the climactic interrogation scene is a masterstroke, with Quark failing to maintain control as the man with the plan to make himself rich, Rom trying desperately to tell the truth to an unbelieving audience while wailing that he wants his Moogie, and Nog telling Wainwright what he wants to hear so he can get them free, culminating with Quark’s exasperated expression of gratitude to Carlson and Garland after they slug a couple of MPs: “couldn’t you have done that an hour ago?” Armin Shimerman, Max Grodénchik, and Aron Eisenberg have comfortably grown into a magnificent trio, and they don’t hit a single wrong note at any point.
On top of that, the opening is excellent too. The notion of a young Ferengi selling his boyhood items before going off to be a responsible profit-making adult is a perfect fit for Ferengi society as established, and also gives the rest of the cast a scene or two. Plus it moves Nog’s story forward. The notion of a Ferengi in Starfleet is a fascinating one, and this episode is an important step on Nog’s journey from the sneak-thief of “Emissary” to the guy who, in at least one future, as seen in “The Visitor,” is a captain. We see the makings of the good—and unique—officer Nog will become via his intelligence, his quick thinking, and his absorption of knowledge (his reading of the guidebook proves incredibly useful), without ever losing sight of the fact that he’s a Ferengi (best seen where he takes 10% of the profits of Quark’s illegal operation, on the theory that he hasn’t been sworn in as a cadet yet so he isn’t obligated to report his uncle).
The episode only loses a point because of the wholly gratuitous and kind of awful bit where Nog basically asks Garland to give him a hand job (an ear massage). That’s—just really wrong. It’s played for laughs, and it’s mostly harmless, but it’s not completely harmless and it just, well, rubs me the wrong way. (Sorry…) It’s the only blight on an otherwise delightful and hilarious episode.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido (who will be at MystiCon 2014 this weekend along with John “Q” deLancie; check his schedule here) is running a Kickstarter for a new story in the Dragon Precinct universe, featuring the characters of Gan Brightblade and his friends from that novel. He hopes you’ll support it—just two bucks will get you a copy of the story itself! If we reach $2500 there’ll be cookies! Details can be found here.
I just love this episode, no doubt in part because, like krad, I have a great fondness for those old B movies. Everything fits together perfectly. I don’t think this story would have worked at all in the first season. The characters weren’t quite settled yet, we didn’t have the connection with any of the Ferengi that we did by this point, and they would have had to come up with some cockamamie reason for them going to Earth. But in the fourth season, we know who these people are, we care about them to one degree or another, and the actors are all comfortably settled into their roles. It really is the perfect Star Trek comedy, beaten only by “The Trouble with Tribbles”. “Trials and Tribbilations” comes close, but the edge goes to this one.
Umm, you said “Jack Napier” when you meant “Charles Napier.” Been watching Burton’s Batman lately?
And the phrase “little green men” was part of the vernacular long before “Tomorrow is Yesterday” used it. Wikipedia says there have been attributions as far back as 1908, and it really came into its own in the ’50s.
This is a fun episode, but generally I’m not fond of anything that treats the so-called “Roswell incident” as something real. The whole Roswell mythology is something that didn’t come into existence until the late ’70s. See, what happened was that in mid-1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing things that he called “flying disks,” and the mystery got a lot of press, so people in other parts of the country started reporting seeing “flying disks” or “flying saucers” in the sky as well, including some folks in Roswell, NM a few weeks after Arnold’s sighting. At the time, there was no leading theory for what those disks/saucers were; it was just a term for “unknown round thing in the sky.” So when the Army reported having recovered debris from a “flying saucer” at Roswell and then reported the next day that it had turned out to be a weather balloon, that was all there was to it, and it was a minor incident that was quickly forgotten.
But in the ensuing months and years, the idea that “flying saucers” were alien spaceships became prominent in popular culture, reinforced by B movies and comic books and the like. So by the late ’70s, the term “flying saucer” had become indelibly associated with the idea of aliens. So when a UFO researcher in the late ’70s stumbled across those obscure news reports from Roswell, she filtered them through her own era’s preconceptions. Where a reader in July 1947 would have interpreted “We’ve recovered debris from a flying saucer” to mean “We’ve recovered debris from an unknown round airborne object,” this person in the late ’70s interpreted it to mean “We’ve recovered debris from an alien spaceship.” And thus the report the following day that it was just a weather balloon seemed to her like a retraction of the previous admission, which spawned the idea that there was some kind of cover-up going on. And when she went to Roswell and interviewed people about this minor, forgettable thing that had happened over 30 years ago, people either told her what she wanted to hear or let her fill the gaps in their memories with leading questions. So she became convinced of this alleged coverup and wrote a book about it, and that spawned the 1980 movie, which popularized the idea and led to other works like The X-Files and Roswell High (the books that spawned the Roswell TV series) playing off this idea and ingraining it even more deeply in pop culture.
There are a lot of people today who assume that the “Roswell landing” and ensuing coverup were something people have been talking about since 1947. But I was really into UFO lore growing up in the ’70s (I was a very gullible kid), and there was nothing about Roswell at the time. It wasn’t even a thing yet. 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a pretty comprehensive distillation of UFO lore as it existed at the time, and it said nothing about Roswell either. It was a non-story until the very late ’70s, because the myth didn’t exist until then. And it’s annoying to me that it was ever given any credence at all. It’s just so monumentally stupid.
Granted, some fun things have been done with the myth, mainly this episode and Futurama‘s “Roswell That Ends Well.” But it’s far from my favorite subject, as a rule.
Also, the time travel in this episode is so totally random. If it’s that easy to travel through time using kemocite, why has the technique never been used again? In my novel Watching the Clock, I suggested that some agent of the Temporal Cold War actually arranged for Quark’s Treasure to go back in time in order to contaminate Earth’s past with advanced technology (which, as per Greg Cox’s Eugenics Wars novels, was eventually used as the basis for the Botany Bay).
Correcting myself a decade late: I misremembered the gender of the UFO researcher who revived the Roswell story in 1978. It was a man named Stanton T. Friedman. And he wasn’t the author of the 1980 book that popularized his theory.
Also, the 1980 movie Hangar 18 was not about Roswell at all, as I mention further down.
I haven’t watched many of those B movies you speak of, but I think this is the way the military was portrayed even in the X-Files, just a bit more sinister, and with the scientists now fully invested. It was a very fun episode though and better than most of the Ferengi ones in my opinion because these three work well together, as you noted.
Dear God, a 9??? I’ll be back on later to actually read this.
The dog running around the Army base just comes across as an extra bit of business, a stray that wandered in, barely noticed by anyone.
I didn’t especially notice it before the Odo reveal, but I think I was mentally processing it as “MP guard dog” rather than “stray”.
Also, the time travel in this episode is so totally random. If it’s that easy to travel through time using kemocite, why has the technique never been used again?
One can ask that question about a long list of random time travel methods throughout all the series. If it makes you feel better, assume that it has a 95% chance of complete catastrophe.
@2, Well, the 25th anniversery of Burton’s Batman is just around the corner; I’m sure it’s on a lot of people’s minds. :)
@6: “If it makes you feel better, assume that it has a 95% chance of complete catastrophe.”
That’s actually kind of what I did do in Watching the Clock, and there’s a physical basis for it. Theory says that a backward time warp would produce a feedback loop that would cause runaway Hawking radiation, essentially infinitely increasing heat that would vaporize anything trying to pass through. It would take some kind of exotic matter to cancel the effect — the same kind of exotic matter that would be needed to make a warp drive work (and avoid a similar kind of runaway energy). So I figured that for the most part, only strong ships with powerful warp drives — such as Starfleet capital ships — are likely to survive time warps. Making Quark’s Treasure‘s survival even more of a fluke — unless it had help, as I hinted in the book.
A fantastic comedy episode. Easily in my top ten. By the way, wasn’t the use of a nuclear explosion to get back to the future the original ending Gale and Zemeckis wrote for… Back to the Future? Seems like I read that somewhere.
Anyway, as for the real Rosewell incident, after growing up reading countless books on the subject, I’ve come to the conclusion that it was… a weather balloon. But I admit little green men makes for a better story around the campfire.
Didn’t Little Green Men air prior to Starship Down?
@9, Yes that was their original idea for the ending. Gale confirmed it on the DVD special features.
