(It isn’t until years later on DS9 that Starfleet’s covert ops arm becomes canon, but even so, you gotta assume that there’s someone better for this mission than the captain of the Federation’s flagship — or at the very least, someone better to accompany him than the not-terribly-physical Chief Medical Officer.)

Yep; as ever, Star Trek has all the senior officers doing the jobs that real command structures always assign to the lowly underlings.

The other great part of this two-parter is the case study of Bad Command in Captain Jellico, Picard’s temporary replacement, who manages to alienate everyone under him by not trusting them to be competent at their jobs.

As most fans agree, the one thing he did do right was finally getting Troi to put on a proper officer’s uniform: oddly enough, once she covered up her cleavage, she started looking way hotter even as we started respecting her personality a little more.

But hey, we have Moriarty, an entirely holodeck-based sentient being, interacting with Barclay, the most holodeck-involved member of the crew, so that’s fun.

We also have everybody leaning hard on that fourth wall in talking about how their entire universe might just be a simulation running in a little box sitting on someone’s table somewhere; I loved that little bit at the end with Barclay telling the computer to end the program and then heaving a little a sigh of relief when nothing happens… and then the screen blacking out and going to the credits.

Of course, TNG taking so long to have a follow-up to that earlier episode, like so much else that doesn’t otherwise make sense in television shows, was due to a real-life licensing dispute that took several years of negotiations to resolve. If we were in a simulated world, what would give it away would be stuff like that happening in our world: “Well, we can’t ever have anybody in these stories mentioning Donald Trump is still President until we finish negotiating the licensing fees for that character with the Douglas Adams Estate… so, until we do, just have everybody forget about that for a while.” “Forget that he’s supposed to be running the whole friggin’ country during our ‘nationwide pandemic’ arc? How’s that supposed to work?” “I don’t know; make something up! That’s what we pay you scribblers to do! Besides, it’s only television!”