...back... when...? The 24th century? Holodeck? Time travel? Oh, I've gone all crosseyed.

Fake reality made for a stranded astronaut by well-meaning aliens who only had a bad novel to use as a guide.

When you put it like that, the plot sounds kind of stupid.

This episode makes it clear that one should always traverse the far reaches of space with a large library erotic fiction that hits on every single one of your kinks as opposed to one shitty pulp fiction novel.

Best part of the episode is that to save his crew, Picard is forced to read the terrible novel from cover to cover.

The book's first sentence is "It was a dark and stormy night." The captain radiates disgust as he reads the line.

This is one of the only episodes I still have vivid memories of, yet hardly any of it took place in outer space.

This is how I remember Star Trek. Not aliens or starships or strange new worlds, but a beardo and an android playing craps with a cowboy.

I remember Deep Space Nine as "Tits With a Funny Nose".

I liked the other version of this episode that came in a later season. I'm not going to spoil it by saying anything more other than that it involved holodecks and Romulans.

My dad was a Star Trek fanatic growing up, so I've probably seen all the episodes of the original series a few times over, but have only seen, like, three episodes since becoming a teenager. As a result, I only have a foggy, zeitgeist-like recolection of the show: I remember general feelings and trends of it without remembering any real specifics. One of the most forceful trends I remember from the show was everyone dressing up in fedoras and brandishing tommy guns while they fight Al Capone. I'm under the impression that made up no less than 10% of the whole show.

So, when this show rolled around and it did all the same stupid holodeck present/past-time episodes, I would usually get really irritated (even more irritated than the everyone-is-a-kindergarden-teacher way people that weren't Patrick Stewart acted). They took the most retarded part of the original series (a true distinction if there ever was one) and expected people to take it seriously. Every stupid holodeck/timetravel adventure should have been about killing Hitler or bumbling into sparking the French revolution.