The group consists of Tongo Rad, son of the Catullan ambassador; Irina Galliulin, an acquaintance of Ensign Chekov; Dr. Sevrin, a noted electronics, acoustics, and communications researcher; Adam, a musician; and two other women.
They are persuaded to go to Sickbay for a medical examination which reveals the party to be in good health, except for Sevrin, who is an asymptomatic carrier of a bacterium.
[1] Kirk deactivates Sevrin's sonic device, and then joins Spock, Chief Medical Officer Dr. McCoy, and Chekov in a search for the group.
[2] Fontana's script was so heavily rewritten that she asked for her name to be removed from it and replaced with her pseudonym Michael Richards, which she also used for the episode "That Which Survives".
[4] The episode has generally been seen as one of the weakest in the show's history, but its portrayal of characters representing the counterculture of the 1960s has produced widespread comment.
In it, Bodroghkozy noted a negative and positive portrayal; on one hand Sevrin's followers have been duped and must return to "civilization, apparently contrite, chastened children".
[11] In 2016, TVline ranked this as having one of the top twenty moments of Star Trek, in this case the "space hippie" concert in the Enterprise sick bay.
[13] The original script, as written by Fontana, would have provided much background on McCoy, including an unsuccessful marriage which led him into Starfleet (which was later incorporated into the alternate reality of the 2009 film Star Trek).
Ms McCoy's backstory was later incorporated into the non-canonical novels Planet of Judgment, Shadows on the Sun, Crisis on Centaurus, and also in the Marvel Comics Star Trek book (1980), married to a Vulcan and still hostile to her father.
Dialogue from the episode was sampled in the song "Starface" (1992) by American heavy-metal band White Zombie, and in the track "One" (2010) by the Swedish goa / psytrance artist Trinodia.
[14] The song "Long time back when the galaxy was new", sung by Adam and Mavig during the concert, has been covered by Gaye Bykers on Acid on their 2001 album Everything's Groovy, under the title "Golf Trek".
This episode was released in Japan on December 21, 1993 as part of the complete season 3 LaserDisc set, Star Trek: Original Series log.3.