Needless to say, they ended up going with the Clock Tower sequence and thus born one of the great climaxes in cinema (in my opinion, anyway).
@9: Well, it’s not a real Roswell story without Truman smashing his way out of a wooden crate.
Eduardo: According to the production order, “Starship Down” should’ve been first, and that’s how it’s done on the DVD set. Apparently, the VHS tapes had them in the other order, and in Jammer’s Reviews (which he did as they aired) he reviewed “LGM” first.
Complicating this is a) the fact that DS9 was syndicated, so the original airdates listed are “week-of” airdates, not actual days they aired because it varied from market to market, b) “LGM” has an original airdate that’s not in the right sequence (as 15 November, which is two days after the “SD” airing, which makes no sense), and c) my memory that “LGM” was aired separately as a special episode, but I’m not finding anything online to corroborate this.
Sigh.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
KRAD offers me a phrase that did not previously exist in my vocabulary: “good Ferengi episode.”
I admidt my personal bias: I like my sci-fi dramas straight, and the Ferengi were so clearly laughable that anytime “next week, an episode centering around Quark….” appeared, I knew I could skip it….but they kept happening, so I am reading now that people I respect ACTUALLY LIKED THEM?!
I’ll have to watch this now.
I also loved this episode. Favorite gag, “‘To be honest, I’d much rather work with you Australians.’ ‘Americans!’ ‘Whatever…'”
But my issue was with the look at Ferengi culture we got. He had a business deal with his cousin, who essentialy welshed on the deal. Yes the Feringi are greedy, coniving, backstabers. But if contracts could just be ignored when you don’t like somone, a culture based on contracts would fall apart. I know it just a small bit done to get the story going, but this made no sense to me. Guess Quark is ment to be seen as a bad business man. That or Ferengi culture is far less stable than I was led to belive.
But yeah, love the whole 50’s sci-fi vibe the show gives off. Especialy when seen through the “modern” eyes of Star Trek regualrs.
@11
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Their revised script for BTTF was a vast improvement over the original. I mean they went from a refrigerator to a DeLorean! And the race to the clock tower is one of my favorite finales as well.
@12
Or a man becoming his own grandpa. Ewww….
Yes, another teeny little grace note that makes me almost beleive in a Ferengi-type culture. Of course, they sell their childhood items (some of which are pilfered, purloined and otherwise stolen) before they chose a profit making path. Love it.
I love this episode made all the better by Charles Napier and Megan Gallager has long been a fave of mine since her China Beach days.
Query: who is Nog’s mother?
Cleggster: Gaila didn’t welsh on the deal. He promised Quark a spaceship. He didn’t promise Quark a spaceship in perfect working order.
Lady Belaine: Nog’s mother is a woman named Prinadora. We’ll learn about her in “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” in the fifth season, and she also appears in my Ferenginar short novel in Worlds of DS9 Volume 3.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@18: Not to mention that, as we’ll see later on, Gaila is ethically challenged even by Ferengi standards. His behavior doesn’t necessarily respect on the species as a whole.
@3, CLB: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!! My big beef is not annoyance at the general interest in Roswell per se, but the fact that it seems like every sci-fi tv show has to try and explain Roswell through the lense of its own premise. And by that token, making Roswell “real” in the universe of the show. Why not just leave it alone and have it be a whether balloon that people make up stories about in that universe? And that’s my big issue with the premise of this episode as well.
Other than that, it’s just kind of a bad episode, a typical bungling Ferengi hijinks show. I found it interesting that watching this again, the opening sets it up like its on its way to being a very good episode. The opening sequences are good, and the Jake and Nog scene is as good as on any of the more serious character driven episodes. And if we could’ve had a character episode of the three of them on the shuttle, it might have turned out great–“Family Business” showed us that the show could give good Ferengi character episodes. But then all of a sudden the technobabble technobabbles another random excuse for accidentally causing time travel and the ship ends up in somebody’s fanfic, or as Keith says, B movie.
