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

• Alan Smithee: The episode was originally pitched and written by Tracey Tormé. Maurice Hurley did a major rewrite on it, which Tormé felt hurt the episode so much that he used "Keith Mills" as a pseudonym. This would not be the last time that Tormé would object in such a way to a Hurley rewrite.
• Creator Backlash: Tracy Torme wasn't happy with how the episode turned out:
  I've completely disowned the piece. I suppose skeletally it's my story, but when I started to reread the rewrite, I got ten pages through it and I got sort of a cold chill and had to put it down. An interesting thing is that the cast, the crew and even secretaries went out of their way to tell me how much they liked my draft, and they asked me in a totally puzzled manner, what on Earth had happened and why we had changed it. All I could do was shrug. Of course this is all my opinion, and you'd probably hear something different from the other side...I felt like a lot of the comedy was taken out. A lot of the surrealism was taken out. I feel that it's very heavy-handed now, and it's gone from being a strange episode to being a stupid episode.
• Recycled Script: An android breaking the bank by reshaping crooked dice in his hand was first featured in the Gene Roddenberry TV Movie (and failed Pilot) The Questor Tapes.
• Science Marches On: Several aspects of the story. Picard gives a Hand Wave to the multiple plot holes by comparing them to Fermat's Last Theorem, as a puzzle which is still unsolved. Except it actually was solved by Andrew Wiles in 1995 (albeit in a way that Fermat himself certainly did not intend), and in response, the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Facets" referenced how there are still attempts being made to find a better solution.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the original script, the astronaut survivor was the last of a crew of seven to die. His image was kept alive in the fantasy setting to be entertained by the Enterprise crew. In the end, a dead away team crew woman remains to keep the astronaut company, similar to "The Cage". At one point in this version, Doctor Pulaski was to have said, "I'm a doctor, not a magician."
  • In the original script, when summarizing the novel's content, Data also gives a review: "The writing is elementary, the plotting predictable, the characters one-dimensional."
• Working Title: The Blue Moon Hotel.

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