That makes it a very good environmentalist plot (that is, good at portraying the “take no chances” overreaction that too many environmentalists have whenever their pet protection project is involved).

Exactly: as with the Preachy McPreacherson episode “Outcast” from season 5, the episode ends up inadvertently teaching a very different lesson from the one its writers (or Gene Roddenberry himself, anyway) probably intended by leaving some of us saying “Uh, it looks to me like the ‘bad guys’ here are right.”

Man, we thought that the episode in which a handful of characters were age-regressed to puberty opened an un-dealt-with can of worms, in that it casually passed over them accidentally having discovered the Fountain of Youth through a simple transporter accident. Here, we reveal that technology exists/existed in Noonian Soong’s jungle planet hideaway where Data met him before he died, which could transfer one’s effective consciousness into an immortal android body. And no one in the crew even raises an eyebrow at it?

Yeah, it’s another one of those episodes that would have made the whole plot of Star Trek: Insurrection completely unnecessary… if it didn’t also bring up the old when-you’re-transported-is-that-really-you-or-just-a-copy-of-you can of worms the same way that “Second Chances” episode back in season 6 inadvertently did. When it comes to “transferring consciousness” in order to get a fountain of youth, I’d sooner take my chances with “regenerative transportation” into a younger version of my own body as discovered in that “Rascals” episode than risk being replaced and deleted; the Star Trek franchise writers at least occasionally hand-wave that whole question about the transporter by saying it uses a “matter stream” which truly transfers your consciousness rather than replacing and deleting you like a computer file being transferred between hard drives.

But then the challenge would have been not to make it yet another iteration of It’s a Wonderful Life (especially when Picard just had one of those the previous season).

Here again, as with many other episodes, it also (probably) would have cost too much money to make it that way. That’s one advantage books still have over television and movies: they operate with an essentially unlimited budget.