I remember [“Profit and Lace”] being a very problematic episode, simply because we shot many of the scenes over again…I’m thinking of one scene in particular, in which Moogie [Cecily Adams] and Quark have an argument and it ends up with her having a heart attack. We shot that rather darkly, and I liked [director Siddig’s] take on it quite a bit. I wanted to explore – what’s the word I’m looking for – the dysfunctional aspects of Quark’s family, the darker elements of a dysfunctional family, where things get so horrendously bad that it causes someone to have a heart attack…
Armin Shimerman in an interview in Starlog magazine, July 1999.
I must say that Cecily didn’t care for it and, obviously, the producers didn’t care for it either. So we reshot it. I thought of that episode really as a one-joke episode: let’s put Quark in drag. That must have been the basic idea and then they filled in the blanks. It didn’t say much of anything. It would have been a great chance to let Quark see the other side of male chauvinism, to be a woman and to explore all of that. Perhaps he would have learned something from it. To some small degree he did, but we didn’t really explore that very much either.
For my review on the travesty that is “Profit and Lace”, go here.
