“Females do not deserve the honour of clothing.”
Let me begin by thanking “Ménage à Troi” for forcing me to look up the meaning of its title when I was thirteen, thereby introducing a whole new video game level to my masturbation fantasies as a teenager. Let me continue by averring that I flat-out fuckin’ love this episode. There are a few episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season that are unabashedly unafraid to have a bunch of foolish fun (“Deja Q,” “Hollow Pursuits”), and this one’s my favourite, even though on its merits alone it’s probably the thinnest (and most troublesome). I don’t care. It has the fizzy glee of a Shakespearean comedy performed in the park on a warm summer’s night. It’s my favourite Lwaxana episode of the whole run of the character. It’s also the best Will+Deanna=4EVR episode, like, ever. And if you don’t spend the last ten minutes of the show – from Picard spouting love poetry to snatch Lwaxana back from the grips of the Ferengi, to Wesley stepping onto the bridge in Starfleet red – grinning from ear to ear, you and I are not the same kind of fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
So: Will and Deanna go on vacation together, which – for the erstwhile lovers – apparently means wandering down their romantic memory lane for a bit of off-duty smooching and, presumably, a post-lunch snack. Deanna’s mom and a love-struck Ferengi intervene, and suddenly Will, Deanna and Lwaxana are captives aboard a Ferengi vessel headed into deep space. We’re introduced to several of the key concepts of the ongoing Ferengi mythology here, starting when Dr. Farek (Voyager’s Ethan Phillips) conveniently beams the ladies out of their clothing. (Can all transporters do that?) Ferengi don’t allow women to wear clothes, allowing for some queasy mom-daughter nudity that is not, strictly speaking, plot-required. Ferengi also apparently carry the tips of their pricks on their ears, which seems quite silly from an evolutionary perspective (one box to the ears and these guys would go down like recipients of the Delta Gamma sorority’s proverbial cunt-punt), but oo-mox is an idea that achieves serious legs over the run of Deep Space Nine and beyond. It’s basically a nice, G-rated way to show a Ferengi getting a hand job onscreen, and what an icky and wonderful thought that is. Oh alien species sex: you are never not fascinating.
Anyhoo. I guess the real question we need to ask ourselves is: does Lwaxana have unwilling sex with Daimon Tog? On a visual level the episode seems to suggest she does not; they’re both wearing more clothes after the cut, not less, and Lwaxana has lulled Tog into boredom and jealousy with talk of the ferocious sexual appetites of her previous lovers. Lwaxana’s later performance of oo-mox upon the Daimon makes me wonder if letting a foot fetishist give you a foot massage should be viewed as a sex act by both parties, or just the one who’s getting turned on. But there’s no denying that underneath the wallpaper of “Ménage à Troi,” there’s some weird sexual shit, and it really sticks. The episode is a rudimentary, but lasting, prototype of what we might call Ferengi 2.0, i.e. the conceptual rethink of the species that followed their disastrous introduction as serious villains at the beginning of Next Gen’s Season One. Everything that Deep Space Nine did with the species – as pitch-black comic caricatures of American male greed and misogyny – starts here.
On the other side of the galaxy, “Ménage à Troi” is also the Apotheosis of Wesley. In a lovely B-story, Wesley’s third or fourth attempt to leave the ship to finally fucking go to Starfleet Academy is derailed when Wesley once again saves the day, this time locating the Ferengi vessel carrying his captured friends. Picard promotes him to actual Ensign, and he gets a Starfleet uniform, and teenage me just about split his britches with pride and glee when Wes walked onto that bridge in his bright red big-boy clothes (accompanied by one of Ron Jones’ nicest, and largest, musical cues in the whole series).
The Apotheosis of Wesley makes me realize two things, however:
1) Why did they bother with this, only to have Wil Wheaton leave the series some ten episodes later? I love what happens in “Ménage à Troi,” but this also marks the beginning of Next Gen having no idea what to do next with the character. Which ends, as I’m sure you’ll recall, with Wesley becoming a Native American spirit walker. #Epicfail
2) It’s only in watching this episode now that I realize that the show had kind of given up on Wesley at this point anyway. Wesley’s last substantial episode was “Evolution,” all the way back at the start of the season. Wesley’s subplot in Season Two, where the young man was growing up on the show without his mother aboard but under the tutelage of everyone else, is not furthered in any significant way in Season Three; he pops up at various points in a functional capacity but isn’t given anything interesting to do. It’s too bad. For all the derision from elsewhere, Wesley meant a lot to me as a kid, but his best stuff is in the first two seasons, when he was ostensibly annoying the shit out of everyone but me. Oh well.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. We charge into Season Four next week.