“Last time I saw something like that it was being served on a plate.”
I’m stupidly fond of this episode even though I realize that it’s not very good; Lwaxana Troi going on a post-menopausal sex jag across the Enterprise is simply too hilarious for me not to mark it as memorable. She even makes a pass at Wesley, in one of the whole second season’s wilder grace notes. When Lwaxana temporarily levels her hormonal gaze on Will, declaring him to be her future husband in front of an enraged Deanna, I’d rather like to imagine a full-out slap-fight between mother and daughter breaking out on the bridge of the Enterprise – although of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation is too chaste for such things. Actually, the fact that they revolved a whole episode around a “post-menopausal sex jag” is itself kind of amazing; that an ‘80s TV series openly declared for a quadrupling of female sex drive in a woman’s advancing years nearly counts as revolutionary.
The best scene in the episode addresses exactly that, as Deanna (belatedly) briefs the captain on her mother’s condition. The look of awestruck horror on Picard’s face when Deanna recounts her mother’s “readings” of his perverted thoughts is great. (Any deeper consideration of a telepath whose prowess is misfiring as wildly as Lwaxana’s, however, is left to drop.) But give it up once again for Jonathan Frakes, who (earlier) sells the heavy-suitcase gag just as credibly as Patrick Stewart did in the previous year; and now in this scene, gives a reaction shot to Troi’s description of the elder Betazoid sex drive that is flat-out hysterical. “I didn’t want to frighten you,” Deanna admits, when telling Will that she downplayed the scale of her forthcoming erotic supercharge when they were dating. My guess is, those two got married just in time.
The Lwaxana plot is largely a thinly-veiled attempt to kick-start a scenario that can put Picard back in the fictional holographic world of Dixon Hill, which comes off even less successfully here than it did in “The Big Goodbye.” Even Picard isn’t interested in playing with something so mundane as a detective plot. His brief scene trying to calibrate the holodeck into giving him a relaxing afternoon in Hill’s universe without any thugs bursting through the door trying to machine-gun him to death is amusing. “More ambience, less substance,” Picard instructs the computer, but he might as well be describing the whole episode. Neither throughline – the Lwaxana story nor the Dixon Hill story – actually goes anywhere; when “Manhunt” reaches minute 37 or 38 or thereabouts, it’s pretty startling to realize that the screenwriters comprehensively failed to build the story towards a resolution. Sometimes I wonder if they even tried, or if the whole point was just to let both runners play, for as many one-liners as they could grab. For at least the first twenty minutes, I don’t mind.
Some miscellaneous notes:
Robert O’Reilly makes his first Star Trek appearance here as one of the holodeck goons, easily identified by his gigantic bug-eyes; he’d go on to play Gowron at length on both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
If you’re tracking Next Gen fashion design, the skin-tight leggings on Picard’s dress uniform are certainly noteworthy.
The Antideans are freakin’ ridiculous – and yeah yeah yeah, one of them is played by Mick Fleetwood – but you gotta love the way they dig into that shrimp.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season 2 is available now.