YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S2E4 "The Outrageous Okona"

• Base-Breaking Character: Okona, big-time. To many, he's one of the most hated one-time Star Trek characters of all time, with the script's claims that he is a dashing ladies' man and Lovable Rogue who lives his life as he wishes (in other words, a Captain Ersatz version of Han Solo), not translating very well to screen, where he can come across as an obnoxious Slimeball. For others, however, Billy Campbell's natural charm and the fact that Okona does eventually drop his Casanova Wannabe act and shows himself to be a relatively decent guy when the situation gets serious is enough to make Okona at least a tolerable character. Notably, Okona went on to cameo (as a DJ!) in an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks and then a more substantial appearance in two episodes of Star Trek: Prodigy.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During Data's comedy routine, there is a scene where Guinan asks the comic "And you made a living doing this?" Modern viewers cannot help but feel a little bit of pity for Joe Piscopo, considering the imminent collapse of his career.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • These days, having Joe Piscopo play the greatest comedian in history seems like it's supposed to be a joke in itself, given that Piscopo's career famously tanked shortly after his appearance. It's doubly ironic given he does a Jerry Lewis impression given that Lewis is much more likely to fill that role. It's triply ironic given that Whoopi Goldberg, an EGOT winner, also appears in the episode.
  • Worf's baffled delivery of the word "lasers" makes him sound like Dr. Evil.
  • Wesley tells Okona that he couldn't be like him, saying "it would be difficult for me to be leaving all the time. I'd miss my friends, the people I love. I guess leaving's gotten easy for you." Two seasons later, Wesley would be leaving all the time.
• Ho Yay: More than one viewer has commented that Wesley's reaction to Okona seems less like hero-worship, and more like attraction.
• Humor Dissonance:
  • The jokes that Data doesn't think are funny, which everyone else insists are, range from just stupid ("You're a droid and I'm annoyed") to so obtuse it's impossible to figure them out ("Flying birds have no mass"). Meanwhile, Data's attempts at jokes where other characters claim he butchered the delivery are actually pretty funny by this episode's standards. The best punchlines in the episode are Data's Deadpan Snarker reactions to people insisting their lame jokes are funny.
  • Similarly, Okona's purported outrageousness depends a lot on whether you find his devil-may-care ways amusing, and not the antics of a tiresome jackass.
• Memetic Mutation: Worf and Picard's stark dismissal of the laser weapons mounted by a pair of spaceships little larger than NASA's Space Shuttle is sometimes taken as an assertion that no laser weapons regardless of power can hurt a Federation ship with its shields up among some part of the fan base.^note Picard notes more precisely that they "won't even get through our navigational deflectors." The navigational deflector is a low-power shield constantly surrounding the ship, meant to ward off damage from things like cosmic dust, radiation, and the occasional small asteroid. That the navigational deflector is considered sufficient to ward off those weapons is less a boast of its power and more just saying the weapon itself is too underpowered to do more than scratch their paint. The fact that the very next episode included as an important plot point the fact that entering a region where hostile ships were actively doing battle with laser weapons was seen as dangerous is conveniently ignored (as is the Borg's use of lasers in the same season's "Q Who?", 8 episodes previous).
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The transporter chief who Okana starts flirting with after being beamed up? That's Teri Hatcher.
  • Okona himself is Bill Campbell, less than 3 years before starring in The Rocketeer.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A Han Solo-style pilot comes on board the notoriously dull season 2 Enterprise, has sex with 1980s Teri Hatcher, teaches Data about humanity, nearly starts an interplanetary war, and at the end has to come to terms with his responsibilities... completely ruined by some of the flattest and cheesiest jokes of the entire franchise.
  • Data learning humor seems like a perfect storyline for his character. Shame all we got was an episode where the jokes weren't just unfunny, they were straight-up incomprehensible. It gets to the point where you start to wonder if there's something seriously wrong with the rest of the crew the way they explain how jokes work.
• Unintentional Period Piece: "Tip O'Neil in a dress." Plus the fact that Joe Piscopo is considered the epitome of funny dates the episode to the late '80s.

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