Trivia / Star Trek: The Next Generation S2E3 "Elementary, Dear Data"

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Brent Spiner's admitted playing Sherlock Holmes was a longtime dream role for him.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: LeVar Burton picked this as his favorite TNG episode, along with "Hollow Pursuits" and this episode's follow-up, "Ship In A Bottle".
• Fake Brit: Daniel Davis, who plays Moriarty, is actually from Arkansas. His accent is so spotless that when he later played Niles on The Nanny, some British viewers wrote that he should help costar Charles Shaughnessy (an actual Brit) with his English accent.
• First Appearance: Daniel Davis as the holographic Professor Moriarty.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The episode was written under the assumption that the Sherlock Holmes character was in the public domain. In reality, only some aspects of Holmes were at the time. Other aspects weren't, and the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was especially aggressive in suing adaptations to argue that the works contain aspects of the character that are their intellectual property. After the episode aired, the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle indeed sued the show, and the resulting negotiations are what led the follow-up episode, "Ship in a Bottle", to be delayed for several years.
• What Could Have Been: In the original script, the only thing keeping Moriarty from leaving the holodeck is another safeguard, which Picard recognizes has already been circumvented as soon as he sees the (holographic) drawing of the Enterprise. He's simply lying to Moriarty when he claims that it's impossible for him to leave. The final scene with The Summation of this was dropped because Gene Roddenberry thought it portrayed Picard as too deceitful, and how Data takes the drawing off the holodeck is left unexplained in the episode, though The Next Generation Technical Manual says that the holodeck will replicate things that the computer expects to leave the holodeck in some fashion, be it food, liquids, or props