Prophet Motive

Unbelievable boring ! If was possible I would put zero to this extremely boring episode !

Once again, Wallace Shawn plays the Grand Nagus in yet another comic episode of "Star Trek: Deep Space 9". However, this time something clearly is going wrong the with the man. After all, he's re-written the Rules of Acquisition--and the re-write clearly violates all the basic beliefs of the Ferengi. For example, the new revised rules encourage Ferengi merchants to give refunds to dissatisfied clients as well as values friendships and family over profits!! Clearly the Nagus either is using this as part of some complicated scheme or he's lost his mind! Quark and his brother clearly are very disturbed by all this and they struggle to figure out what to do next.

This is one of the funnier episodes of the series. While it's rather inconsequential in the overall scheme of things for the show, it's very cute and a nice change of pace. Not to be missed.

The Negus comes. Quark is suspicious. Quark must move in with his brother. Negus starts to reject the Rules of Acquisition. Meanwhile, Dr. Bashir is up for a big reward but goes all gaga and can't graciously accept that he is being honored. This is a rather tiresome episode which contributes nothing to the continuity of the series.

The Grand Negus arrives at DS9 and appears to have a different personality.

This is a reasonably entertaining episode depending on your taste in humour.

The main plot about the mystery of why Zek is behaving so un-Ferengi has a strong conclusion with some good themes about the value of greed. Mostly though it's all humour, with frequent jokes about the nature of the Zek and the Ferengi characters. It depends how funny you find this for how much enjoyment you get from the episode. Personally, I think the material gets tiresome pretty quickly, but that's just me.

The subplot involving Dr Bashir is okay but the humour is fairly repetitive. It's actually derived from an inside joke of Star Trek losing out on Emmy awards to 'Picket Fences'. Again, it depends on what makes you laugh as to how amusing you will find it.

All cast do pretty well with the material, especially Armin Shimerman and Wallace Shawn.

I'm not quite sure why there are so many negative reviews. I really enjoyed this episode. Zek is a fun character, and Quark is one of my favourites. I really enjoy Ferengi culture, as they are not villains but they're definitely not part of the "good guys".