YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S1E21 "Symbiosis"

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • While some fans found the concept ridiculous of an entire species turning their economy to selling drugs, it has some precedent with the Opium Wars. The British Empire made virtually its entire import sales from dealing opium to China and actively did their best to enforce it on the public.
  • The fact that real life medical corporations turned to selling addictive painkillers that were massively exploited is also a truth of the 21st century.
• Anvilicious: The plot is heavy-handed enough, but the scene where the bridge crew explain to Wesley why people get addicted to drugs crosses the line into outright lecturing the audience. And when combined with the feature that Reading Rainbow did on the episode, it makes it seem like a clunky after-school special.
• Canon Fodder: Many fans interpreted Tasha's Drugs Are Bad speech as her indirectly confessing to being a former addict herself, mostly just because it makes the scene feel less preachy, Tasha hardly ever got any character development, and from what we see of her home later on, it's definitely the sort of place where drug use could easily be rampant. Many authors, both fan and officially licensed, would later incorporate this interpretation into their stories, and Denise Crosby also gave it her blessing.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Merritt Butrick plays a man suffering from a worldwide plague. Less than a year later, he passed away from AIDS complications — the first Trek cast member to do so,^note Mike Minor, the art director for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, had died from AIDS complications the previous year and the first Trek recurring cast member to die of a communicable disease. (He was also one of the youngest ever to die, having been all of 29 years old at the time he passed away.) What makes things even harsher is the (probably unintentional) Reality Subtext, as the entire reason why Butrick took the role was because he needed money for his AIDS medication. His character's sickly look was sadly not acting.
  • In addition, while the episode is slammed for its heavy-handed stance on drug use, Gene Roddenberry himself would die three years later in part because of years of rampant drug use wrecking his body.
  • The episode might have been Anvilicious but it was horrifyingly prophetic. Decades later, America would find itself plagued by an epidemic of opioid addiction driven by narcotic drugs being peddled as pain medication. It's hard to watch this story in the twenty-first century and not see Brekkians as expies of pharmaceutical executives.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Turns out the Pakleds of "Samaritan Snare" aren't actually the first crew of aliens too dumb to fix their own ship that the Enterprise stumbles upon.
  • The dialogue as the Enterprise tries to instruct a drunken captain how to repair his shuttle sounds uncannily like a transcript from an IT support call.
    "Captain, we are beaming over a replacement coil."
    "That's great! And that'll fix us up?"
    "Yes, once it's installed."
    "Right, and how do we do that?"
    (Despair, grief, and silence)
  • The episode ends with Picard and Crusher wondering if letting the Onarans suffer planet-wide Felicium withdrawal was the right thing to do, with Picard concluding "We may never know". When Starfleet finally got around to checking up on them seventeen years later, the Onarans did manage to recover from their addiction, but from their mural of the history, it was not fun. Although they acknowledge that they're glad they're off the drugs now, being left to cope with withdrawal and reconstruction by themselves makes them pretty lukewarm on Starfleet.
• Memetic Mutation: Denise Crosby's almost seductive delivery of the line "Drugs can make you feel good" makes it quite easy to take out of context.

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