Tendo City

1. Once you have their money ... never give it back.
3. Never pay more for an acquisition than you have to.
6. Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
6. A man is only worth the sum of his possessions. (From Enterprise, episode "Acquisition"; sloppy script-writing, as rule 6 (see above) was already given in DS9)
7. Keep your ears open.
8. Small print leads to large risk.
9. Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.
10. Greed is eternal.
13. Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
16. A deal is a deal ... until a better one comes along.
17. A contract is a contract is a contract (but only between Ferengi).
18. A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
19. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
21. Never place friendship above profit.
22. A wise man can hear profit in the wind.
23. Nothing is more important than your health--except for your money.
27. There's nothing more dangerous than an honest businessman.
31. Never make fun of a Ferengi's mother ... insult something he cares about instead.
33. It never hurts to suck up to the boss.
34. Peace is good for business.
35. War is good for business.
40. She can touch your lobes but never your latinum.
41. Profit is its own reward.
44. Never confuse wisdom with luck.
45. Expand, or die.
47. Don't trust a man wearing a better suit than your own.
48. The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.
52. Never ask when you can take.
57. Good customers are as rare as latinum -- treasure them.
58. There is no substitute for success.
59. Free advice is seldom cheap.
60. Keep your lies consistent.
62. The riskier the road, the greater the profit.
65. Win or lose, there's always Hyperian beetle snuff.
75. Home is where the heart is ... but the stars are made of latinum.
76. Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.
79. Beware of the Vulcan greed for knowledge.
82. The flimsier the product, the higher the price.
85. Never let the competition know what you're thinking.
89. Ask not what your profits can do for you, but what you can do for your profits.
94. Females and finances don't mix.
97. Enough ... is never enough.
99. Trust is the biggest liability of all.
102. Nature decays, but latinum lasts forever.
103. Sleep can interfere with profit. (DS9 season 2, episode 7 - "Rules of Acquisition")
104. Faith moves mountains ... of inventory.
106. There is no honour in poverty.
109. Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.
111. Treat people in your debt like family ... exploit them.
112. Never have sex with the boss's sister.
113. Always have sex with the boss.
117. You can't free a fish from water.
121. Everything is for sale, even friendship.
123. Even a blind man can recognize the glow of latinum.
139. Wives serve, brothers inherit.
141. Only fools pay retail.
144. There's nothing wrong with charity ... as long as it winds up in your pocket.
162. Even in the worst of times someone turns a profit.
177. Know your enemies ... but do business with them always.
181. Not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit.
189. Let others keep their reputation. You keep their money.
192. Never cheat a Klingon ... unless you're sure you can get away with it.
194. It's always good business to know about new customers before they walk in the door.
202. The justification for profit is profit.
203. New customers are like razortoothed grubworms. They can be succulent, but sometimes they can bite back.
211. Employees are rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.
214. Never begin a negotiation on an empty stomach.
218. Always know what you're buying.
223. Beware the man who doesn't make time for oo-mox.
229. Latinum lasts longer than lust.
236. You can't buy fate.
239. Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
242. More is good ... all is better.
255. A wife is a luxury ... a smart accountant is a necessity.
261. A wealthy man can afford anything except a conscience.
263. Never allow doubt to tarnish your love of latinum.
266. When in doubt, lie.
284. Deep down everyone's a Ferengi.
285. No good deed ever goes unpunished.
286. [Quark's rule] When Morn leaves, it's all over.

I thought this was pretty neat..

So did I, in 1994.

I remember when I was a teenager and thought Star Trek was a sophisticated depiction of the future.

Now I understand that Star Trek is nothing but a simplistic universe filled with hat planets.

It's a sad world we live in.

Well to be fair the biggest strength of Star Trek is imagining a future where human kind lives up to their potential. Humanity NOT having glaring social flaws is a part of Star Trek's charm, a way of saying that it's possible to imagine a future where humanity might just overcome it's weaknesses.

All the aliens are basically human personality elementals. This one's fighting spirit, this one's greed, this one's logic, this one's loyalty, and so on.

Weltall Wrote:I remember when I was a teenager and thought Star Trek was a sophisticated depiction of the future.

Now I understand that Star Trek is nothing but a simplistic universe filled with hat planets.

That's because you haven't sat down and watched a whole series from start to finish like I have. I just started watching the full series of DS9. There's some real subtext if you know where to look. Take a look at the relationship between Odo and Quark, there is some really good story telling going on it's really deep. Odo locks Quark almost every week to Odo Quark is despicable specimen of man. But they seem to need each other, Quark in the Ying to Odo's Yang they provide harmony to each other. But at the same time Odo would never admit it, the last line in the series is Quark saying, "Are you kidding? That man loves me, it's written all over his back."

