Review of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Little Green Men," season four, episode 8 of the series

 Review of

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Little Green Men, season four, episode 8 of the series

Five out of five stars

Area 51 revisited in a humorous way

 This episode starts simple enough, Quark has received payment for an old debt in the form of a shuttle. His nephew Nog has been accepted into Starfleet Academy, so Quark agrees to the use of his new ship to transport his brother Rom and Nog to Earth. While it may appear that Quark is demonstrating familial loyalty, he is in fact planning on smuggling a load of illegal kemocite to Earth.

 There is a failure of the shuttle and when the kemocite reacts with the warp exhaust, a temporal rift is created, and the ship is sent back in time to 1947 on Earth. To make things even better, the ship crash lands near Roswell, New Mexico.

 The three Ferengi are taken to a facility for interrogation and at first their universal translators are not working. In an attempt to get them active again, they clap their open hands to the sides of their heads, generating an amusing moment. Rom is able to repair their translators and in true Ferengi fashion, Quark immediately tries to make lucrative business deals with the humans.

However, he underestimates the military mentality, and it appears that the three Ferengi are stuck in 1947 and will essentially be prisoners in a military base. Fortunately, the ever suspicious Odo has used his shape-shifting powers to stow away aboard the ship and he manages to help free the Ferengi and allow them to board their ship and return home with the help of a nuclear explosion.

 This is a fun episode for it combines the science fiction of the series with one of the most persistent rumors/myths/secrets of the federal government. Area 51 is the reference constantly used to claim that Earth has been visited by aliens, specifically a crash by an alien ship. Combining this rumor with the science fiction series was a stroke of genius.