Sunday 05 February 2012

Creating the Ferengi

With Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gene Roddenberry had a new ship, with a new crew, and he wanted a new villain for them to contend with. Thus he asked Herb Wright, co-producer on the show, to develop a race that would become the series’ recurring antagonist. Wright introduced this new species in the episode, “The Last Outpost,” which we write to depict the Federation’s first official contact with the Ferengi.

A New Villain

Wright recalls that, “When Gene [Roddenberry] asked me to come up with a kind of grand villain for the new Star Trek series, he said he didn’t want to rely on the old stuff. Well, take a look at the Klingons; they were basically the Stormtroopers of space, and the Romulans were kind of like the SS of space. I went off to noodle what the look and shape and construction of this new villain would be physically and emotionally and to work out what their society would be like; basically I had to come up with a new world. That wasn’t too hard. I just looked around at 80’s America, where greed was good and Gekko was one of our heroes. I came back to Gene and I said, Where are the carpet baggers? Where are the robber barons? Where are the guys where every time you turn around they’re buying space ships out from underneath your feet or stealing from you? [...] With the Ferengi, the idea is that profit is the most important thing. You always like to come out on top, and business rules supreme. Even when you die, the heaven you go to is in fact where they count up how much profit you have and give you a good table in front, while hell was the place that you’d go to penniless and have a damned future in which you would be taken advantage of every five seconds, which is the worst thing the Ferengi can possibly imagine.”

One of the reasons that Wright was attracted to the idea of a greedy, robber baron race was that they could provide the ideal contrast to Gene Roddenberry’s highly evolved crew. He was intensely aware that Picard and his team did not have most of our twentieth-century vices. “The twenty-fourth-century that Roddenberry envisioned,” says Wright, “was one in which humanity had worked out its personal and public differences. [...] I saw the inner logic of what Gene was doing. He said he had tried for that in the first show, and for all kinds of reasons he was never really allowed to take it to the nth degree. Now he wanted to show us that it was possible for there to be a higher ideal. The real conflicts would have to do with cosmic rays or alien possession things that would alter us against our will. But there was no one who could voice those aspects of greed and corruption and selfishness, so the only people we could relate to on the show were the aliens and the villains, because those were the people who acted like us.”

Thus the Ferengi continued Star Trek’s tradition of creating alien races who reflect real groups of people on Earth, but whereas the Klingons had stood in for the Russians, the Ferengi would stand in for the forces of unrestrained capitalism. “The thing I’ve always thought about a good villain is that, basically, they’re just like us; they’ve got our vices, our faults, but they are exaggerated—or at least everyone thinks they’re exaggerated. The reality is they are usually closer to us than we would wish to admit.”

Large parts of Ferengi society were worked out from the basic premise that they were greedy and unscrupulous. However, this was not quite enough for Roddenberry and Wright, who decided they should give them a few even less attractive traits. “Sexism came with the package,” says Wright, “and Gene wanted to take that to an ultimate degree. He loved that idea enormously. It was his idea that it was by law that no female Ferengi could even own clothing, let alone wear it. The fact that women are not allowed to make profits was decided early on. It’s almost like [a] Victorian industrial revolution kind of attitude toward women, which is [that] they should be home, taking care of kids, and they shouldn’t even be wearing clothes, because that just gets in the way and it costs money. There’s no profit in that!”

Unpleasant as the Ferengi may seem, Wright wanted the viewer to recognize that their society did work for them and that humanity must seem as strange to them as they did to the crew of the Enterprise. “One of the first things they do when they first come aboard and realize they’re looking at human females is say, My God, you clothe them? Why would you want to do that? [...] They’re thinking, What are these, savages doing? To the Ferengi, it’s such a savage idea to have women clothed, and they’re thinking how disruptive it would be to one’s society.”

