“Well that’s a conversation-stopper if I ever heard one.”
This aimless little ditty appeals to me precisely because it’s so far off the beaten track. It’s the fifth season’s annual Lwaxana episode, and it’s about… the importance of having a good time? On paper it’s an absolutely awful idea for an episode, but against all odds, it largely works. The lion’s share of the credit, once again, goes to Majel Barrett. These latter appearances for Lwaxana on Next Gen were surprisingly complex from her standpoint; at precisely the moment that the character was within striking distance of becoming a one-note joke (“Menage a Troi,” I guess), the writers turned into the wind and actually started writing Mrs. Troi as a richly-realized mature woman. Which, then as now, is somewhat of a rarity on television.
Here’s the thing: “Cost of Living” reads pretty weird from our contemporary perspective. Lwaxana befriends Alexander (of all of Alexander’s episodes, this is probably my favourite) while Alexander, Deanna, and Worf are trying to work on the concept of responsibility within Alexander’s family. Lwaxana, of course, takes Alexander away and tries to enforce the value of free-spiritedness instead. To do this, she takes him to the holodeck to play around in a kind of artists’ commune of the future, where various Cirque du Soleil members caper around in leotards and do some low-rent humour. And then everyone gets naked.
I’m halfway to being a nudist myself, so I really do want to support Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early conviction that by the 24th century, the human race would be well beyond our primitive notions of body consciousness. The problem, though, is that after the series’ first season (the one that Gene Roddenberry most directly oversaw), any text or subtext about the Federation’s liberal attitudes towards sexuality were mostly bled out of the show. So by the time they pop up again in “Cost of Living,” they seem kinda hinky. We have a sixty-year-old woman hopping naked into a mud bath with a 9-year-old boy she’s just met… and then “the entertainment” shows up, and with that alien dancer wearing only body paint and glitter, we get Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first fully-nude ass shot – and right into the camera, too. Whatever else was going on, the day they shot that must have been the best day of Brian Bonsall’s life.
But I’m always a fan of any episode that does away with Next Gen’s various pretensions towards action-adventure and tells a different kind of story. It’s refreshing, especially in as draggy a year as Season Five. In terms of tacked-on B-plots, “Cost of Living” has the most transparently useless so far: cosmic dust infects the Enterprise and starts melting her internal systems. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Lwaxana story, and if the A-plot has a flaw, it’s that the space dust crisis never influences Lwaxana or Alexander’s story, and we never see either character arrive at their moments of catharsis. We do, however, see Lwaxana pop up at her wedding naked. By Alexander’s grin, we can assume it was quite a view.
It occurred to me while watching “Cost of Living” this time that this would have been the first episode Majel Barrett shot following the death of her husband, Gene Roddenberry. This adds even more thumping emotional weight to Lwaxana’s speech about being old, lonely, and frightened – and looking ever more desperately for a companion with whom to spend her remaining years.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.