"Little Green Men" is the 80th episode of the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the seventh episode of the fourth season. It is rated 4.3/5 on the official Star Trek Website.
Quark receives a shuttle that his cousin Gaila has been promising him for years. He christens it Quark's Treasure and for its maiden voyage takes his brother Rom and nephew Nog to Earth, where Nog has been accepted to Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. Quark also intends to make the trip financially profitable by smuggling a load of kemocite to Orion on the return voyage.
As the ship nears Earth, Rom finds that due to sabotage by Gaila they are unable to drop out of warp. However by using part of unstable kemosite to create an explosion they can drop out of warp. Unfortunately in doing so the ship and crew are thrown back in time to July, 1947 and crash land near Roswell, New Mexico. The Ferengi awake on a U.S. military base, where the Americans believe them to be Martians. After Rom repairs their malfunctioning universal translators, Quark begins negotiations with the humans, whom he considers backward and gullible, to sell advanced technology from the future. He brags to Rom and Nog in private that "within a year we'll be running this planet," and dreams cultivating to a vast Ferengi economic empire.
Unbeknownst to the Ferengi however, Constable Odo had traveled to Earth with them and of course was also thrown back in time. Using his shape shifter abilities, Odo is able to move about the base locating and repairing their spacecraft. He then appears as a German Shepherd Guard Dog in the room where the Feregi are being held, and morphs into his normal form, telling Quark that he knew about the kemocite smuggling, and that they must try to preserve the timeline and not alter Earth history. Quark, Rom, and Nog then escape from custody with the help of an Army nurse and her college professor boyfriend (actor Conor O'Farrell) who has been brought to the base to try to establish dialogue with the aliens.
By harnessing the energy of an atomic bomb test scheduled for that morning, Rom is able to use the remaining kemocite to cause a temporal rift which returns them to their proper time. After dropping off Nog at Starfleet Academy, Quark has to sell the damaged spacecraft for salvage and he, Odo, and Rom return to Deep Space Nine. As the episode ends Odo is seen strong arming Quark off to a holding cell to face charges of smuggling contraband.
[edit] Arc significance
- Nog, having been accepted at Starfleet Academy (cf. "Heart of Stone," "Facets"), travels to Earth where he will begin his studies.
[edit] Production notes
- Throughout the episode several references are made to the real life 1947 Roswell UFO incident:
- The base commander, General Denning tells an underling that the whole thing would officially be called the recovery of a "crashed weather balloon."
- Quark's spaceship is held in Hangar 18, a building famous to UFO aficionados as the place where the U.S. government allegedly held items dealing with crashed alien craft.
- In a bit of inspired casting, Charles Napier played General Denning. Some twenty-five years earlier Napier had played the role of Adam, one of the space-age hippies in the original Star Trek episode "The Way to Eden."
- Conor O'Farrell is cast as a professor brought in to help communicate with the Ferengi. Two years later O'Farrell was a series regular on the NBC show Dark Skies playing Phil Albano, the second-in-command of Majestic, a super-secret U.S. government force battling aliens that first arrived at Roswell in 1947.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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