Profit and Lace can be boiled to the plot summary that “Quark has a sex change, and it is hilarious.” Of course, it makes sense that this basic plot would appeal to the writers on Deep Space Nine. Profit and Lace is awful on its own terms. Even if those episodes were not consistently funny, they tended to be competent. However, they were all much better episodes than Profit and Lace. One Little Ship was a waste of a potentially fun story hook. His Way was as problematic as it was goofy. Who Mourns for Mourn? and You Are Cordially Invited… were uneven, but enjoyable. The Magnificent Ferengi was brilliant, one of the best comedic episodes in the franchise. To suggest that Profit and Lace suffered from a “whimsy backlash” is to ignore its very severe flaws.
The quality of these episodes was inconsistent at best, but these softer and gentler stories stood out in contrast to the more weighty storytelling of Waltz, Far Beyond the Stars, In the Pale Moonlight or Inquisition. It was the sixth “lighter” episode of the season, following the broad comedy of The Magnificent Ferengi and Who Mourns for Mourn?, along with the more whimsical storytelling of You Are Cordially Invited…, One Little Shipand His Way. It is tempting to argue that Profit and Lace suffered from audience fatigue. Suddenly, the Ferengi are appearing in episodes as tone-deaf and ill-advised as The Last Outpost.Īt some point, something went horribly wrong. The writers on Deep Space Nine did a tremendous job developing and humanising the Ferengi, but the late one-two punch of Profit and Lace and The Emperor’s New Cloak erases all of that good will. Some of the show’s best episodes focus on the Ferengi characters, like House of Quark or Family Business or Little Green Men or The Magnificent Ferengi, not to mention all manner of very solid stories like The Nagus or Bar Association or Body Parts. The episode is so bad that it becomes a retroactive taint upon Deep Space Nine‘s attempts to develop and flesh out the Ferengi. It could reasonably be argued that the toxicity of Profit and Lace is not even quarantined. At best, it is an episode that belongs in conversation with Meridian, Prophet Motive, Let He Who Is Without Sin… and The Emperor’s New Cloak. And yet, her persistence in the face of such systemic oppression enabled her to directly influence Grand Nagus Zek, arrange for Rom to succeed Zek as Nagus and win rights for the women of Ferenginar.Profit and Lace is a disastrous misfire, a late-season catastrophe that many would consider to be the absolute nadir of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
In fact, her illicit dealings often forced Quark to struggle between family loyalty and the cultural misogyny he’d internalized over the course of his life. As a female Ferengi, she had few rights and no legal avenue for exercising her considerable business acumen. Quark and Rom’s mother Ishka (played by Andrea Martin and later Cecily Adams) served not only to depict the challenges of being a woman on Ferenginar but also to provide the viewer with a deeper understanding of Ferengi culture and its flaws. This character growth led Rom to help form a union with Quark’s other employees, get married and even become Grand Nagus, leader of all Ferenginar. Once he started to pursue this interest, he became a valued member of Chief Miles O’Brien’s engineering team. Rom was not stupid rather, his aptitude lay not in making money but in engineering. Quark’s brother Rom started out as a dim lackey - then actor Max Grodenchik and the writers began to dig beneath the surface of the character. Fortunately, the creators of DS9 eventually brought this kind of nuance to other denizens of Ferenginar.
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