By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
For the most part, Star Trek: The next generation It was a fairly tamed show … He may have constantly put Marina Sirtis in lean outfits, but this is the last series where you could expect a character to make a vulgar sex joke. Nevertheless, such a joke is hidden in one of the most important episodes in the series. In “The Price”, a Ferengi uses his hands to tell an unhappy brand on the size of his penis in a moment which seems madly out of words in this spin-off Star Trek.
If this has been a hot minute since you watched “The Price”, here is a quick summary: in this Star Trek Adventure, different governments negotiate the rights on what is supposed to be a stable worm hole on the other side of the galaxy. Some of the representatives of these negotiations are Ferengi, a breed known for their greed and their general misogyny towards women. This last quality is fully exposed in a scene where the Ferengi Goss makes a gesture of the hand towards Ensign Bailey; Later, the Star Trek: The next generation Companion confirmed that he referred to the size of his “sexual organ”.
This vulgar display is a real moment to “flash and you miss it” … The one who, in fact, most of the Star Trek fans have failed entirely. But why is this moment in the episode? Although we can only speculate, it is quite possible that the director Robert Scheerer was included as a reference to something other than most fans do not know: the strange fascination of Gene Roddenberry for the Ferengi having huge penis.
Years before the “The Price” broadcast, Roddenberry helped create Ferengi as a new villain so that our heroes can face, the one who would operate like Klingons Star Trek: the original series. In a 1987 memo, the creator of Trek described Ferengi as having “prodigious sexual appetites”, and the producer of TNG Herb Wright later said that the Ferengi were manifestations of the “sexual fetish” of Roddenberry. Wright says Roddenberry wanted to “want to put a gigantic cod-jargon on the Ferengi” as a way to confirm for the public that these alien were very well endowed.
Continuing, Wright said that Roddenberry “spent 25 minutes explaining all the sexual positions that Ferengi could go through.” Finally, the producer closed all this strange sex speech by telling the creator of the franchise that he could not have all this spicy content because “it is a family program, at 7:00 on Saturday”. Roddenberry accepted and the size of the Ferengi penis is not confirmed on the screen, although these misogynist foreigners have kept their disproportionate sexual appetites as initially designed by the Trek Guru.
It is quite possible that having a Ferengi boasts of its penis size in “The Price” is a way of honoring the original vision of the creator of Star Trek for these extraterrestrials. It is also possible, of course, that it is simply a amusing visual gag on a minor character boasting of his anatomy in a memorably vulgar way. These extraterrestrials are often described as raw caricatures of modern capitalists, so having one of them focused on the size of its Latinum stick would be perfectly in accordance with their other representations on the screen.
As for us, we like to think that “the price” is a way of honoring the extremely excited vision of the creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry for these stingy foreigners. However, we may never know if goss (assuming that he was telling the truth) is only endowed or if the Ferengi collectively shake a very thick endowment (probably the continuum of the great material). The latter could finally answer the question we have been asking for decades: why the Leeta devil ends up marrying Rom on New deep space.