Gene Roddenberry also wanted to make sure that, if we stopped to think, we would have reasons to be jealous of the Ferengi. “[H]is whole point was they may be nasty, mean little sons of bitches, but, between all the stuff they’ve got and the money, they get all the hot ladies, and they know what to do about it; that’s something they’re actually good at. See what happens down the road: Quark has some hot women on his arm. If you look at all those who have got that kind of power, the same thing applies.” This aspect of Ferengi superiority goes to the heart of the race; the idea was that, because they were really more like us than the Starfleet characters, the viewer would find himself agreeing with them. “I also wanted to create someone who we could love,” says Wright, “and then hate ourselves for loving them which is always the dirty little secret of villains.”

Creating the Look

In order to work out what the Ferengi would look like, Herb Wright worked with concept artist Andrew Probert and they started to produce different drawings. Wright remembers that the original brief he gave Probert was relatively simple. “When I first thought about these guys, I had kind of an image of Scrooge McDuck diving into his gold coins and cackling. I figured that since we had the big guys already with the Klingons, and the medium-sized guys with the Romulans, the little guys who you really have to worry about would be the Ferengi. I wanted us to loathe them, and despise them, and fear them, and also think they were ridiculous. We played around with a bunch of concepts. I kind of scrunched up my face, and popped my eyeballs, and bared my teeth, and put my hands upbehind my ears. It was probably the most grotesque thing you could get. We always fear the thing that doesn’t look like us. In this case, the idea was to take them away from looking like us, but of course they do look like us in some ways. They’re weird, but they are still humanoid.”

In some of the early drawings, the Ferengi have small pointed beards, something Wright approved of, for it reminded him of another inspiration for the Ferengi: Shakespeare’s Shylock who puts business above all else. He goes on to say that the beards also had distinct echoes of ancient Babylonian sculptures. “That Middle-Eastern look came right off the statues. What was Babylon all about? It’s the same issues of greed and gold that we were trying to endow the Ferengi with. But they were looking a little bit too Assyrian, and a little bit too severe because of that. At the end of the day I felt it was better, and so did Gene, that they would have hairless features. [...] I’d always admired Spock's ears. The idea was to take that to a different level, so they almost had elephant ears. When I first described what might look like, it was by holding my palms out on either side, like you do when you’re a kid. And having that heavy eyebrow ridge that went across made it even more weird, because it’s almost like their whole head is a cap. It also accentuated the baldness and the prominence of the brain.”

Roads Not Taken

The large, four-lobed brains almost led to the Ferengi becoming rather more violent than the creatures who made it to the screen. “I had been deeply affected by the horror film Scanners,” says Wright. “There was a moment when I thought, These are the smartest villains out there; they have to be. They’re businessmen. Jeez, they generate all that electrical steam upstairs; how about if one of the things they could do is make your head explode? The intention was that they’d have this brain-splattering ability and could literally blow out the brains of other people. That was deemed, first of all, way too expensive. [...] Secondly, it was obviously too far afield for our family audience. Thirdly, once you’ve done that stunt, who’s going to get in a room with a Ferengi?”

Several early discussions focused on ways the writing staft could make the Ferengi seem more dangerous. In the pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint,” there is even a reference to them eating people. ”There was an area where there was a potential to go with a more monstrous quality,” recalls Wright, “and cannibalism is the most monstrous thing that humanity can face. It’s even worse than genocide in most people’s eyes, because literally eating people is, well, pretty disgusting. We were toying with that idea. I was worried about that, because I thought it would allow people to turn around and step away from the larger issues that these villains were about, because they could just say, Oh well, they’re just a bunch of cannibals, as opposed to saying, Yeah, they seem silly, but you find yourselves agreeing with them. They get things done, they’re wearing the hot clothes, and they’re the ones living life with all the stuff.”

