If it’s remembered at all, it’s because it introduced actor Robert Duncan McNeill to the Star Trek universe (his character “Tom Paris” on Voyager was pretty much the same character he plays here under a different name).

Yeah; Voyager‘s creators came up with all kinds of excuses for why they didn’t just bring him back as Nicholas Locarno again, but when you follow the money, the real reason they made him Tom Paris instead was probably so that they wouldn’t have to keep paying Ronald D. Moore and Naren Shankar (who wrote this episode) royalties for every single episode where he occurred as a regular character… which was going to be pretty much all of them.

What was I just saying? Once a season, whether we need ’em or not? Lwaxana Troi invited herself onto the Enterprise.

Also, as Max Bialystock tells Leo Bloom in the 2005 movie version of The Producers, “there’s always a part for the [boss]’s girlfriend.” Majel Barett’s being Gene Roddenberry’s wife certainly did great things for her career, although I think Lwaxana Troi was also deliberately written to be a thoroughly annoying character so the writers could bring her in for some “light-hearted” conflict whenever Roddenberry complained that their darker story ideas were ruining his utopian vision of the future. On Deep Space Nine, she pretty much continued to do everything she did here, apologizing at the beginning of one episode that she shouldn’t have given little Molly O’Brien so much candy (which gave the kid an upset stomach and caused her to puke all over her father), and then cheerfully pestering Odo with amorous advances the same as she used to do to Picard.

When Professor X and Jean Grey… Wait, that can’t be right. [checks notes] Oh, that’s Captain Picard and an empathic metamorph played by Famke Jannsen.

Fun fact: long before Patrick Stewart got picked to play Professor X in the movies, the famous comic book artist Alex Ross used him as his model for Professor X in Kurt Busiek’s Marvels. Also, since Marvel and Paramount have had some dealings with each other in the past, there have actually been comic book crossovers between Star Trek and X-Men characters. So… character played by Patrick Stewart, meet another character played by Patrick Stewart!

“Picard’s falling in love with her, isn’t he? This is going to be tragic, isn’t it? WHY DOES PICARD ALWAYS HAVE TO HAVE TRAGIC LOVE STORIES?” (“Because if they weren’t tragic, there’d suddenly be another member of the cast,” was my reply.)

That’s kinda like the real-life explanation for the ending of “Rascals” in the sixth season; “Why doesn’t young Picard just stay young and keep his hair?” “Well, because then they’d have to fire Patrick Stewart and hire David Birkin, and do you have any idea how restrictive union rules and child labor laws are about adolescent actors?”