5x20 Cost of Living

[6.6/10] What kills me about “Cost of Living” is that there’s something here. There’s an old adage about why kids and grandparents get along -- “they have a common enemy.” Showing Lwaxana and Alexander finding a certain camaraderie together, as both of them bristle against authority figures in the way of Deanna and Worf, is the germ of a good idea. The colorful senior and the rowdy junior have a lovely rapport together, and the way each wants to be free to follow their own muse despite the calls of rules and responsibilities unites them in a believable way.

But the episode often devolves into wacky sitcom writing. Characters’ reactions are over the top. New players drop in to have exaggerated responses and make overblown choices to further the plot. Lwaxana is an outsized character, so some of this is to be expected. Still, there’s a core of something real to her hopes and fears, and to Alexander’s corresponding desire to just do what he wants, that gets lost in the cheeseball execution of these ideas over the course of the hour.

As that intro suggests, this is a Lwaxana Troi episode, where the famed Betazoid interloper comes aboard the Enterprise to marry her internet boyfriend Campio. At the same time, Lwaxana naturally sticks her nose into Deanna’s efforts to massage the father-son relationship between Worf and his son, undermining her daughter’s ideas and plans, and bonding with Alexander over her own philosophy on life and raising children.

A lot of this material gets pretty goofy. Deanna tells Alexander that most children appreciate their parents for caring enough to establish rules once they grow up, only to wince when she hears her own mother has come aboard and says, “in other cases...” it feels like the hackiest sort of sitcom joke-telling. There’s a lot of that vibe here, with an over-emotive protocol advisor, a series of wacky holodeck characters, and even Worf’s own over-the-top flummoxed reactions that make this episode of The Next Generation feel hammier than usual.

It does not help that the episode also features a totally forgettable sci-fi plot. In the cold open, the Enterprise crew destroys an asteroid hurtling toward a planet. Later, numerous systems on the ship start malfunctioning, leaving a weird collection of orange dishwashing detergent behind. Geordi and Data have to solve the mystery of what's causing the issues and creating the goo before it starts to threaten the major systems.

There’s a few problems with this plot. For one, there’s zero mystery because the cold open also features a cloud of mysterious shimmery powder floating onto the ship, so it’s obvious to the audience what’s causing these troubles. For another, there’s essentially zero connection, thematic or otherwise, to the main plot with Lwaxana and Alexander, leaving this one with the sense of two different scripts stapled together. Lastly, there’s nothing particularly clever about the discovery or the solution. The team figures out that the cloud is an organism eating a particular element and leaving the goo behind as waste, and they deposit it onto another asteroid using the usual Treknobabble magic.

There’s a touch of tension when the life support systems are affected and Data has to complete the mission on his own (doesn’t seem to affect Lwaxana and company, but whatever). But it feels like particularly false jeopardy when these events are consigned to a B-story that’s tonally mismatched to a down-home story about surrogate grandparents and grandkids bonding. Maybe, maybe, you could find more to do with the goo-producing cloud if you fleshed it out into an A-story, but as is, it plays like the mandatory space obstacle of the week with little in the way of excitement or intrigue.

Most of the creativity in the episode comes from Lwaxana and Alexander’s jaunt to a holographic version of a sort of Alice in Wonderland-like realm. Ostensibly, it’s a colony of free-thinker, but in reality, it’s an excuse for the costumer designers and makeup artists to go nuts with imaginative suits and silly characters for Lwaxana and Alexander to interact with, The whole little zone has an “imagination land” or Big Rock Candy Mountain Vibe, seemingly aimed at a younger audience. It’s plain that the place is meant to represent escape from responsibility and obligation and encourage both the older and younger protagonists to embrace their free-spirited side. Once again, the episode goes a little too far in conveying that idea to the cheap seats, but it’s still nice to see the production team go all out here.

Eventually, Lwaxana’s betrothed arrives (Tony Jay, of Hunchback of Notre Dame and ReBoot fame!) and what follows is a rote tale of conforming to a life of expectation and rigid rules or continuing to be true to thine own self. Naturally, Lwaxana takes the former, choosing to be nude at her wedding rather than conforming to Campio’s customs, and credits the epiphany to her time with Alexander. It’s a stock sort of tale (even if the rendition is a little out there), but man, Majel Barrett sells the hell out of her bare moment of rebellion and faith in herself.

That’s the most frustrating part of “Cost of Living”. Barrett proves once again that she’s one hell of an actress. As much as she works the Auntie Mame vibes when offering smart remarks to her daughter or otherwise being a fly in the ointment aboard the Enterprise, the episode also continues the trend of giving Lwaxana real human moments. When she sits Alexander on her knee and hears about how his mother died, or speaks earnestly about the fears that come with growing older and being older, TNG touches on real truths and lets the First Lady of Star Trek show off her legitimately moving acting chops.

But too often, in this episode and in general, those talents are wasted on a story that’s delivered without the complexity and realism it deserves. The core of “Cost of Living” is worthwhile and even poignant, a story of the common ground between someone older and someone younger both bristling at how the generation in between expects them to behave. But by tacking on a superfluous sci-fi plot, and ballooning that story into something cartoony rather than piercing, TNG wastes the comic and dramatic potential of having Lwaxana return to the Federation flagship once more.