FULL DISCUSSION - Star Trek TNG S3E24 - Ménage à Troi

Honoured to have gotten my first take-read. And Josh, you sounded the name out and got much closer than most others ever had. Should it ever come up for a future take-read - “tray-oll-fee-ah”, similar to “trail-fear” when said at ‘normal pace’

Rad Bradberry is rad!

That's funny. The scenes where you thought Lwaxanna was normal and mature are the scenes where I see her as insufferably narcissistic. I think she's normal and mature once she's on the Ferengi ship and is doing what she can to help get them all out of there. In those scenes, she's putting her daughter before herself, but in the beginning with the demeaning "when are you going to get married?" thing, she is absolutely putting herself before her daughter. In those scenes, Lwaxanna is doing what narcissists do. She doesn't care about the kind of life that Deanna chooses and wants for herself, unless it's the same exact choices that Lwaxanna would make for herself. Getting married and having a family is what Lwaxanna wants for herself. It's not what Deanna wants. And again, in narcissist fashion, Lwaxanna seems to think that no one can be happy unless they make the same exact life choices as her. This is a form of validating their own life choices because secretly, maybe they feel insecure about the decisions they made or life they chose. It's also a way of living their life through another person if they are unable to get what they really want for themselves through manipulation, control, and self-projection. Trying to impose your values and choices onto someone else with no regard for what their actual wants and needs are is absolutely disrespecting their autonomy, and Deanna was absolutely in the right to tell her to fuck off. What sets Lwaxanna apart from a narcissist though is I believe Lwaxanna was doing all of this from a place of ignorance, and maybe a little insecurity, but definitely not from a place of malicious intent. Although she is still pretty manipulative and controlling over it She actually thinks she is helping Deanna, but she is actually imposing and self projecting onto her while disrespecting her autonomy. Again, I really wish this episode ended with some sort of resolution between the two where Lwaxanna finally sees the error of her ways and Troi gives Lwaxanna a little validation. That would have also made all of those scenes have some purpose in this episode. But sadly, it was never addressed. And I can't really blame Lwaxanna or the writers for this because this attitude was unfortunately very common amoung a lot of parents at the time, so it felt normalized. Sadly, a lot of people still haven't learned how to recognize this and are still doing it to their own children, continuing the cycle, but there are cycle breakers.

I’m sure others have commented, but the uniform color has nothing to do with rank. It has to do with division and department.

I don't know, I feel like the relationship with Troi and Riker in this episode doesn't match up with what we've seen so far. Like a new writer didn't understand the series well enough. To me at least this far in the series, they're good friends still, but kind of know they belong together in some way. I suppose the vagueness could be because "it's '90s TV", as Josh suggests, but I don't buy it.

Uniform color explanation! In both series (tos and tng), blue is for the sciences (including medical). TNG: Red is for Command/Conn, Gold is for Operations (Engineering and Tactical). TOS: the colors are flipped; Red is for operations and gold is for command/conn. Hope that helps.

I've always believed that the writers and producers were caught between creating an interesting, thought-provoking show for adults, and a fun, engaging show for kids. It's like some studio head walks onto the set in the middle of a scene and says, " Hold on! My 10-year-old won't understand that line! Make her say it again, but louder!" I think some shows are able to appeal successfully to both kids and adults, but many of TNG's worst episodes are examples of the writers failing to do just that.

I have always had an affection for the sillier Star Trek episodes. Mainly because when I was younger, my mom used to watch the series and these were more of the episodes I was allowed to watch. I always liked the Sci-fi, but I was a dumb kid so the goofy episodes made me smile and I just associate them now with watching Star Trek with my mother. So I definitely have some bias there. And no I don't know why my mom let me watch this episode lmao

Great news, A&J, thanks to you reading my patron take, I just got my promotion to full DaiMon ..... Now who gets the chairs?

At 11:25, Josh I think you have gotten a mistaken impression of the Ferengi attitude towards women. They don't despise women per se (Ferengi women), they simply treat them a little worse than we treated women in the past. They look down on them as lesser. They have no voice in society, They aren't allowed to own property, etc. And most importantly, they are not allowed to wear clothing. So the Ethan Phillips Ferengi DID find Lwaxana repulsive because she was human-looking, not just because she was female. But he did get pissed when Damon Tog allowed the girls to drape themselves in those blankets. I think Damon Tog is a swinger at heart. Very open to new and "exotic" things. Actually, you could probably consider Tog to be a fairly decent fellow overall...for a Ferengi I mean. I thought his performance gave a bit of nuance to the culture that has been previously lacking. Although they made it pretty clear that even his own people consider him to be a bit of an oddball.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but after watching this episode again as a grown up with some bad experiences with unwanted attentions, this episode resonated with me more. Maybe when it was aired and within that culture, it gave some perspective to young boys and girls that how an unwanted attention could feel like. This episode wan ever part of my rewatch list so it was nice to revisit it with you guys.

