Synopsis: The Enterprise crew finally meet the vicious, human-devouring Ferengi.
Memory Alpha Summary: Read it if you dare, HU-mon!
Review: For three episodes we heard about the scary new adversary the Federation had never met but had heard frightening rumors about. And thanks to somebody, the Ferengi were fucked up so badly here that it took Armin Shimmerman several years to get them back to respectability. Despite their awful presentation, the first half of this show is actually pretty decent. There is some genuine tension building, as it appears the Ferengi are powerful and are yet silently watching the Enterprise. Sadly, this goes to hell once they beam down to the planet, as this group of Ferengi are whiny, wimpy, and are so awful at lying that it doesn’t matter that Troi can’t read their thoughts. The moderately intriguing conversation Riker has with the guardian of an ancient civilization is wasted because of the Ferengi presence.
Sadly, the other thing this episode does is begin to show how pointless the character of Tasha Yar will be. Essentially we have two “shoot first, ask questions later” security officers in Tasha and Worf, and Worf is easily the most interesting of the two (if only at this point because he’s Klingon and provides some comic relief). I literally laughed out loud when Picard asks for suggestions and Worf says, “Hit ‘em fast and hit ‘em hard!”
Geordi is also an embarrassment in this episode, with his “WOO-WEE!” attitude on the bridge every time he gets turned on by an idea or an explosion. Thankfully, Data manages to make the Chinese finger trap gag amusing. This episode is so bad as it is that the finger trap bit feels mature in comparison.
Death By Troggles 
Fear my whip!
hey now
Now this is the kind of drivel I expected to find towards the bottom of the list.
What I noticed while I was ranking these is that I was less forgiving of bad episodes in later seasons. I think it’s because while the earlier episodes have a greater concentration of bad writing, I found most of it to be inoffensive. Also, characters were less likely to act “out of character” because their character hadn’t been developed yet.
Another first season episode that I remember liking at an early age that I ended up hating. I mostly enjoyed this one because the dude comes at Riker with an axe, and Riker totally honey badgers it.
Even then, though, the Ferengi had to be the worst idea as a main enemy tat’d I’d seen to that point.
thankfully, they figured it out quite quickly that the Ferengi were a disaster and created the Borg and eventually the Cardassians