By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of my favorite things about Star Trek is how low-key perverted it is. And the franchise comes by this honestly: Gene Roddenberry was one of the horniest creators to ever walk the planet, and he always had bonkers ideas to make his shows even freakier than they already were. For instance, this is the same guy who had to be talked out of giving Deanna Troi three boobs, and he really wanted to make sure we knew Ferengi had huge pricks. But the weirdness didn’t stop there: when it came to The Next Generation’s sexiest episode, he tried to add a special scene where Riker ate a penis-shaped fruit!
This strange tale begins with “Ménage à Trois,” a Season 3 TNG episode that features (what else?) both Deanna Troi and her mother, Lwaxana. When Riker and Deanna take a brief shore leave to the planet Betazed, their romantic vacay is ruined by a conniving Ferengi. Eventually, he kidnaps these two Enterprise officers and Lwaxana, and Picard saves the day in a most unconventional way: by threatening to blow the Ferengi ship up while he quotes plenty of Shakespeare and just a dash of Tennyson.
She Likes What He’s Packing
By Star Trek standards, “Ménage à Trois” is a pretty seductive episode. After all, the title winkingly refers to having a threesome, and this episode introduces the uncomfortable fact that the Ferengi get off on having their ears rubbed. Plus, this is yet another episode where Lwaxana Troi is guided by her insanely horny desire to jump Picard’s bones. Throw in a romantic side quest to Betazed (the planet so sexually liberated that nobody wears clothes to a wedding), and you have the perfect recipe for some sexual deviance. However, Gene Roddenberry decided this tale needed one more ingredient: penis.
Metaphorical penis, that is. On the special features for the TNG Season 3 Blu-Ray set, writer (and future Battlestar Galactica showrunner) Ronald D. Moore recalled something hilariously weird. Back in the day, it was very common for Roddenberry to rewrite episodes, adding his own personal touch to whatever ended up onscreen. For this episode’s picnic scene, Moore claimed that the Star Trek creator added a scene where “Mrs. Troi reaches into the picnic basket and brings out an oskoid, which is a long cylindrical piece of fruit with veins going down the side, and offers it to Riker to take a bite.”
Feeling A Little Fruity
That’s right, folks: Roddenberry took one look at an episode already full of wacky sexual innuendoes and decided it wasn’t complete without Troi trying to make Riker put a d*ck-shaped fruit in his mouth. Like, there’s no mistaking this thing as a symbolic penis; Roddenberry wanted it to have veins, for God’s sake! Obviously, this bit of insanity never made it onscreen. Apparently, this was pretty common. In the earlier episode “Captain’s Holiday,” Roddenberry pushed for the natives of Risa to engage in orgiastic, largely same-sex coupling in the background of key scenes. However, Rick Berman knew Roddenberry would be happy as long as Picard got laid.
With that being said, it’s kind of insane to think about what nearly ended up onscreen in “Ménage à Trois.” Everybody has seen the infamous screenshots of Captain Kirk holding what looks to be a rock-shaped penis. That’s embarrassing enough…how much worse would it be if we had crystal-clear screenshots of Riker looking like he’s about to deep-throat an edible d*ck? Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and Riker didn’t have to introduce the Ferengi to a weapon far more powerful than a Type X phaser: the Gawk Gawk 9000.
