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Character Spotlight: Lwaxana Troi

By Ames

Lwaxana haters, see yourselves out (or stick around and see how wrong you are!), because A Star to Steer Her By loves our black-eyed Betazoid mama. She’s the daughter of the Fifth House, holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed, and also one of our favorite characters from The Next Generation!

Like Katharine Pulaski (whom we also stan with the best of them!), Lwaxana Troi is a character who gets way more hate than she deserves, who grew substantially every time she appeared on the show, and who has way more nuance than even some of the main characters we’ve discussed from the show so far! And that fashion sense? Holy cow. So pack your absurdly huge luggage, don your fluffiest wig, and meet up with us and Mr. Homn as we celebrate (and occasionally criticize) all things Lwaxana below and this week on the podcast (sashay over to 55:22 for the convo). We’re going on a manhunt!

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

Murderers! Assassins! While her first couple of appearances in TNG were fairly annoying, as you’ll see in our next section, the one thing Lwaxana gets emphatically right in “Manhunt” is figuring out the two Antedians the Enterprise was carrying are actually assassins. And she drops this information in the most nonchalant way possible, cementing her status as a major boss.

Release them and I will stay with you willingly Oh boy is “Ménage à Troi,” a tough episode to gauge. While it certainly has its lows (Lwaxana constantly crashing Deanna’s day, Ferengi shenanigans at their worst, and some sexual assault and implied rape swept under the rug), Mrs. Troi does put her daughter first and insists to Daimon Tog that Deanna and Will be released if she sacrifices herself like any mother would.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The other great scene that Lwaxana inspires in “Ménage à Troi,” is one we mentioned in our Picard Spotlight post, when she and JL work together to trick the Ferengi into releasing her. Even from across viewscreens, she compels the beautiful diatribe of Shakespearean poetry from Jean-Luc that ends up saving the summer’s day!

What does that little one do, Mister Woof? I don’t know why, but it always tickles me the couple of times on the show that Lwaxana calls our Klingon security head “Mr. Woof” as she does in “Half a Life” and others. Is she doing it just to evoke a reaction from him? Does she actually know his name at all? Regardless of the answer, it’s a cute joke that the writers play.

It is the custom for your loved ones to join you at this Resolution, is it not? Our fuller opinion of the character really started getting formed once the show reached “Half a Life” – one of our TNG faves – and we got a different look at this man-hungry helicopter parent. Suddenly, Lwaxana has nuance. She fights for people other than herself or her immediate family. She becomes vulnerable with Timicin, something we didn’t think possible from her character. And when she decides to go with him to his Resolution, it feels personal, complex, and complete.

A child who is trusted becomes worthy of that trust We gave Deanna some rightful criticism for thinking that writing up a contract between Worf and Alexander would be a good idea in “Cost of Living,” and Lwaxana waltzes in like a fairy godmother and throws that terrible idea in their faces! Immediately, she knows how to better parent Alexander than anyone else on the show ever had, low bar that that is.

You’re telling me you’re not going to be naked at your own wedding? It feels like such a triumph for Lwaxana to so brazenly show up naked to her wedding in “Cost of Living,” fully embracing her Betazoid heritage and throwing her strong will and individuality in Campio’s and his little toady’s faces. Now why she was engaged to that uptight twat in the first place is another story, but good for her anyway!

Whatever it is, we can face it together Here’s an actually good moment she shares with her daughter: That tear-jerking moment in “Dark Page.” It’s another instance in which we see Lwaxana as having more personality traits than we were led to believe she had as she comes to acknowledge the death of her daughter Kestra, and also we see Majel Barrett nailing some acting we’d never seen from her before.

Nobody’s ever seen me like this By the time we reach Deep Space Nine, the writers have figured out what to do with Lwaxana Troi to make her an impactful character. Sure, she’s still a great comic device, especially against rigid characters like Picard and Odo, but it’s in the way that she is humanized (or Betazoidized?) in scenes like the truly remarkable turbolift scene in “The Forsaken” that she really shines.

Then sway with me, Odo. Sway with me. While Lwaxana’s constant pestering of Picard gets tiring really quickly, her relationship with Odo proves something more interesting. In one of those Odd Couple kind of pairings, she’s able to get Odo to come out of his shell, even if it’s just a little bit, so when she gets him to dance with her in “Fascination,” it’s delightful and shows more layers to their respective characters.

Before I met her, my world was a much smaller place Okay, so the weird inspiration vampire side of the plot of “The Muse” may be idiotic, but the Lwaxana-Odo scenes are pure gold. Lwaxana and Odo, again, find each other to be the only people they can be vulnerable with, and Odo agrees to marry a very pregnant Lwaxana to get her out of an existing marriage, delivering the purest, most intimate and beautiful speech we’ve heard from him (until Kira, at least).

