Acquisition
“Acquisition” really didn’t work for me the first couple of times I watched it. Having sat down and had a think, though, I can see what it wants to do, and why it’s worth doing.
So I’m rather more inclined toward it now. I guess you might call it… an acquired taste?
Future Imperfect
I kid, I kid. Except not really. This isn’t going to be a fierce defence of a misunderstood classic, or anything, but I do think the episode gets a bum rap. I think it’s worth pushing back against that a little.
For a lot of people, the biggest hurdle for rating “Acquisition” comes from the fact the Ferengi are present at all. This is a group which includes Brannon Braga himself, who described their use here as “an act of desperation”. And sure, it’s probably not a great sign if you can only manage seventeen stories of your brand-new show before inspiration runs dry. That said, TNG only got past its pilot before it had to remake an entire damn episode, and that didn’t exactly portend disaster long-term.
And while “The Naked Now” was also an act of desperation (the planned script ultimately proving unusable), what we have here isn’t just an echo of that situation, but an inversion as well. Rather than scrambling to remake the past, “Acquisition” reaches into the future. Starfleet doesn’t actually make first contact with the Ferengi until the 24th century, after all.
Which, of course, was the problem. So many fans whinged about the Ferengi debuting 200 years before the Ferengi debuted that one of the show’s writers had to wade into the fever swamp and wave “Little Green Men” around like mosquito-repellent. And look, as a recovering canonoholic myself, is this really a battle worth the powder? Nobody here uses the word “Ferengi”, and the idea Ferengi like to knock out entire crews before robbing them and leaving offers a perfectly reasonable explanation for why no-one reports meeting them prior to “The Last Outpost”. We could even note the fact that the leader of our little band of thieves has a name similar to Ulysses, suggesting this particular group of Ferengi are a very long way from home.
Even without all that, the argument it’s ridiculous that it takes another two hundred years for Starfleet to run across the Ferengi rather ignores the fact that nations can shrink as well as grow. Maybe some other race made major inroads into Ferengi space. The Klingons, perhaps, or the Romulans, or even someone we’ve never met from the far side of the Alliance’s worlds. Someone invaded, anyway, forcing a period of severe contraction. I mean, the Ferengi might be intended as a satire of Reagan economics, but there’s no sign of the ludicrously engorged military machine that historically accompanied it. It wouldn’t be fair to say they have no sense of patriotism – it mainly comes in the form of excuse-making and self-deception, but then that’s true of a lot of patriotism – but it’s hard to imagine the Grand Nagus having much success in corralling his nation of hyper-libertarian back-stabbers into a viable fighting force.
My point is, there’s handwaving available if you need it. It even helps explain why the Enterprise-D is constantly hearing about the Ferengi without having met them – the Federation is expanding into territory the Ferengi once occupied but have long since vacated.
All of which is to say that in terms of continuity, the fact this episode dares to remind me that the moral outrage of “Dear Doctor” ever happened bothers me far more than the inclusion of a species I wasn’t expecting to show up. Let’s make sure we maintain a sense of perspective.
The Four Stooges
So much for the decision to raid the future. That just leaves us with plundering the past. This is maybe an odd objection in the context of a prequel show, but I’ve taken Enterprise to task before about needing to do more than extract the icons of your history, and parade them around once again.
While this remains true, though, it’s worth noting that it’s rather less of an issue for “Acquisition” than it was for “The Andorian Incident“. This is partially down to timing – indulging your fannish impulses towards the end of the series is a different proposition to doing it in your first half-dozen episodes. It’s also partially down to the fact that the Ferengi have had twelve years of development over the eighties, nineties, and into the third millennium, whereas the Andorians got one episode each of TOS and TAS and a brief cameo in The Voyage Home. It was reasonable to expect recognition and investment here in a way that was completely not the case twelve episode ago.
