3x24 Ménage à Troi

[5.9/10] If you polled Trekkies on the types of episodes they hate the most, I think your top three responses, in no particular order, would be 1. Lwaxana Troi episodes, 2. Ferengi episodes, 3. Wesley Crusher episodes. “Menage a Troi” happens to feature all three at once, making it a veritable chocolate sunday of anathema to the hardcore Trek fan’s tastes and preferences.

I tend to appreciate all three of these things more than the average Trek devotee, and even I struggled with this one. It’s a logy episode, with little in the way of excitement or momentum for most of its runtime. You have to really like Lwaxana’s usual outre antics, slimy Ferengi mercantile pursuits, and Wesley’s wunderkind victories to not be, at a minimum, roundly bored by this outing.

And yet, I have to respect how it’s also a stealthily solid episode. There’s clear conflicts with surprising but well set up resolutions that hinge on some character-revealing turns in the story. Each payoff has a setup that proceeds it. “Menage a Troi” may not have the most entertainment value-per-minute of any TNG episode, but it turned out to be more sturdy than I thought when rolling my eyes at the episode’s halfway point.

Take Lwaxana’s story here. It starts out as some bargain basement “mom tries to get her daughter settled” plot. I generally like the dynamic between Troi and her mother. There’s a “You’re embarrassing me, mom” quality that feels relatable and amusing. But the show, as is often the case with Lwaxana, plays it to the cheap seats. There’s cliché conversations about shacking up and settling down, infantilization, and other wacky romcom-esque hijinks. Lwaxana’s efforts to convince Troi to find a man and have a kid for the good of her own happiness feels dopey.

And yet, when push comes to shove, Lwaxana really does care about the well-being of her daughter (and Troi’s on-again, off-again beau). When the Trois and Riker are kidnapped by the Ferengi Daimon Tog, Lwaxana asks him to let Deanna and Will go since she’s the one Tog really wants, even if it means neural torture for her. That choice deepens one of the show’s most clownish characters, showing that the feeling beneath her overbearing, exaggerated mom shtick is, in fact, genuine.

Granted, the choice is undercut just a little by the fact that Picard rescues Lwaxana too in the end, with a few hints from Lwaxana herself. But for one thing, count me among the few who finds Picard’s awkwardness around Lwaxana’s romantic advances hilarious. Watching Picard murmur his way through an insistence that the elder Ms. Troi is the object of his affections and no one else to convince Tog to free her is a hoot. And for another, it provides Patrick Stewart to fall back into some Shakespearean verse, always a treat. The comedy in “Menage a Troi” doesn’t always work, but Picard having to deal with Lwaxana’s...uninhibitedness remains fertile ground for laughs.

For a third, even if, as is inevitable for a comedy episode, Lwaxana makes it out unscathed, she was still willing to risk continued imprisonment in exchange for her daughter’s freedom, without any guarantee of a rescue. It’s not much, and it takes a backseat to some eye roll-worthy hijinks and cringey ear-based honey pot schemes, but it adds a hint of ballast to the core storyline of the episode.

The same goes for Wesley’s story here. We’ve played the “Should I stay or should I go?” game with Wesley as early as the season 2 premiere. The prospect of him leaving for Starfleet Academy isn’t a particularly compelling one, since the show’s been teasing that for a while and found ways to sidestep it for some time now. Without giving anything away, I did consider the possibility that this might be a sign of Wesley’s potential exit from the show, but even with the near-season-finale boost of possible changes in the status quo, it’s hard to take the prospect too seriously.

Nevertheless, “Menage a Troi” manages to inject a little meaning into the acting ensign’s decision to stay aboard the Enterprise. He’s this close to beaming over to another ship to head to the Academy oral exams, when he realizes he might have the flash of insight that could save Commander Riker and Counselor Troi. Wesley essentially forgoes his dream to help rescue two of his fellow crew members from danger, something that speaks to his selfless character and willingness to help even at great personal cost.

His remaining on the Enterprise is all but a foregone conclusion, but the reason he misses his transport away, makes it more than that. It’s the kind of character-revealing decision that makes it cathartic when Captain Picard removes the “acting” label from the little twerp’s rank, and gives him a field promotion to the rank of full ensign. I’m not the world’s biggest Wesley Crusher fan, but it’s hard not to beam a bit for the kid when he strolls onto the bridge in his full uniform for the first time, earning his way into Starfleet through his valor and compassion and not just boy genius test scores.

To the same end, despite my usual resistance to “Wesley saves the day” story, this one makes sense for once! It’s not that Wesley possesses some preternatural intellect that allows him to see things trained professionals don’t. It’s that he was there for Riker’s chess game against a Ferengi, and remembered the traditional rhythm that Will’s alien opponent griped about. So when Riker uses that same rhythm to surreptitiously signal the Enterprise while in captivity, it’s natural, rather than contrived, that Wes might be the one to piece it together.

There’s similar setups and payoffs all over “Menage a Troi”. That chess game is Will’s ticket out from behind a forcefield when he challenges his Ferengi guard to a rematch. Lwaxana casting Picard as a vengeful former lover dovetails with Tog complaining about her speaking of former romantic partners earlier in the episode. The episode even finds an excuse to sideline Mr. Homn so that the writers don’t have to deal with him during the Ferengi abduction. This is a fluffy episode to be sure, but it’s surprisingly sound fluff.

It’s not quite enough though. Even if you have a stealthily elegant script and a bit of unassuming depth, when the scene-to-scene atmosphere is dull or cheesy, it’s hard to warm to an episode like this one. There’s a lot of outsized characters at the fore here (including a Ferengi played by Ethan Philips long before he became Neelix -- another Trekkie unfavorite!), and as Lwaxana herself once acknowledged, that’s something of an acquired taste for a show that tends to be much more serene and down-to-earth on a weekly basis.

Still, showing a softer or more realistic side to the show’s more caricatured figures, adding a hint of meaning to their journeys through what is frequently a farce, may not make an episode like “Menage a Troi” good, but it definitely makes it better than a tale of Wesley, the Ferengi, and the first lady of Star Trek might seem on paper.