The Ferengi on The Next Generation

Although there were good reasons for pulling back from the more dangerous qualities discussed, the result was that the Ferengi may have been taken less seriously than Wright hoped. He left Star Trek toward the end of The Next Generation’s first season. In 1989, nobody liked the Ferengi. The original idea had been to make them into Star Trek’s new villains: a race of unscrupulous capitalists who posed a constant threat to the Federation. They were supposed to combine humor with a genuinely aggressive side, but from the moment they first appeared on screen something had been wrong. The humor had overbalanced the threat, and they had literally become a laughing stock. The Next Generation show-runner Michael Piller remembers that when he arrived on the scene in the show’s third season the Ferengi were actually on the point of extinction. “There’s no question that most people would have been happy to lose them,” says Piller. “In general, the perception was that they were silly, even stupid. Everybody felt that it was a one-joke premise and, for all intents and purposes, the joke had been played out. [...] I can’t say that I was the Ferengi’s greatest champion, but, at the same time [...] I didn’t see anything wrong with some villains that brought smiles to your face. [...] I just thought they could serve as a change of pace.”

Thus, under Piller’s direction, the Ferengi continued to make appearances on The Next Generation. But they were no longer played as a major threat to Picard and his crew. Indeed, although a few rogue Ferengi were encountered, overall, they began to integrate with the Federation. Piller recalls that this approach allowed the writers to play to the Ferengi’s strengths specifically. Ferengi stories could deal with themes that were normally off limits to the noble Starfleet officers we were used to.

“The Ferengi represented a segment of the universe that was not being dealt with in any other way at the time,” according to the Piller. “You know, Roddenberry’s vision was very clear: human beings had evolved to a place where they wouldn’t be particularly interested in material goods or petty jealousies. It was impossible to get those kinds of emotions out of our human characters, so we had to use aliens to give us conflict and the ability to comment on the kind of social issues we wanted to explore. My philosophy about the Ferengi was that they were the most human aliens that we had to work with. I think we identified, as Star Trek does so very well, a theme of life that needed commentary, and we were able to do that through the Ferengi.”

The Ferengi on Deep Space Nine

Although the Ferengi made several appearances on The Next Generation they were still very much a supporting race, and we knew relatively little about their culture. All that changed when Michael Piller helped develop Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In a bold move, he and Rick Berman decided to make one of the series regulars a Ferengi. In the beginning, the station was seen very much as a frontier town in the tradition of Dodge City, and this environment instantly suggested several characters to Piller.

“Every frontier town that I’ve ever seen in the movies had a Brian Donleavy character who ran the saloon,” he says, “who was greedy and was buying land, and was cheating at cards and running hookers. To me, it seemed like a natural place for a Ferengi.” Some of the references in the writer’s bible suggest that the Ferengi, who was soon named Quark, would have been quite a malevolent presence who had a hand in every illegal activity on the station. Nevertheless, Piller insists that there was never any question of making him into a real bad guy. “I don’t think Quark was ever going to be our house villain. He has a different agenda to everyone, else. I think what you wanted was a strong, adversarial, but not unlikable, character to play against Sisko. Quark was always meant to be a benevolent adversary; remember, he was going to be a regular character. Look at Dr. Smith in Lost in Space: you have a really hard time when one of your regulars is just pure evil. It becomes tiresome. You really need to look at a character for who he is and what he wants out of life. And this guy is a Ferengi; he really wants to flourish and thrive and prosper, and, yeah, he’s willing to do just about anything to do that, but he’s smart enough that and this is a very important part of it; these Ferengi are very smart people he doesn’t go out of his way to involve himself in things that are going to get him kicked off the station.”

When Deep Space Nine was in the planning stages, Piller intended Quark to be “a thorn in Sisko’s side” but, as he was writing the pilot, it became clear to him that Quark was a more natural adversary for one of the other characters: Odo, the lawman on the station. In Quark and Odo he found two characters who were philosophically opposed, but were also inextricably linked by their roles on the station. It soon became clear that they had a grudging respect for one another, and over the years their many scenes together provided a rich vein of humor. “It was clear to me that having a Ferengi aboard Deep Space 9 would provide the show with instant humor and built-in conflict with the Federation guy in charge of the station, and also with Odo, who I’d always seen as the sheriff of this town. Obviously conflict is a wonderful thing, and conflict with burner is even more fun. When you discover it, you realize you are tapping into a goldmine. We all know what the relationship was between Spock and Dr. McCoy in the original series; it was an unrelenting conflict, but it always was fun. Nobody set out to create an imitation of that in Deep Space Nine, but whenever you can you look for conflict between two characters, and the lawman and the outlaw are the classic two. Also, I think that relationship turned out to be the result of two terrific actors who worked extremely well off one another.”

