YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S2E12 "The Royale"

• Dramatically Missing the Point: Several fans and critics lambasted the hotel actors' acting as poor and shallow, seemingly missing the point that it was supposed to be; the entire hotel cast/situation Riker and company find themselves in was badly-written In-Universe.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • We see Picard sitting at his computer console studying Fermat's Last Theorem, and he briefly waxes philosophical to Riker that after 800 years and after all their advancements, no one had managed to prove it. Apparently nobody told him that Andrew Wiles figured it out in 1995.
  • The crew recovers a piece of the space shuttle Charybdis bearing NASA's "worm" logotype. They would retire it in 1992...only to bring it back as a secondary logo in 2020.
  • "Mickey D" later became the Totally Radical nickname for McDonald's that it coined for itself.
• Narm: The characters being trapped in the hotel by the door out leading right back in is blatantly just the actors walking all the way around in the revolving door, which comes off less like they're trapped and more like they're just too stupid to use it.
• Narm Charm: Data really getting into the role of a hotshot gambler.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Picard refers to Fermat's Last Theorem as having been unsolved for over 800 years. Whoops.
  • Debris from a NASA spacecraft, which according to this episode took part in a mission in the mid 21st century, are beamed aboard the Enterprise. However, the NASA "Worm logo"◊ seen on the debris was actually reverted to the previous "Meatball logo" in 1992. This now falls into a weird subversion now, as NASA has re-instated the "Worm" for manned missions beginning in 2020.
  • The Royale sets, costumes, and hairstyles — probably intended to create a slightly retro ambience for the audience in 1989 — will strike 21st-century viewers as palpably, undeniably, almost overwhelmingly the look of the 1980s.

---