Last week, I was doing some late-night channel surfing and happened upon Genesis, one of the few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation
featuring Dwight Schulz’s nervous, severely socially awkward engineer
Reginald Barclay. I was excited to see the character, who I fondly
remembered, mainly from season three’s Hollow Pursuits, which
introduces him. When I looked that episode up, I was delighted to find
that it would be airing on Thanksgiving night. The episode was just as
charming as I remembered.
Schulz gives a performance that is
extremely comical but also sympathetic. At one point in the episode, he
confides in his immediate superior, the kind and competent Geordi La
Forge (LaVar Burton), that he is the guy who always writes down things
to say before he goes to a party, then ends up spending the evening in
the corner studying a potted plant. For a wallflower like me, this poor
fellow who has earned the whispered nickname “Broccoli” from his
crewmates is easy to relate to.
Not only is Barclay a
wonderful character, but Guinan, the serene bartender portrayed by
Whoopi Goldberg who is probably my favorite occasionally recurring
character on TNG, has a terrific heart-to-heart with Geordi
during which she encourages him to show oddball Barclay a little
empathy. She relates the story of her brother, the black sheep of the
family, who had a fantastic sense of humor that no one else got a chance
to appreciate because they wrote him off so quickly. When Geordi
explains how unpopular he is with the rest of the officers, complaining
that he’s never on time and is always agitated, Guinan responds that if
she were surrounded by people who didn’t like her, she’d probably be
late and nervous too. Geordi is a very nice guy already, but this
conversation is an important aid in helping him give Barclay another
shot.
Anytime the holodeck comes into play, it’s a treat,
because we get to explore entirely different settings from the sterile
starship, often with fancy costumes for those usually stuck in the same
uniform all the time and with literary or historical characters
springing to life to interact with the crew. One of my all-time favorite
posters is the American Library Association’s one featuring the members
of Captain Picard’s crew holding their most beloved books. This doesn’t
seem like much of a stretch because the show frequently includes
allusions to various literary figures, particularly Sherlock Holmes.
In this episode, we get the Three Musketeers, with Barclay programming
his idyllic escape from reality with Picard (Patrick Stewart), Geordi,
Data (Brent Spiner) as the famous swordsmen and Riker in the role of
eager young D’Artagnan. All are accomplished duelers, but none can match
the skill of Barclay, who, within his own little world, demonstrates
none of his characteristic jitteriness. The Crushers (Gates McFadden and
Wil Wheaton) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) also have amusing
holoworld counterparts, and it’s especially entertaining to see how the
real Geordi, Riker and Deanna react to them when they crash the program
in search of Barclay.
This is an episode that seems very ahead
of its time. Though it aired in 1990, it is the perfect cautionary tale
on the dangers of getting too sucked into the Internet, particularly
role-playing games. Sally Caves, who wrote the teleplay, seems to have
anticipated the extent to which people could get drawn into this
illusory world, particularly those who have trouble with real-life
social interaction. Of course, the message could apply to any number of
fiction-based entertainments, from books to Dungeons and Dragons. But it
seems to fit the Internet especially well.
Hollow Pursuits is one of the funniest episodes of TNG,
but it’s packed with meaning, with a lesson to the Barclays of the
world not to retreat so far into their own imaginations that real life
eludes them and to those who know such people not to let them feel so
isolated that such pursuits seem like the only way to find peace.
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