In my opinion it's tokenism. It smacks of an agenda. If you must include it, show it in passing, don't make a big deal of it, unless there's a Captain Jack-type character to pull it off.
I disagree with this. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Captain Jack, and I think John Barrowman is fantastic, but I don't think Trek needs a Captain Jack-type character, flirting with anyone with a pulse regardless of the configuration of their genitalia. That sort of thing is more likely to turn into a running joke than a serious depiction.
As others have said, that ship sailed a long time ago, and the only way to do it now without hanging a big neon sign over the scene saying, "See how progressive we are? Except not, because everyone else has already done this," is to just have a gay or bi character be there, with no particular emphasis placed on their orientation. 25 years ago, sure, they could have had a "very special episode of TNG." Now, they'd just look foolish doing it that way.
Didn't Star Trek already try to tackle this issue twice? First in the episode where Riker falls for that one person from a culture of genderless monosexuals, and again when Jadzia Dax fell in love with the new carrier of a symbiote who was previously bonded with the spouse of one of her previous hosts? Granted, that depiction was still of a persecuted minority, but it's something at least.
Gack.
"Rejoined" (if I'm remembering the DS9 episode title correctly) was interesting, and reasonably subtle, in that it used the Trill as an analogy - and Dax was pretty much the perfect character for that. But the TNG episode was terrible. It smacked of the writers using a sledgehammer when they should have used a scalpel.
What might have redeemed it - and Jonathan Frakes has said this publicly - is if they'd cast a male actor as Soran. But even then, the episode was pretty badly written to make A Point.
^Actually, it was done quite well in this episode of Star Trek: Phase II:
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWWR9z71CFI[/yt]
That was horrible and the worst possible way to show it. I don't need to watch two people fall all over each other to get the idea that they're committed to one another whether it be man-woman, man-man or woman-woman.
Gotta agree. Terrible script.
I wouldn't say the script was terrible (though in the interest of full disclosure, perhaps I should admit that I may be biased, as the writer is a friend of mine - I've also read his original version, that he wrote back in 1987). I would say that the acting in Phase Two (that I've seen - I've only seen a couple of episodes) was pretty wooden.
