Trivia / Star Trek: The Next Generation S2E22 "Shades of Gray"

• Creator's Apathy: This is the final script credited to outgoing showrunner Maurice Hurley before he left, and you can tell he just didn't care anymore.
• Creator Backlash: Nobody involved with the series has anything good to say about this episode. For perspective, most of the show's other poorly-regarded episodes have at least had Trek alumni defending them as having a good concept that was poorly executed. This one... not so much.
  • Maurice Hurley said:
    Piece of shit. It was supposed to be a bottle show. Terrible, just terrible, and a way to save some money. I was on the way out the door.
  • In 2012, Peter Lauritson recalled the episode, saying:
    It was just... we learned from that. I think, probably the worst we ever did. It was like "Never again." "Shades"... I don't even want to remember it.
• Genre-Killer: There's never been a Star Trek clip show before or since this episode, thanks to it being so poorly received that all the franchise's subsequent creative teams never so much as considered another clip show simply because they didn't want to remind viewers of its existence, and any suggestions to do so were immediately quashed. (The closest they ever came was a brief nostalgic interlude of clips near the end of the DS9 finale.)
• What Could Have Been: As originally scripted, the entire forest was supposed to come to life and attack Geordi and Data when they attempt to extract a thorn from one of the vines. This was cut from the finished episode, presumably for budget reasons.

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