Ménage à Troi

The writing team finally embrace the goldmine that is playing the Ferengi for comedy

We’ve been to the ‘Klingon Homeworld’ and Vulcan this season, what's left? How about Betazed. Maybe that’d be a good excuse for Troi to have something to do. Ah, but here comes Lwaxana Troi so our underused ship’s Counsellor can get huffy and fight with her mother. Here’s some good news, though - Wesley Crusher is off to Starfleet Academy where we’ll hopefully be shot of him forever. Anyway, Picard orders Riker to have some shore leave, so he heads off with Deanna and absolutely forgets all his principles about not dating fellow members of the crew for some reason. Fortunately, the ultimate gooseberry arrives in the form of Lwaxana and Mr Homn.

Now say hello to the Ferengi.

We knew this episode was going to be about them because they were mentioned in Picard’s opening monologue and were seen in Ten Forward in the teaser. A nefarious Damon (is there any other kind?) kidnaps the Trois and Riker and zwooshes off in his oddly under-crewed Marauder. A chance for Deanna to prove herself? Nah, Riker and Lwaxana will do all the work of escaping, while the good Counsellor is reduced to just reacting to everything that happens. Of course, it’s ultimately up to Wesley's gnarly skills to save the day because nobody else (even Data and LaForge) can see through the ruse that was devised by Riker. Sadly, this not only means rescuing Lwaxana it also means Wesley doesn’t leave the Enterprise after all, so it's disappointments all around.

To add insult to injury, Wesley is promoted to a full Ensign, which means he now outranks hundreds of people aboard the Enterprise-D.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Words

There’s no better introduction to this episode than the comments made by its co-screenwriter Susan Sackett:

It’s a comedy. It’s not Shakespeare. We pitched a lot of stories and the last one was Mrs Troi. At first, we were going to do O. Henry’s The Ransom of Red Chief and it kind of evolved. We developed the story and the premise with Gene and he helped make the characters believable.

So was it Sackett’s idea to make it into a sex comedy, or co-writer Fred Bronson? Actually, it seems to have been Gene Roddenberry himself who wanted to go down the dirty rabbit-hole. Indeed, the scuttlebutt is that Roddenberry’s rewrites were far, far filthier than what we saw on screen, involving veiny penis-shaped fruits at the picnic and all sorts or malarcky. I also suspect - but can’t prove - that Roddenberry invented ‘oo-mox’, the sensuous Ferengi ear foreplay, which debuts in this episode.

Speaking of ‘oo-mox’, my favourite moment in the screenplay is this stage direction:

Lwaxana has been “oo-moxing” Tog into a deeper alpha state and he’s now on the verge of sleep.

There’s something about that sentence that puts a big smile on my face.

The writing team of Bronson and Sackett has a rather interesting relationship with Trek. Bronson wrote an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, “The Counter-Clock Incident” (under the pseudonym ‘John Culver’), despite being hired by NBC as publicist for the show and being strictly prohibited from writing for it (hence the pseudonym).

L’il Uhuru in “The Counter-Clock Incident”

It was Bronson that introduced Sackett to Roddenberry, who in 1974 became his personal executive assistant. Bronson and Sackett wrote two TNG episodes together, this one and season five’s “The Game”, which is surely the more satisfying of the two, although I have to give credit to the team for opening the door to the Ferengi farces that will be such an important element of DS9.

Acting Roles

So obviously this is a vehicle for Majel Barrett’s Lwaxana Troi, and if it’s not her finest hour, it is at least a good fun romp and a big step up from her last appearance in “Manhunt”. She’s well-paired with Frank Corsentino' Damon Tog, and they make a good double act. Corsentino had played Bok in season one’s “The Battle”, and will reprise that role in a later episode too.

Peter Slutsker’s Nibor is plays the gullible gaoler rather well, and nobody gets cast as a TNG Ferengi just once, it seems, as he'll be back as a new Ferengi in two future episodes.

He finally gets to appear without latex in the popular Voyager story “Year of Hell” as a Krenim Commandant. Here’s a picture of him with Gene Roddenberry behind-the-scenes, that I guess Slutsker himself requested.

Speaking of Voyager, what an oddly familiar voice that is behind the sinister Ferengi physician Farek's make-up... It’s none other than Ethan Phillips, who plays Voyager’s second-to-least popular character, Neelix.

Shout out to Rudolph Willrich playing Reittan Grax, the administrator who has nothing to do but be the token Betazed while the Trois are kidnapped.

He’s back in DS9 in yet another administrative role, namely a Bolean Academy Commandant in “Paradise Lost”, and in Enterprise they let him play a Captain, with fairly light latex. There’s nothing in his performance here to make him a shoe-in for a revisit, so I’m guessing he gave some great auditions.

But the real comedy star once again is Patrick Stewart, who spouts Shakespeare sonnets in the final act in order to win Lwaxana’s release.

This scene alone rescues the episode from potentially circling the drain.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

There really isn’t much narrative purpose to the Enterprise-D visiting the Gamma Erandi Nebula, but it’s a reasonably pretty diversion I suppose.

There’s new footage of the Ferengi Marauder shot for this episode, because up until now we hadn’t seen one without the Enterprise-D also being in the frame. It’s not super-exciting, but it is new.

However, there’s lots of Betazed fun for the SFX team this week. Along with reuse of the planetary mattes from “Who Watches the Watchers”, there are two new shots composed for Betazed. I mean, it’s the same matte painting, but the compositions are new. It’s more fun down on the surface where we welcome back the Huntington Library Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, CA, where season one’s “Justice” was filmed.

I absolutely love the matte painting of Betazed with its sci-fi mushrooms! It’s one of those slightly tricky shots that has to combine the matte painting with live foreground footage, but the TNG team can do this sort of thing without breaking a sweat (it was much harder to do this in classic Trek)!

It’s only on screen for a few seconds, but it’s so good it causes Riker and Troi to rekindle their relationship. That’s the power of a great matte painting!