No, I would prepare a special star trek themed dick stencil and paint a few somewhere inconspicuous on the bridge. Then laugh whenever the things showed up on the tube. BTW, thanks poster for the highlights! The end is perfect.

They may not have had time. According to the entry about this on the Memory Alpha site:

"Taking still photographs of the various "working" control panels, the fans can be heard discussing ways of removing set pieces from the stage."

I wonder what would've gone missing had they not run into lot security?

I don't know why they dropped that storyline, but I did find this on Wikipedia re: the dude getting blasted:


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A mold of Paul Newman's face was filled with raw meat and then blown up to create the effect used when Picard and Riker fire on Remmick, but both Rick Berman and Peter Lauritson were concerned that it was too graphic. Dan Curry invited his six-year old son to watch the episode in order to test how children would react to it, who reportedly liked it so much that he suggested the creation of a Remmick action figure where the head would blow up by pressing a button. This resulted in Berman deciding to air the episode uncut with the full sequence included.[3]

While I agree the episode had lots of potential, it also sticks out in my mind as one of the worst examples of "slow phasers" in the show's history. Before his head explodes, alien-parasite guy fires a phaser whose beam is more pokey than a molasses hose in December, letting Picard and Ryker "lean" out of the way.

Anyway, to have an arc-like story that spans multiple episodes, you would've needed something called "a head writer" and not a policy of "let whoever wants to write a script and fuck continuity."

Yet another reason why Battlestar Galactica > Trek.

I remember reading that they got so much flak from that episode (including needing to put a warning up) that they decided to just let that plot die, whereupon they quickly replaced it with the deus ex machina introduction of the Borg to replace the meta-plot unstoppable bad guys factor. You really can't top an exploding head and make it suitable for TV.

There was a lot of internal conflicts over that episode, the writer wanted it to be about a coup inside Starfleet, Roddenberry opposed it with his reasoning that Starfleet could do no wrong and had no internal corruption or some shit. So they changed it to "aliens infiltrate Federation" instead.

It's funny though that they refused to do all of that sort of thing in TNG, yet DS9 was ballsy enough to do it. That's another feather in that shows hat.

They were ballsy enough to do it after they saw how Babylon-5 was eating their lunch.

Berman & Braga may have saved Star Trek from Roddenberry, but they went on to ruin it, render it to ashes, and piss on the residue.

I'd say it was less to do with Berman and Braga, and more to do with the people around them at the period when the shows were good.

If I were a conspiracy theory kinda guy, I'd assume the free pass for media violence (and ownership of much of the media by military industrial complex and conservative entities) is to desensitize the American public to war footage. The above interests having long ago discovered how damaging images of death and suffering are for the support of war and war mongering.

Here's an article touching on that theme, with a depressing critique on how graphic torture on TV reflects our country's acceptance of the practice compared to 30 years ago. Basically we've come to accept violence and torture on primetime TV, but standards on sex and nudity are still stuck in the 80s.

http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/14865/hannibal-tv-review/

There's something to the theory that America's tolerance of violence relates to our militaristic culture, but that article is complete garbage.