Risa

There's a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.

Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.

I feel like there's a missing explanation of why "assimilating the diversity" of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.

It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of "we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need" worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.

It still gets me that the Ferengi were mostly unknown to the Federation, yet by the time of DS9 they're almost a widely known cornerstone of economics in the Alpha Quadrant.

They had no idea what they wanted to do with Ferengi in this episode. By the end, they are downright feral. Wearing furs and jumping around screaming like cavemen. After watching them in later episodes, this one just feels really weird to see.

I wish their neat energy whip came back though.

Hell of a twist if that was revealed after all the initial interactions. The ultimate grift to put the Federation off guard.

It's all in the writing, I guess. It'd be a kind of bungling, stumbling, weird encounter, random, campy, never know what they're going to do, villian.

*There were a decent villian in "Peak Performance" (the strategema episode). You just need that off species to be a counter.

More like the ultimate friend