Once Deep Space Nine was up and running, Piller stepped down from the day-to-day running of the show and handed the reins over to Ira Steven Behr, another veteran of The Next Generation’s third season. Behr is widely credited with rejuvenating the Ferengi, but he admits that when he got to the show, he had no interest in them at all. “I never took them seriously,” he says, “and no one I know took them seriously. So I was quite surprised when Mike Piller told me that there was going to be a Ferengi on Deep space Nine.”

The idea became that Quark was someone who was still looking for his main chance. “It’s obvious, really,” says Behr, “the guy’s a bartender. You can say that a lot of the Mafiosi led sedate lives and did not live in palatial estates, but they weren’t bartenders; they made sure they never had to wait on people, and that’s what Quark was doing. He wanted to get that leg over and prove to everyone, and I guess to himself, that he had what it took.” At the same time, Quark was supposed to provide the comic relief necessary amid the darker overtones of Deep Space Nine. “I looked at Sisko, I looked at Kira, I looked at Dax ... I was looking for something humorous that was going to be clearly different from The Next Generation. Instead of Data walking around making comic remarks, I wanted someone who was going to embody a different sensibility. The Ferengi gave us the chance to bring something to the show that was different from anything we had seen in the other Star Trek series. [...] The Ferengi gave us a chance to see the kind of people who grasp, who reach, but can’t get there. [...] To me Star Trek is filled with [...] confident, fearless people who are going to get the job done. It was essential to have a Daffy Duck for the show to take off and develop its own identity.”

Legacy

Quark’s Ferengi perspective on life automatically placed him alongside other Star Trek characters who provided an alien commentary on human behaviour, in the tradition of Spock. Behr points out that Quark and Spock probably would not come to the same conclusions, and goes on to say that in contrast to Spock or Odo, Quark, who was always concerned with self-preservation, provided a valuable critique of Starfleet heroics. “One of the things that really worried us as writers were the clean deaths in Star Trek and the way we were feeding this rather insidious view of violence and heroism. Something about it did not seem right. We tried to deal with it in a number of shows, but one of the ways we could address it continually was to have Quark. Any time you showed weakness or fallibility, it had to be in alien characters. When you have eight people talking and saying, We should attack, or These people need our help, it’s good to have someone saying, I want to get out of here! I felt most of the time Quark was right; it was absolutely, positively, common sense. To me, when a flawed character like Quark is able to rise to the occasion, it means that much more. The thing I like about Quark is that when we gave him those moments when we made him two-gun Quark and had him save the day I always felt it worked because we hadn’t done it to death.

“In all kinds of little, below-the-surface ways the Ferengi enabled us to do so much else with the other characters,” says Behr in conclusion. “I think having them on the show, having that element in the series, freed us up to explore other parts of the characters. We got away with a lot of things, and a lot of attitudes that had not been part of Roddenberry’s universe for a while. They had been there in the beginning, but then they had gotten lost. We could be greedy; we could be in love with latinum; we could be less than perfect. We saw these shows and the Star Trek world didn’t implode. [...] The Ferengi opened the door to make everyone not more Ferengi but, the irony is, to make everyone more human. That’s the beauty of it. That’s the success of it.”

 

N. Ottens
29 August 2008

Sources for this article include:
• Reeves-Stevens, J. & G., Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Continuing Mission (1998)
• “The Ferengi,” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 1, issue 9 (January 2000)
• “Reinventing the Ferengi,” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 2, issue 5 (September 2001)
• “Creating the Ferengi,” Janet’s Star Trek Voyager Site
• Images courtesy of Andrew Probert, Probert Designs.