Strut your stuff on the catwalk Finally, we just have to give massive points to her remarkable fashion sense. One of our favorites is this blue number from “Fascination,” with the perfect wig to complement it and accessories like whoa. Make sure you check out our full screenshot assemblage that we put together previously to give fair credit to the excellent costuming of this iconic woman.

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Worst moments

Momzillas gone wild Mrs. Troi is not without her faults, however, and most are man-related. How much pressure she puts on her daughter to get married is more than uncomfortable, it can get downright offensive. When the arranged marriage she initiated between Deanna and Wyatt comes due in “Haven,” it’s clear that this momzilla doesn’t always have her daughter’s best interests in mind; just her own.

Use your mind, not your mouth We also found it just plain rude how much Lwaxana insisted on communicating with Deanna telepathically in “Haven” and other episodes. a) Deanna has made it clear she’d rather speak out loud, and b) Picard and other crewmembers can’t hear what’s being said and that’s impolite, especially coming from someone of such standing in the Federation.

Oh, Jean-Luc, what naughty thoughts It becomes a running gag for the first couple appearances of Lwaxana how much she makes sexual advances on Captain Picard, who is just trying to do his job most of the time. But “Manhunt” really takes the cake for just going overboard with presumptuous behavior unbecoming for a woman of her stature. Leave the poor guy alone!

Until death us do part Later in “Manhunt,” it’s even grosser for Mrs. Troi to declare that she and Riker are to be wed. Whatever physiological state she was in is no excuse for how she goes out of her way to mortify her daughter, to put the moves on Deanna’s imzadi without consent, and to make scene after scene all for romantic attention. Why Gene Roddenberry would make his wife act like this is beyond us.

No man has ever been such a mystery to me Lucky for the flesh-and-blood men that Lwaxana spends most of “Manhunt” sexually accosting, apparently she has no idea what a hologram is. I don’t know how, but she’s so horny that when she meets Rex the bartender, she’s so intrigued by her inability to read his mind that she doesn’t even realize it’s because he’s not a real person. We can just imagine how far it went before it dawned on her.

Oo-mox is only the beginning It’s only fitting that someone like Lwaxana Troi should be there for the introduction of oo-mox on the show, and one time was already too much. During “Ménage à Troi,” Lwaxana unknowingly performs what’s essentially a sex act on her captor, which is gross enough as it is, but we learn later in an episode of Deep Space Nine that she also slept with Daimon Tog, and I vomit in my mouth.

Swipe right! We learn in “Cost of Living” that Lwaxana has gotten engaged to Campio, whom she effectively met on a dating app and whom she has absolutely no chemistry with. It strikes us as entirely out of character that she’d accept marriage to someone who wouldn’t allow her to be who she intrinsically is just because he’s rich. Thank the Four Deities she found a way out of it!

My name is Mud While we gave Lwaxana credit for spending more time with Alexander and treating him better than Worf ever does, we have to admit that the jacuzzi scene in “Cost of Living” is off-putting. Sure, it’s the future and we know that in Betazoid culture, nudity is entirely normal, but we’re still not sure it’s something Alexander is accustomed to or had any ability to consent to and that’s weird.

The worst thing that can happen to any parent This is a complicated one because it’s so triggering. I’m not sure it would be fair to blame Lwaxana or anyone for the accident that befell Kestra as we learn in “Dark Page,” but it’s very clear that Lwaxana blames herself. This is truly the lowest her character had ever been, and it explains a few things about how she so tightly latches on to Deanna, but it is a bad, bad time for her.

Bad thoughts, they hurt her What’s more accurate to say about the events from “Dark Page” is that Lwaxana had handled her trauma in an ultimately poor way. By blocking those memories as evidently Betazoids do with triggering events, she never was able to mourn or accept the loss of Kestra, instead avoiding the memories entirely in a way that turned out to be harmful to her and not fair to her late daughter’s memory.

Does no one understand quarantine procedures? I’ll nitpick about it every time some disease breaks out in an episode and no one seems to understand you shouldn’t go around touching everyone around them. So when Lwaxana has Zanthi Fever in “Fascination” and suddenly her horniness becomes contagious, I’m doubly pissed off because it resulted in a really, really stupid premise for an episode.

What I’d mistaken for love was nothing more than a prison After we mentioned just now when Lwaxana leapt at the chance to marry Campio in “Cost of Living,” we see she’s made the same mistake with Jeyal in “The Muse,” except now there’s a baby involved. The most irritating facet of Lwaxana’s personality is how man-hungry she always seems to be. It always clouds her perception, making her make bad decision after bad decision, and worse: making her compromise who she is.

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Give it up for Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who could really do it all. Stick around next week for more kickass recurring characters on the Enterprise-D, and for our continued ride through the series Enterprise over on SoundCloud or wherever you podcast. You can also send us love notes over on Facebook and Twitter, but stop marrying every eligible dude you meet!

#star trek #star trek podcast #podcast #lwaxana troi #the next generation #deep space nine #haven #manhunt #menage a troi #half a life #cost of living #dark page #the forsaken #fascination #the muse #majel barrett

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