Bad Orb Vision

"Prophet Motive" Plot Summary:

The Grand Nagus abruptly rewrites the Rules of Acquisition and takes up altruism, inspiring Quark to investigate his leader's actions. He discovers that Zerk's meddling with the wormhole entities led to their meddling with him in turn.

Analysis:

I think we've reached the nadir of this series. Admittedly I've never been enamored of Ferengi episodes, and although the Grand Nagus has never failed to crack me up, he's basically been used as a pinup joke character. I was pretty bored through the beginning of this episode, which was like a terrible version of the end of A Christmas Carol with all the Dickensian anti-Semitic allegory in full color...but it wasn't particularly painful to watch, just predictable, uninteresting, and nasty.

That was nothing compared with how I felt during the final 20 minutes of "Prophet Motive." It's bad enough that they've watered down Kira into oblivion and made a mockery of Bajor. Ridiculing the Prophets is over the line; they may be fictional, but the treatment of religion was akin to showing Jesus having sex on a sitcom. Phrases like "in bad taste" and "highly offensive" don't even begin to cover my reaction. I wanted to turn the TV off.

The Bashir subplot, while relatively uninteresting, at least didn't make anyone look stupid...well, except maybe Odo with his gossiping, and Kira with her gushing...OK, at least it didn't make Bashir himself look stupid. O'Brien was there and that's about all I can say about him. I sort of liked the new Rules of Acquisition, at least as a comic foil for the old ones, since we have never been expected to take Ferengi "religion" seriously. We knew they wouldn't last of course, since then we would lose even the comic relief to the Massive Rewriting Plague which seems to have affected everyone and everything on this show. The good point? Well, Rom had a pretty decent episode.

In and of itself, the idea of someone sneaking into the wormhole to see the future has merit. But to discover that the Prophets, the Bajoran gods, are nothing but meddling fools who need Quark to set them straight...that the Bajorans in essence need a Ferengi god instead of their own...I can't even talk about this. I'm hoping it was just a bad orb vision.