Synopsis:  Riker, who fails to take caution with the revolving door, gets his away team stuck in a casino hotel until Data learns how to rig the craps table.

Memory Alpha Summary:  Mama needs a new pair of shoes!

Review: There are many cool things in this episode.  Beaming up the NASA debris.  The eeriness of the revolving door.  Finding the diary of a petrified astronaut.  Discovering they are living out a poorly written pulp novel.  The problem lies is that there is little tension, as the away team is never in any real danger.  And watching actors intentionally act poorly isn’t as fun to watch as one would think.  Still, it’s fun, so I’m game.

It is amusing, now that we’re over twenty years out from this episode, how many simple predictions were proven wrong so quickly.  NASA changed their logo like two minutes after this episode aired.  It is also mentioned how NASA made their 3^rd attempt at travelling outside our solar system in 2037.  Given that the space shuttle program has recently been discontinued, I seriously doubt this will come anywhere near true.  Of course, when this episode aired, we were supposed to be only a decade away from colonizing Mars.  Finally, Fermat’s Theorem was solved seven years after Picard tells us that it was still unsolved.

Perhaps more annoying is that Data tries to give blackjack advice to the stupid girl, and he is completely and utterly wrong.  “The odds favor standing pat,” he says.  The girl has hard 13 and the dealer has a king.  The odds actually favor hitting in this case.  However, I got myself a look at the original script, which has the dealer showing a five.  If that were the case, Data would be right.

Tracy Torme, who was responsible for three of the best episodes in season one (none of which have appeared on the countdown yet), quit after lead writer Michael Hurley tore this script to shreds, eventually leading Torme to quit the show.  I wonder what could have been had he stayed, though I didn’t particularly like The Schizoid Man, so perhaps it wouldn’t have been all gold.