Menage a Troi (⭑)

This travesty has essentially nothing to recommend it and is, along with “The Price,” easily one of the two worst episodes of TNG’s third season. Considering that it’s both a Lwaxana Troi story and a Ferengi episode, with a deeply half-baked subplot featuring a reversion to first-season-style “Wesley is way smarter than everyone else and saves the day” nonsense, its poor quality should surprise no one.

Lwaxana Troi encounters someone whose demeaning attitudes about gender, obliviousness to social cues, and disregard for anything resembling personal boundaries all exceed even her own, and…she herself still manages to be as irritating as ever. Unaccountably, there are people who somehow find this character appealing and funny. I am emphatically not one of them. However, this does not mean that any part of me finds scenes of her demeaning herself by ear-masturbating a repugnantly sexist Ferengi DaiMon at all watchable, either. (Being the episode that both debuted “oo-mox” and first “made good” (?) on previous mentions that Ferengi don’t “clothe females” wins “Menage a Troi” zero points.) Honestly, I just don’t get what anyone thought would be entertaining about any of this.

Was TNG even trying, at this point, to put out the dumpster fire that it started back in season one when it first introduced the Ferengi? Their second and third appearances on the show each improved on what had come before, to the point that their small role in season two’s “Peak Performance” was actually fine. This season, it seems like the writers mostly decided to stop trying to present them as a new “enemy” of the Federation and instead use them chiefly as idiot stooges whenever an episode “needed” a character who was both dumb and unscrupulous. In “The Price,” instead of anyone pretending that they represent a military threat, they barge uninvited into a bidding war and generally misbehave. By “Captain’s Holiday,” they are seemingly reconciled to the civilized interstellar community in general enough for one of them to be hanging out at a pleasure resort, even if he does behave like a barbaric, murderous bonehead while there. Then, here, we open with them being unprecedentedly welcomed to an annual trade conference, and they are even said to have “behaved themselves” during it—seemingly indicating (again) a transition away from being a belligerent power and toward coexistence and membership in the interstellar community. Until, that is, they decide on a whim to abduct a Betazoid dignitary and two Starfleet officers, hoping to use the former as a kind of combination sex slave and negotiating secret weapon. That last part, of course, sounds quite dark, but fortunately the Ferengi remain as dumb as rocks, so they prove predictably easy to outwit. It’s a good thing, too, because the episode has no interest in “dark”; it’s a comic take on abduction and coerced sexual servitude, you see. Just…wow.

Can I find anything to like in this mess? Well, for a moment, it looks like the episode might be interested in the idea of Riker and Troi rekindling their once-upon-a-time romance, and I would have been on board for that. The scene in which they establish a smidge of back story and reminisce together before going for an actual kiss is nice. Lwaxana pestering her daughter about landing a man for several scenes is not how I would have liked to arrive at such a development, and in any case the moment gets interrupted and doesn’t lead anywhere, but, whatever. Um… Okay, Troi throwing cold water on her mother’s self-importance by describing the Sacred Chalice of Rixx that Lwaxana is always going on about as “an old clay pot with mold growing inside it” got a genuine laugh out of me. And then, I have very ambivalent feelings about the eventual resolution of the Lwaxana / Ferengi story, with Picard having to play the enraged, yet poetry-spouting, former lover in order to cow DaiMon Tog into letting her go. On one hand, gags that try to be funny at the expense of the dignity of a character that I like, by making a fool of him and pulling him down to the level of a despicable and unwatchable character, never sit well with me. Also, having Picard threaten to fire upon and destroy another ship and playing it for laughs undermines any sense of the reality of the scenario, and erodes my respect for the show a little bit. And, of course, Tog is an imbecile for falling for the ruse. And yet, despite all of this, Patrick Stewart somehow manages to make parts of the scene entertaining, as he alternates between his flamboyant displays of feigned romanticism and a deadpan countdown of the ten seconds that he has given the DaiMon to comply with his demands. So, there’s that. I mean, if the episode earned itself any good will from me at all via Picard’s antics, it immediately squanders it via the subsequent cringe-inducing bit with Lwaxana sitting on his lap and being her usual intolerable self, but… Yeah.

Finally, there’s the Wesley subplot. Do I even need to dive into this? The episode feints at sending him away to the academy, but this is so half-assedly brought up and given so little attention that it’s hard to take at all seriously, even before it becomes apparent that he’s going to stall and miss his opportunity so that he can solve the problem of locating the Ferengi ship. He does the latter by miraculously recognizing a pattern in the background noise of an encoded transmission that for some reason is being listened to on audio even though it is known not to contain any normal message (the whole rigamarole is quite odd and inconsistent with how this sort of thing normally goes on the show, all for transparently obvious plot reasons). Everyone else, of course—including Data—completely fails to notice the pattern; only the boy genius is clever enough. But anyway, there is almost, but not quite, a character arc tossed in about his reluctance to leave the comfort and familiarity of the Enterprise (which, sure—that would make sense and be worth dramatizing), but no real sense, in the end, that this actually plays into his decision to blow off taking his oral exam, because this whole storyline is too underbaked to convey any actual character motivations. Nor is there any sense of how he feels about his decision afterwards, or what it really means, on a character level, that he made it. Plus, the setup itself (the ship waiting to whisk him off simply can’t delay for a few more minutes while he does a thing) feels pretty bogus to begin with. And finally, to cap it all off, out of nowhere Picard decides to give 17-year-old Wesley a “field promotion” to full ensign, in what is clearly meant to be a feel-good ending but actually just feels implausible, cheesy, and dumb.

No thanks.