The B movie thing actually goes a long way towards explaining some of the truly awful dialogue in this episode. The conversation between the couple about seeing her in her wedding dress is more like exposition that they’re engaged rather than true character development, Garland’s dreaming of an association of planets seems like a lame attempt to break the fourth wall and is basically pandering to Star Trek fans, and the military officer’s sneering at scientists who always have their heads in the clouds is just laughable. I also tend to not like episodes where the characters need exposition to explain the “foreign” things that we take for granted. Aside from that, I thought the comments about smoking and nuclear weapons were kind of beating us over the head as badly as Wesley’s questions about drugs in a first season TNG episode. And it also seems extremely unlikely to me that Quark would have absolutely no knowledge of drugs or addictive substances, especially considering the people with whom he associates. He runs a freaking bar, for crying out loud. Surely he has real alcohol in there.
The thing about basing it around the B movies is, if the watcher is a fan of the B movies and gets all the references, fine. But in the need to appeal to a wider audience, if the watcher doesn’t catch that the show is deliberately trying to pay homage to those movies, then it just comes off as a B movie–and that’s bad.
And otherwise? By the time we got to the interrogation scene, I was just plain bored, and I couldn’t wait for the episode to be over. We have this one on our Star Trek time travel collection DVD, and it’s never one I willingly go back to.
Meh. This one has some good moments, but it’s not an episode I consider essential viewing by any means. I usually skip it. As #20 alludes to, it’s a serious drag by the end.
Heh, so crzydroid and I are usually on the same page about most things, but I will have to disagree here. I’m not saying it’s a 9 or one of my favorites, but I don’t think it was quite so horrid either.
The funny thing is if, at the beginning of this rewatch, if you had told me this was an episode that featured a)Ferengi, b)time travel/alternate settings, c)comedy I would have said, oh, this is going to be horrible! (I like comedy, it’s just that I tend not to like things specifically marketed as comedy, if that makes sense).
But, the Ferengi are more tolerable now, I think I’ve become pretty much immune to the time travel technobabble, and I actually thought the comedy worked, because I did feel like it was being somewhat self referential/poking fun at itself, and doing the 50s B movie thing as a joke (like, the military guy sneering at scientists seemed an obvious one to me, I didn’t think we were actually supposed to take that seriously). Plus, I just really like Rom and Nog in general.
I also really liked the twist of Odo as the dog (I also assumed it was a guard dog) – it was the kind of twist that I didn’t see coming, but wasn’t completlely implausible either.
But, yes to the oo-mox scene just being rather gross.
CLB – that is some interesting stuff about the ‘Roswell myth’ I did not know, so thank you :)
Oh, and are you actually going to get to hang out with John deLancie? (I read your bio! ; ) ) If so, I’m totally jealous.
@krad
Given how Star Trek episodes from TNG season 2 onwards almost never changed production or airing order, I’m going to assume Little Green Men was an exception that ended up corrected later.
It might have been promoted as a special episode. I can’t recall it either, but it makes sense given the Roswell subject and the timing (same as the ST-Voyager episode that dealt with Hiroshima exactly 40 years after the fact).
@24: Actually there were a fair number of episodes aired out of production order. Going from TNG S2 onward as you specify:
TNG:
“Loud as a Whisper” and “The Schizoid Man” aired in the reverse of production order.
“The Ensigns of Command” (second episode in season 3) was shot before the season premiere “Evolution.”
The production order after “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” was “Suddenly Human,” “Brothers,” and “Family,” while the episodes were aired in the reverse of that order (with “Family” necessarily coming right after BOBW).
“Unification”‘s two parts were shot in reverse order to accommodate Leonard Nimoy’s availability.
DS9:
“A Man Alone” and “Past Prologue” were aired in reverse order.
“Through the Looking Glass” was shot in between the halves of the following 2-parter, “Improbable Cause” and “The Die is Cast.”
Other pairs shot in the reverse of their airing order:
“The Visitor”/”Hippocratic Oath”; “Little Green Men”/”Starship Down”; “To the Death”/”The Quickening”; “The Assignment”/”Trials and Tribble-ations”; “Rocks and Shoals”/”Sons and Daughters”; “Far Beyond the Stars”/”One Little Ship”; “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges”/”Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang”
VGR:
The early second season was aired wildly out of production order, with four delayed first-season episodes interspersed as follows:
“The 37s” (#120), “Initiations” (121), “Projections” (117), “Elogium” (118), “Non Sequitur” (122), “Twisted” (119)
Episode 130, “Death Wish,” was delayed until after #134, “Dreadnought.” The next two after that, “Investigations” (135) and “Lifesigns” (136), were aired in reverse order.
The early third season was also wildly out of production order:
“Basics, Part II” (146), “Flashback” (145), “The Chute” (147), “The Swarm” (149), “False Profits” (144), “Remember” (148), “Sacred Ground” (143).
More inverted pairs:
“Fair Trade”/”Alter Ego”; “Coda”/”Blood Fever”; “Darkling”/”Rise”; “Day of Honor”/”Nemesis”‘; “Waking Moments”/”Message in a Bottle”
Season5 had a real tangle. The first five and the last seven were in order, but in between we had:
“Timeless” (201), “Infinite Regress” (203), “Nothing Human” (200), “Thirty Days” (202), “Counterpoint” (204), “Latent Image” (206), “Bride of Chaotica!” (207), “Gravity” (205), “Bliss” (209), “Dark Frontier” (211/212), “The Disease” (210), “Course: Oblivion” (213), “The Fight” (208)
“Dragon’s Teeth” (225) aired three weeks late, after “Riddles” (227).
“Tsunkatse” (232) and “Collective” (235) were pushed back to after “Memorial” (236), probably so the Seven-centric episodes would air during February sweeps.
Near the end of season 6 we have:
“Live Fast and Prosper” (242), “Muse” (244), “Fury” (241), “Life Line” (243)
“Repression” and “Critical Care” were an inverted pair.
“Flesh and Blood” (253/4) aired after “Nightingale” (256).
ENT:
“Sleeping Dogs” and “Shadows of P’Jem” were inverted.
“Carbon Creek” was shot before “Shockwave, Part II,” and “A Night in Sickbay” was shot before “Dead Stop” — in both cases, the reverse of the necessary story order.
It’s actually a bit surprising that the last 67 episodes of ENT had no discrepancies between production and airdate order, given how often it happened before.
@25
I stand corrected.
Given that I passed on watching most of Voyager’s run, I had no idea there were that many shows which aired out of production order.
@25: Well, that would explain why I saw a picture on this site of Patrick Stewart reading the script for “Suddenly Human” while in the Locutus costume/makeup.
Never have been a big fan of the time travel episodes. Maybe it’s the technobabble level getting increased to 11, or the fact that they never have any problem getting back to their original time without there being serious consequences. Add to this that I usually don’t count the Ferengi episodes as my favorites, and this episode was setup for me to just hate it. In the end though I didn’t. This one was just OK. Funny enough to save it from being bad, but not entertaining enough (unless you’re a fan of B movies) to be great.
I love “Little Green Men”, easily one of my favorites. Such a light-hearted comedy, a nice little adventure with Nog before he goes off to the Academy. I love how it points out how stupid humans are in a hilarious way without being preachy. Its really like watching one of those old B-movies, and having Odo show up is a nice surprise. I had totally forgotten Odo had gone back in time with them, as I hadn’t seen this one since it aired eighteen years ago. That’s a tribute to the superb acting of the Ferengi trio.
Really dumb question, but does Odo ever actually tell anyone before he goes wandering off in these Quark following expiditions, or does he just take a powder. Seriously, isn’t Sisko going to be annoyed when his security chief goes “Poof” for a week or two at a time? Also for the approximately 893 time, Odo arrests Quark, only for him to be unarrested the following week. Seriously, Odo arrests Quark with the frequency of holodeck failures on the Enterprise-D.
Nitpicking aside, this was a fun episode, but I feel you like it a bit too much. I’d rate it as a 7 or so (yes I know you’ve said the rating is the least important part)- it’s cute, but it lacks any sort of tension to it. All of the throw ins to classic B-Movies and pre-translator intercultural relationships are fun, but it just doesn’t do it for me as a MUST SEE episode, which is what a 9 signifies to me.
@30: Quark must have one hell of a good lawyer. Now, there’s a missed opportunity for a recurring character…
@31, I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that. That would have been excellent! What species would said lawyer be? Would it be another Ferengi? Or a species we’ve never seen before?
“Space Station Security Chief getting you down? Federation after you for unlawful terrifs with their uppity way of life? Better call Saul’alurin.”
@31: I’d think the Cardassian Nestor from the O’Brien Must Suffer Cardassian trial episode might have been looking for work.
@30:
Odo had no evidence, all the kemocite was blown up getting back to the future.
Coming to this late as I’ve been away, and only posting to say I only disagree with krad on this review on one single small point. I think it’s better than Trouble with Tribbles. Absolutely my favourite “comedy episode” of Trek ever.
I’m somewhere between the lovers and the haters. I heartily enjoy this episode, but I wouldn’t put it up as an example of superb Trek by any means.
I guess I’m not enough of a fan of 50’s B movies to really appreciate the parody. I mean, I recognized that it WAS such a parody, and forgave the bad dialogue accordingly, but that’s not enough to make me love the episode. On the other hand, the sheer immersion of the Ferengi trio into their characters DOES fill me with joy for at least a few moments. (“How should I know? I have no idea what you’re talking about!” “I WANT MY MOOGIIIIIIEEEEEE!”)
It’s a little bit sad that Worf has to have the parallels between himself and Nog pointed out explicitly on-screen, but I guess if they hadn’t included this scene, it would have been conspicuous by its absence. Not sure how it could have been handled more gracefully, without making one of Starfleet’s finest look like a bigot.
I don’t care one way or the other about the Roswell issues. I wasn’t aware that the novels tie together the various 20th-century time travel episodes; that’s cool!
@31: That’s true, that’s a big missed opportunity. Unless a legal degree is one of Morn’s many not-shown-on-screen talents? ;-)
@20: Well, I think the idea about the smoking is that, even compared to other harmful drugs that (IMO) are pretty stupid for people to use recreationally, like alcohol or weed … tobacco smoking is EVEN WORSE for our bodies by an order of magnitude. To the degree that it really is amazing it ever became a widespread practice.
@36: My point was that the dialogue made it seem like Quark had no knowledge of addictive substances, whereas I’m sure these things exist in the Star Trek universe and Quark would definitely know about them. Not to mention drugs that are a lot “harder” than the recreational substances you mention.
What a fun episode. Cheesy, goofy and well played. What I am really appreciating about rewatching DS9 is the variety of types of stories that they made. It doesn’t always work, to be truthful, but here…wow, did it ever. What I really liked about it was that it was unabashedly played like a b-movie parody. They went full monty on it and the gamble paid off.
I wonder if Quark, Rom, Nog and Odo got a debriefing from Temporal Investigations upon they’re return?
David Sim: DTI is a Federation organization, but I’m willing to bet that Cadet Nog got a visit from them shortly after he was sworn in…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
They were orbiting Earth, so I’d guess the DTI could still question them.
Nog’s comment that maybe an old Earth lab they are trapped in is the Divine Treasury is one of the funniest lines on the show so far. Made me laugh out loud.
There was a lot of funny moments in this episode like the family interactions of the ferengis. But for the me the 20th century human all acting like 50’s B-movie stereotype was the worst part of the episode. If this was in a holosuite I understand the people acting like tropes but since they really did travel back in time why not have the 20th human act like real people.
KRAD said: “The episode only loses a point because of the wholly gratuitous and kind of awful bit where Nog basically asks Garland to give him a hand job (an ear massage). That’s—just really wrong. It’s played for laughs, and it’s mostly harmless, but it’s not completely harmless and it just, well, rubs me the wrong way. (Sorry…) It’s the only blight on an otherwise delightful and hilarious episode.”
I’ll admit that Quark’s habit of fondling his … ears kinda grosses me out.
Great. My browser just crashed and my text is gone. I am really not in the mood to type it out all again, so here’s a shortened version:
1. The universal translator working the way it does in this episode doesn’t make any sense at all. Why should someone be able to understand ferengi just because of a device that is implanted into the ears of the speaker?
2. Handjobs, um, I mean Oo-mox is the most atrocious thing in the Trek universe. It’s not funny, it’s sexual harrasement. I wish the writers would’ve never heard of it in “Ménage à Troi” (I mean, it’s a pretty bad episode anyway…).
3. We get to hear ferengi, I think it’s the first time since the aformentioned episode.
4. Rom has come a long way since his first appearance. Originally he was only there for comic relief, but he has developed into a character with his own thoughts, wishes and skills
5. It’s also nice seeing Quark acknowledging his brother and his brother’s work.
6. Time travel yet again? Life in the 24th century must be very dangerous. You are in constant danger of traveling through time by sheer accident and sometimes you even wipe out the entire Starfleet on your travels.
6. I am torn between “this was a good episode” and “this was a very mediocre episode”
@45/waka: The universal translator is in the ears of the hearer.
I thought this, and “Our Man Bashir”, were two great comedy episodes.
@46/Jana: That’s exactly waka‘s point — the Ferengi have the translators, but the humans can understand them. So they must be transmitting as well as receiving, as it were.
Ultimately, there’s no way universal translators can make sense; they’re a dramatic contrivance for the sake of the story, and if you think about their workings too closely, the idea falls apart.
Maybe the UT is a cybernetic implant, or at least the option Quark went with is? Slam it into your brain, and you can translate right at the language processing level, speaking and hearing in your chosen language. It also explains why some words, usually from Klingons, are left untranslated; the implant version of the UT allows you to choose whether or not you actually speak in the common language or keep certain words untranslated.
Going further, there is a range of UT options. Some people get squeamish about an implant, so get just the common in-ear, some people don’t even like that so get a tricorder based version, and some people rely on translation books, and everything in between. See, it all works. :)
Ultimately, the UT proofs that God exists, and therefore, he doesn’t. Shamelessly ripped from the Hitchhicker’s Guide:
@krad: like #6/bmac, I processed the dog as an MP dog as well.
@2/CLB: Wow that’s something I never knew. Thanks for the rundown of the “Roswell Incident”, it was an interesting read. Regardless of that, though, I still think this episode was a wonderful incorporation into the widely believed version of Roswell.
@36/McKay B: It is definitely an uncomfortable aspect of Worf’s character in this episode, coming across as a bigot, but it’s not the first example. In the third season episode of TNG, The Enemy, Worf’s hatred of all Romulans for the death of his parents is established unequivocally. In the fifth season episode of TNG, The Outcast, Worf states quite strongly, that the J’naii bother him because of their androgynous nature and the fact that (in his mind) they all look alike. As I said, it’s not a character trait that we should like, but it’s not unprecedented for the character.
Lockdown rewatch. A perfect comic masterpiece. Quark, Nog and Rom are superb as always, the 1950s humans are terrific and Odo provides the twist in the plot. Not a bad performance in the episode and as a young man when this first came out I had developed a huge crush on Megan Gallager when this episode aired, and even now I think she still looks very hot as Nurse Garland. I can forgive it the ear rubbing as it’s played for laughs and Rom’s late reaction to it is still very funny, a clear 10 for me.
@51/chadefallstar: I developed a crush on Megan Gallagher eight or nine years before this episode aired, when she was on Hill Street Blues or The Slap Maxwell Story.
I’m not sure how Oo-mox, in itself, is sexual harrassement. I will certainly agree that tricking someone into giving it to you (assuming you are Ferengi) would qualify, and even stroking someone else’s ears when they don’t know the implication for Ferengi would be. But how is the actual act itself harassement? Kissing someone can be sexual harassment, but if you and your spouse both, consensually, kiss it is not, but by your logic it is, regardless of the mutual consent.
Christopher, I’m not sure about Roswell not being seen as a possible alien event until the late 1970’s. I have clear memories of bugging and cajoling my grandfather to take me to a lecture by a UFO proponent (Yes, I was a gullible kid too.) This would have been when I was 11 or 12, which would be 1968 or 1969, late sixties rather than late seventies. The lecture, and the book I talked my grandfather into buying for me, certainly heavily referenced Roswell.
Of course, that was fifty years ago, and my memory may be off on the Roswell connection; but the alien visitation topic definitely wasn’t and it had to be in that time frame. If it had been in the late seventies I would be able to drive myself and had access to, but not owned, a car.
@53/costumer: Well, of course the idea that UFOs were alien spaceships caught on in the 1950s and was quite active in the culture and entertainment of the ’60s and ’70s. But the Roswell “incident” was just one of dozens of instances of the mass hysteria following the Kenneth Arnold sightings in the summer of 1947. This was just two years after WWII. Americans had been trained for years to constantly watch the skies for enemy aircraft, and with the genuine threat ended, that free-floating hypervigilance was in need of something else to latch onto, priming Americans to go UFO-crazy.
