10 Most Hated Star Trek: The Next Generation Episodes

On the eve of her wedding, Lwaxana Troi comes aboard the Enterprise and interferes with Deanna and Worf's attempts to teach his brat son Alexander discipline.

Pairing two of TNG’s most annoying recurring guests, Lwaxana and Alexander, and having them explore one of the show’s worst holodeck programs, a kind of intergalactic circus, is a recipe for catastrophe. Lwaxana acts like a crazy aunt encouraging Alexander to disobey authority and just have fun even exposing him to a striptease-like dancer, while Alexander is rude and whiny making us want to slap him. They are intentionally irritating but with no likeable characters to provide a balance, they become a burden to watch.

Meanwhile, poor Worf is thoroughly disrespected with the episode making a mockery of his attempts to teach his son boundaries. He is constantly undermined by Lwaxana who makes light of his lessons encouraging the young boy not to take his father seriously all culminating in a mud bath that scrapes away Worf’s last ounce of dignity.

The main drama is whether free spirit Lwaxana will settle for her stiff fiance or stay single and liberated. That she agreed to marry him sight unseen in the first place feels out of character. She does realize their marriage is doomed from the start, but instead of communicating this to him, she makes a spectacle of herself sabotaging the wedding by marching naked to the altar. The music and bemused looks of the crew frame it like some heroic moment rather than the horror show that it is.

There is also a perfunctory metal parasite slowly eating away at the ship which is treated as an afterthought for most of the episode before rapidly escalating in the last act into a race against time to save the Enterprise from being destroyed. It’s hard to suddenly care about this subplot when it was given zero importance in the first half.

Ultimately, Cost of Living doesn’t succeed as a drama, comedy, or sci fi disaster making it not worth the cost of watching.