"The Last Outpost" is the fifth episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, originally aired within the United States on October 19, 1987.

In this episode, the Enterprise pursue a Ferengi starship to the planet Gamma Tauri IV, where both ships are disabled by an unknown power drain.

As the chase passes the planet Delphi Ardu IV, both ships suffer power drains causing them to come to a halt.

Data (Brent Spiner) reports that the planet seems to have once been a remote outpost of the "Tkon Empire" that became extinct 600,000 years ago (during the Middle Pleistocene).

Picard contacts the Ferengi and gets them to agree to mutually explore the planet below to try to find the source of the energy drain.

The away team break free, and begin to exchange weapon fire, but the energy expelled is absorbed by a nearby crystalline structure.

Data investigates the tree and awakens an entity that displays itself as a humanoid and calls itself Portal 63 (Darryl Henriques), "a guardian of the Tkon Empire."

As a means of ironic thanks, Riker suggests sending the Ferengi a box of Chinese finger traps, a toy that fascinated Data when he became stuck in one earlier in the mission.

To this extent, the "bible" produced before the start of the show stated categorically "No stories about warfare with Klingons or Romulans".

[5] After they re-appeared later in the first season in "The Battle", the producers thought that they didn't make a suitable adversary and plans for their continued use in this role were dropped.

[9] Westmore was not pleased when a shot of an actor in costume was leaked without the teeth, he said "I was annoyed about that photo because the make-up was incomplete.

[3] Executive producer Maurice Hurley saw Portal as being a sort of guard-dog,[11] but thought that the Ferengi turned the concept into "silliness".

[3] Wil Wheaton later recalled that the cast was unhappy with the episode as they didn't like several aspects of it including the fingercuffs joke and the Ferengi in general.

[13] The episode also featured the first occasion that Geordi La Forge gave a report to the bridge from the engineering section.

[3] In that role he would also shoot a scene for the movie Star Trek: Insurrection, but it was cut from the final version of the film.

He thought that the episode saw some character growth but felt that the Ferengi "were a total joke" until they were later partially redeemed by Shimerman as Quark in Deep Space Nine.

He gave it a grade of C.[13] Mark A. Altman reviewed the episode for the 1998 book Trek Navigator stating it was "one big, inferior rip-off of "Arena".

[21] The 2023 video game Star Trek: Resurgence is a sequel to this episode, with Frakes reprising his role of Riker and Mark Rolston voicing Portal 63.

[25] This included the first season episode "The Last Outpost", and the set has a total runtime of 638 minutes across multiple 12-inch optical video discs.