Lwaxana Troi was introduced in The Next Generation as, essentially, Auntie Mame in Space with a slight hint of The Golden Girls: a flamboyant, exuberant, assertive presence in an environment that could use the occasional splash of color, whose presence would shift the tone of an episode toward the comedic, typically through her overt sexuality. “The Forsaken,” of course, introduces the character of Lwaxana Troi to Deep Space Nine. “ Q-Less” is an instructive example of a possible endpoint for such a view: a vision of DS9 as a dry, limp affair, its own characters mostly reduced to background players supporting guest stars from the more popular, well-established series. “Make the show more TNG-like,” as Ira Steven Behr recalls the corporate directive. By 1993 the Star Trek franchise had long since been recognized as a lucrative cash cow for Paramount Pictures (a Gulf+Western company), and so as much as Deep Space Nine was set up with the intention of developing a bold new identity for itself, cautious impulses have intruded at times over the course of the first season. There tends to be a tension in popular media franchises between the impulse to take long-standing, well-established properties and do new things with them, and a more conservative impulse, one that becomes fiercely protective of the sacred cash cow.
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May 2023
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