Also, look at some of the story lines, some of the surprise endings are worthy of your favorite author Stephen King. Like the episode I just watched, the crew was looking for a monster aboard the station it's not until the very end that the monster they were looking for was a mutated Odo. No one, not even Odo had realized that he had changed. And the revile was brilliant, they were all standing around when Odo begins a gruesome transformation, it was a really disturbing scene, I have no clue how they got permission to show this on TV. It was like something out of one of those horror films that screw with your mind, the scene really messed with my head. Odo's fingers began to reform and mutate and slowly they started to become tentacles that began to suck the life out of the console. And they his face literately started melting, right before his body went ape shit.. It really disturbed the hell out of me.

Also, the sub story line with Kie Wen is really well written, she manipulates events and schemes people throughout the whole series like real master.. And at the same time she is worshiped like a hero. She's like a Sith lord, no one sees how evil she is except a few chosen people, that is until the end when her evil scheming is finally reviled and her horrors unleashed upon the world.

Finally the episode I'm watching right now is really well written. Miles O'Brien starts to notice that everyone has changed. Suddenly people are conspiring ageist him, his wife and friends suddenly have changed. So he runs, and contacts star fleet but now star fleet has changed and they have begun to conspire, soon we realize that the hole world is different. Then the master twist happens..

It's not Miles O'Brien, the world is different, because he is different. The Miles O'Brien we have been following was a clone programed to think he was the real thing, and then suddenly turn on the station. The story was so well written, I never saw it coming. The clones dieing words where, "Keiko... Tell her I love....."

My point is, if you think StarTrek story lines stayed as deep as "Hat Planets" then you need to watch some of the newer series again from start to finish, so you can really appreciate how amazing these writers are.

You should read the link I offered to the TV Tropes page about Hat Planets. Note how the list of Star Trek examples is as long as one's arm. :)

So someone identified a pattern and made a note of it. And?

My point being, just because it's used in many things doesn't make it bad.

Now, granted, I actually wish more aliens would be TRULY alien. The best species Star Trek ever had was the Borg. "Had" because the moment they created the "borg queen" they destroyed every last shred of uniqueness the borg had. If they had focused on the terrifying incomprehensible alien conciousness of the borg in First Contact instead of making a "relatable" human face for the bad guys, First Contact could very well have reached Wrath of Khan levels of greatness. Instead it's a movie with some good moments and memorable lines, but with a huge distraction in the form of some gross alien woman macking on a robot.

My point is that the show relied so heavily on this idea for almost 40 years that there's a trope named after it. If you see a familiar, recurring alien, you automatically guess what you're in for and you're usually right.

This is why you have a list of Ferengi aphorisms and the list is cartoonishly ultracapitalist. When you stop to think about some of the alien cultures, you have to wonder how they ever developed civilization and a level of spacefaring technology when their very biology seems to lock them into a singular character trait, to which adherence would have no room for anything like science.

Didn't Klingons just get their tech from conquered aliens visiting their world? I assumed Ferengi tricked some more naive aliens out of it.

Let's not forget that drive to DO something with your life depends on emotions. A species devoid of any would just sit around completely apathetic to everything until they starved to death.

All the same, from what I understand these species aren't completely stem to stern entirely ONE mental aspect. It's more like they're at extreme ends of a sliding scale with all the aspect of a human mind in them, just in varying amounts. That's the only explanation for the existence of, say, a klingon lawyer or a ferengi scientist.

Really though, all those alternative humans were really there as a literary metaphor for humanity, and an exploration of all the possible cultures we as a species COULD have had. Vulcans and klingons are basically just elves and dwarves... IN SPACE.

Again though, the series was at it's very best at two extremes. The first was when they deeply explored the nature of humanity directly, with the most human characters in the series (Data, Spock and... KHAAAAAN). The second was when they really got into what it would mean for a species to be both obviously intelligent and at the same time completely alien to our way of thinking. Yes, truly alien bodies are a part of that, but mainly it's those incredibly different minds that catch my attention more than whatever husk it's in. That's why the borg are the best truly alien species. Yes, they're made up of weird forehead humans, but that mind is, or was, a really alien concept that the rest of the species, stand-ins for various aspects of humanity as they were, couldn't really understand. That's why the borg queen was such a huge let down. With her, the entirety of the borg species became one very boring human stand-in personality.

Funny thing is, Next Generation actually took the time to explain WHY so many species in Star Trek are clearly frickin' apes with different foreheads. There was some epic storyline about the Great Secret of the Milky Way, which is that originally there was only ONE species that was about as "blank slate" in the forehead department as you can get, and it decided to seed countless planets with some code to guide evolution of one species to something resembling them. Granted, there's a lot of misunderstandings about how genetics works in an explanation like that, but they can be overlooked or worked around with a little creativity. Point is, it was a pretty daring revelation that the fans apparently HATED, so they seem to just ignore it in favor of turning Worf into the Predator for an episode. I wish they'd kept it, considering it would have united all those forehead species as one massive family, and the truly alien aliens would have been the actual "other" the series could have focused on.