Mainly, though, this all comes down to tone. It’s much easier to understand deploying the Ferengi for a nonsense romp than it is trying to use the Andorians to anchor a story about the hypocrisy of Vulcan realpolitik. “The Andorian Incident” took itself incredibly seriously and wanted us to do so as well. “Acquisition” just wants to mess around. I don’t think it’s remotely a coincidence that this is an episode written by the same two writers who gave us “Breaking The Ice”, a desperate plea to the still-new show to de-po its face and just have a little fun.
And maybe it helps that we’re straight off the back of the sublime but tremendously heavy “Duet”, but I struggle to see any problem with the idea that, in a season of twenty-five episodes, there’s room for one or two that are content to just provide a silly diversion. This certainly seems to be this story’s goal. We’re six minutes into the episode before we hear our first words that aren’t in Ferengi – all of three lines from Trip. It’s almost six minutes more before the Ferengi translator move us into the realm of actual conversation. This isn’t just a brave decision, though I certainly think it is brave (I know the Jacquemettons wanted to do it for longer, and I wish they’d got their way). It’s a sign that the episode isn’t really interested in saying a great deal. Instead, the focus in the opening minutes is on hiring a handful of capable physical actors, and then seeing how well they can keep the audience entertained without actually saying anything intelligible.
Let’s not undersell how usual this is. Almost ten full minutes of simple physical comedy; that’s approaching a quarter of the episode. Any suggestion that “Acquisition” is doing nothing but coast on past triumphs dies here. It’s true that it’s utilising the past. Not just in terms of our alien visitors, either. Ethan Phillips, Jeffrey Coombs and Clint Howard have each appeared in multiple Trek shows before Enterprise, and two of them have already had experience of playing Ferengi. Crucially, though, this isn’t just hiring old faces for the sake of giving the advertising team something to talk push. It’s about taking three veteran actors with the clear ability to pitch their physical performances at the right level, and then letting them get on with it.
As far as I’m concerned, this ends up working pretty well. From Krem’s encounter with one of Phlox’s pets, to Muk almost getting himself fried by a console in engineering, neither the lack of dialogue, nor the difficulty of selling facial expressions when under prosthetics, stops our antagonists from being plenty of fun to watch. Nor is it just the old hands who get the job done; the brief scene of newcomer Matt Malloy’s Grish beaming with cheeky pride as he steals a chair – still attached to its floor-mount – comes close to justifying the episode all by itself. Krem chucking a slice of unwrapped cheesecake into his bag is almost as funny.
This near-total lack of understandable dialogue has another purpose too, though. It has the effect of deepening the apparent mystery of what the Ferengi are doing here, two centuries too early. Which makes it both hilarious and very telling that when we’re finally in a position to have this explained, the episode doesn’t bother at all. Because it was never the point.
The Way We Were
So what is the point? So far I’ve argued it’s essentially about just having a bit of fun. Like a crack team of Ferengi marauders, though, there’s always more we can take away. “Acquisition” is also about celebrating the franchise’s past, as oppose to just referencing or utilising it. I’ve mentioned that Phillips and Coombs have both played Ferengi before, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of their combined contributions to Trek as Neelix and Weyoun/Brunt, respectively. Howard in contrast has only made two prior appearances (or three, I guess, since “Past Tense” is a two-parter). Given one of those was “The Corbomite Maneuver“, though, one of the franchise’s first indisputably great moments, his presence here also carries some historical weight.
Once again, I’d resist any argument claiming all this wasn’t sufficient reason for “Acquisition” to exist. IDFC isn’t a series about deciding which episodes were worth the making, though. It’s an attempt (at least in this iteration) to challenge conventional wisdom on which Trek shows had the most solid first season.
To that end, we need to compare “Acquisition” with the other episodes in the cycle. It will surprise no-one that I’m going to place it below “Duet” and “Arena”, both obvious (if complicated) classics. What about “Coming Of Age”, though? Does an ambitious but ultimately failed experiment in self-assessment count for more than a story that spends ten minutes doing something new and then settles into a fun but ultimately unambitious template?