So even if Roswell did come up occasionally before the late ’70s, it certainly didn’t dominate the UFO mythology to the extent it has ever since the ’80s and ’90s. It would’ve been just one story out of many, because the books and movies and TV shows that elevated it into a household word hadn’t come out yet.
Frankly, what annoys me about modern UFO folklore is that it’s become exclusively about Roswell and Area 51. It used to be a lot more diverse than that. The Bermuda Triangle. The Egyptian pyramids. The Nazca lines. A secret UFO base under the North Pole. Now it’s just Roswell ad nauseam, and it’s gotten kind of boring. It’s all so damn stupid and ignorant, but at least it used to have some variety to it.
As I said, I recall the lecture and book to be heavily Roswell centric. But, also again, that could just be my memory conflating things. I agree, the heavy emphasis on Roswell is disappointing. I don’t discount the possibility that aliens have been here, but I would need a lot of evidence to believe any particular event is of alien origin; to date I haven’t seen any for any.
@55/costumer: I wouldn’t be surprised if your memory were conflating things. Roswell has been such a heavy part of UFO mythology for the past 30-40 years that most of us have come to assume it’s been a big part of the mythos since 1947. It took me a while to remember that I’d never heard of it when I was a UFO buff in the ’70s, and that it was never mentioned in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was pretty much a definitive overview of the UFO lore of the time.
Heck, I’ve seen a number of people (and I used to be one of them) assume that the 1980 UFO-conspiracy movie Hangar 18 is about Roswell, when in fact it’s about a totally different fictitious capture of a crashed UFO. People have conflated their memory of the movie with the loosely similar elements of the Roswell myth/cliche, and that distorts their memories. So it’s credible that the same thing is true of the book and lecture you remember.
“I don’t discount the possibility that aliens have been here, but I would need a lot of evidence to believe any particular event is of alien origin; to date I haven’t seen any for any.”
If aliens had visited, they sure as heck wouldn’t look like “Greys,” an image that actually originated in the late 19th and early 20th century as a speculation about far-future human evolution. And they wouldn’t be whooshing around in flying hubcaps. I mean, seriously, if they’re watching us in secret, then why would they be performing attention-grabbing aerial acrobatics while flying around in brilliantly lit vehicles? If they’re smart enough to invent interstellar travel, they should be smart enough to turn their high beams off.
UFO cult beliefs have nothing to do with any realistic possibility of alien life or visitation. They’re just a product of the same superstitions, fears, and hallucinations that used to be explained as ghosts and demons and goblins and faeries, but that have now been dressed up with the trappings of the Space Age. Cultists’ descriptions of the aliens they claim to have seen generally conform to popular mass-media depictions of alien life. They have nothing to do with actual aliens; they’re just a manifestation of human psychology.
I riffed on this in my Analog story “Abductive Reasoning,” in which a real stranded alien encounters a UFO cultist and is amused and bewildered by his assumptions about alien life. It can be read for free on my Patreon page:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/41459524
@56 Christopher L Bennett
I certainly agree with you on “greys” and bizarre aerial acrobatics.
I loved this episode by the time it ended, but had to fight down an initial disappointment that we weren’t going to see “Rom and Quark take Nog to college”. I actually wanted to see how his first days at the Academy might go, especially with Quark along, maybe trying to mess it all up for Nog. In the right writers hands, we might have gotten a funny-but-meaningful episode of family and breaking down barriers at Starfleet.
Was the “No flaws whatsoever” sarcasm given that there was a major problem with the command sequencer?
I can’t tell if Rom’s engineering skills are inconsistent, or just my memory of them. He sometimes seems brilliant, but I also have vague memories of him saying “uh oh” or “unless/except…” Is “good at ideas but usually overlooks one thing that has unintended consequences or requires scrambling to address” a reasonable description?
Not sarcasm — just that their diagnostic showed no flaws because the command sequencer was programmed to appear to work perfectly until the sabotage activated. It wouldn’t have been effective sabotage if the flaw had been detectable ahead of time.