Basically from TOS red and yellow switch. So blue is science, medical, yellow is enginneer, securitiy, red is more ganeralizd includes command and navigation. Different paths. People move from yellw to red but blue usually stays blue.

"oh my god we're set" lmao

Wow, really thought someone would have commented about the uniform colors by now

They originally wanted to put Data in a blue uniform, but just felt it didn't look good. So they decided to put him in a gold one and make his title Operations Officer.

The uniform colors have nothing to do with rank (degree of authority). They have to do with department (job track). In the Original series it’s: Yellow/green - Command track - so people in charge of ships, administration, people who steer ships (helm and navigation) Red - Ship’s services/operations - things like engineering, communications, and security Blue - sciences and medical In Next Gen, just swap yellow and red. What might be confusing you is that Data wears yellow. He is actually head of Operations, so he wears the same color as security (Worf) and engineering (Geordi). But because he is an android and does a lot of things well, they often have him do things that Spock would have done as science officer. There’s no separate science officer shown on the show, but if there had been, that person would be in blue.

Where dat Contact at bro? What that mouf do?

I was trying to make it as subtle as I could, but I guess Josh is just too classy a guy for his brain to go there right away ;)

A lot of opinions about my boss’s episode. Anyway, I think this episode, despite its flaws, still gives us a lot of great character moments. Riker and Troi, Picard’s speech, Wesley’s promotion. My recommendation for how to watch Ménage a Troi.. turn off your mind and let Lwaxana’s antics flow through your body like the warm sap from an Oskoid.

Rad Bradberry, famed author of The Coool Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit Awesome.

They switched red and yellow in TNG. Starfleet wanted the doomed officer's blood and guts to show up better on television.

Did you guys know that Majel Barrett also voices the ship's computer? It's true!

The Door shot. It's actually funny as Robert Legato is the alternating SFX director of the show. And in my opinion the better of the two (Dan Curry is solid, but his work lacks the crispness of and full color palette that Legato uses). Legato knows they can do that shot, because he's been on the set walking directors through all the shots were sfx compositing has to be used to accomplish it. But realistically here, he would just be opening into a corridor that Wesley would then walk to the Transporter room. Now a nice long tracking shot of that would be cool, but since Wesley plot is absolutely the B plot, they generally wouldn't go to that extreme for something that isn't actually going to happen. If Wesley was in truth leaving, they might actually give that shot more weight. Legato is a very talented SFX producer, probably most famous for being in charge of Titanic and Apollo 13.

We did it, we've FINALLY reached one of the 6 episodes better than The Defector

lol at the preview "captured by the evvvvallllllll ferrrennnngaaaay"

this was an episode

Command is red, engineering is gold, and science is blue.

17:50 Good point, Josh.

9:22 I always took the "iron jaw" line as a commentary that the Ferengi can bite, and bite hard.

Red is command, blue science & medical and yellow operations (engineering, security etc.) in TNG, so the helm officer wears red. I've seen it claimed they swapped the red & yellow from TOS because Stewart & Frakes looked better in red. Also they made Data Ops Officer rather than science like Spock because the blue uniform clashed horribly with the gold make-up.

Well the ferengi women do not wear clothes on their planet

I think Steward just got into the spirit of the episode and made his performance more hammy throughout. Were the outdoor scenes shot in the same place as the Justice episode in season 1?

The ending is the only thing that keeps this episode from being forgettable. At least we got a good meme out of it.

“I don’t think there will ever be a Lwaxana episode that will be a Sarek or The Bonding…” 😏

I like that Riker and Troi are like this as it keeps options open for plots with guest characters, same goes for Picard and Beverley who have always had a certain frisson of attraction and closeness.

WOW I agree with you! Some minor fun bits, but the writing seems all over the show. Not exactly one we would watch on repeat. I dont hate it, I dont love it, its just..well, yeah ok next..

The uniform colors are based on department, not rank. Ops/Security/Engineering are gold/mustard. Science/Medical are blue and Command is red.

In TNG red is for command which is Wesley’s career path. Command includes piloting starships. Gold is for starship operations, including security and engineering. Blue is for medical and sciences plus some more niche positions like historians or researchers for specific projects. What’s strange is that Riker is really in charge of operations, specifically personnel assignments, with input from Troi, as we saw in the Barclay episode - so why isn’t he in gold?