Remember, the stakes here are (comparatively) high – as of their respective last episodes, Enterprise and TNG are so close in IDFC ratings that a strong placement for “Acquitision” would see the later show pull itself away from the bottom slot. Who among you dares admit you’re not on the edge of your seat?
I’ll save you from stressing out too much by tipping my hand straight away – “Acquisition” is doing more with its set-up than might be obvious at first. Michael Sussman’s comments that Deep Space Nine already revealed Delphi Ardu was never the site humanity’s first contact with the Ferengi are well-taken, but this isn’t the only reason to reject the idea that “Acquisition” is a simple retread of “The Last Outpost” set two hundred years earlier. The critical difference between the two episodes is that in TNG, the Ferengi were as new to us as they were to Picard. Here, in contrast, we’re watching our crew deal with a threat we’re completely familiar with. The idea is to watch how quickly Tucker, Archer and T’Pol can catch up with what we already know.
The answer to that, rather delightfully, turns out to be “almost immediately”. Archer has been conscious for barely two minutes, and talking to the Ferengi for under ninety seconds, by the time he’s worked them out enough to be able to dupe them into a futile search, buying him the time he needs to outwit them more permanently. We could put this down to how sharp Archer is, even after having been drugged, but the fact his attitude gets him the butt of Muk’s rifle three times in about a minute rather brings that theory into question. This is less about Archer’s wits, and more about how incredibly easy it is to read the Ferengi in their entirety.
And of course that’s the case. Archer has studied his history. And as he tells Krem, it’s well-known that the raiders’ philosophy once came close to destroying our planet. This leads to my favourite line in the episode: “You should have managed your businesses better”, as pure a distillation of the total refusal of capitalists to grasp the point as Trek has managed yet. It’s an immediate jump to “the problem with capitalism is capitalists”, a rote denial that the system can be the problem; it’s just that some people aren’t doing things the right way. The fact Archer criticises a pirate for his greed, and said pirate immediately responds by sticking up for the concept of business itself, tells our captain everything he needs to know.
It’s not just that Krem’s philosophy is wrong. It’s that it is so obviously, painfully, stupidly wrong that it’s the work of seconds to assimilate it, reject it, and figure out how to use it to defeat those who espouse it. Once again, the Ferengi are the piteous clowns they were introduced as in “The Last Outpost”. They’re dangerous again, too, with Muk in particular enjoying his role as a sadistic enforcer. But that’s the point here, just as it was there – you don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. DaiMon Tarr was introduced when Donald Trump was just one more money-worshipping Gordon Gekko-type haunting the corners of public consciousness. “Acquisition” was filmed less than two years after Trump wrapped up his first presidential campaign.
In other words, whoever’s fault it was that the Ferengi needed to be revisited in their original form, it wasn’t the production team on Enterprise. We’re reminded here not just that Roddenberry’s vision of a future Earth has moved beyond the shameless money-grubbing of Reagan’s America, but that we ourselves have totally failed to.
And hey, if you prefer your Ferengi a little more nuanced – less S1 TNG, more late-stage DS9, then what is the storyline of Ulis and Krem but a speed-run through how Rom ultimately outpaces the apparently more savvy Quark?
Yes, “Acquisition” is an episode that’s shamelessly facing back along Trek’s timeline. But by carefully choosing the concepts they picked out, and by putting them in the hands of people who’ve proved their skills at execution, “Acquisition” capably demonstrates how you don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to drive people somewhere interesting.
Let’s let at least one person of colour get a line of dialogue next episode, though, hmm?
Ordering
1. Duet
2. Arena
3. (Ex Post Facto)
4. Acquisition
5. (The Infinite Vulcan)
Series Ordering
1. Deep Space Nine
2. The Original Series
3. Voyager
4. The Animated Series
5. Enterprise
6. The Next Generation