The premise is interesting, and the mystery of "what's happening to Tom" as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word "evolution" into a keyboard there's should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts "No! Bad!" Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.

I think it's actually a pretty good episode up until the final few minutes when the questionably sentient lizards show up. How reviled the episode is says more about how people react to that than the overall episode, IMO.

It won an Emmy.

The beginning is amazing and exciting, especially Tom spilling his guts arguing to Janeway to make the test flight.

I have a hard time getting over the thing where the story introduces some amazing new capability, and it's never explored further. In this one it's, "we found a way to get home instantly, but we'd have to do a thing in sick bay to reverse the side-effects." A similar case is the episode with the planet of friendly hedonists with long range transporters that it turns out they can't use because "the power systems are incompatible".

I'm sure if I weren't so uptight I'd enjoy these episodes more.