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The Holodeck adventures in every iteration of Trek are, to my mind, the writers and producers' cop-out to dealing with the sf surroundings the various crews have found themselves in. Either they're playing 20th-century earthbound spy games ("Our Man Bashir"), "visiting" cheesy Vegas casinos with equally cheesy lounge-lizard singers "burdened" by ersatz-problems, reliving Sherlock Holmes or "Dixon Hill" detective stories, or, as here, indulging in Anglo-American literary pretenses or in "retro-pop-cultural" imaginings of the American middle class. I consider them all to be boring evasions to good weird (as in UNfamiliar!!!) plots, stories, and surroundings.
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I completely agree, Rex. Completely. And it's all due to an imagination deficit. If the
Trek mavens would simply ask a group of eight or nine established SF authors to join them on a weeklong retreat to discuss ways of re-engergizing (pun intended) the franchise, we could return to the all-too-alien concept of
science fiction.
However, I must confess to a strong fondness for the Holodek-based TNG episodes "Elementary Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle."