By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
You can get a laugh out of countless Star Trek fans by simply mentioning one character’s name: Reginald Barclay. In his very first episode (“Hollow Pursuits”), he gets busted for putting the Enterprise crew in his holodeck fantasies. The most eyebrow-raising thing about his program was that it featured a scantily-clad Troi that he presumably melded more than minds with. When they decided to bring the character back, the producers of The Next Generation went out of their way to shake off the character’s sketchy reputation. Decades later, though, this guy is still mostly known for being the biggest pervert in Star Trek history!
When Barclay was first introduced in The Next Generation, he was very much a joke of a character. He was portrayed as nervous and socially awkward in “Hollow Pursuits,” and his fellow crewmen had even given him a demeaning nickname: “Broccoli.” When he starts performing poorly at work, the crew discovers the reason why: he’s addicted to the holodeck, where he escapes into a fantasy where he’s a tough guy who can land Riker on his ass with a single punch. Eventually, our heroes help Barclay get his sh*t together, and he helps to save the day in traditional Star Trek fashion.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Creep?
The TNG producers brought him back one year later in “The Nth Degree,” which was a very different kind of episode. Barclay gets zapped by a mysterious beam that makes him super smart. Eventually, he hijacks control of the ship and sends the Enterprise to the center of the galaxy. There, they encounter hyperadvanced aliens whose whole deal is exploring the galaxy by getting others to come to them. This leads to a peaceful exchange of ideas, and when it was all done, Barclay was returned to normal. Or at least as normal as he ever gets.
Giving Barclay such a different adventure for his second appearance was quite deliberate. According to staff writer Brannon Braga (as recorded in Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages), “We struggled for a year with how to have Barclay come back. We didn’t want him to play the nervous chap in the holodeck again.” Therefore, everyone was happy when fellow writer Joe Menosky “came up with the science-fiction notion of a probe which is essentially a ship in a bottle. It was a good twist on that particular character, which you could only get to with a science-fiction gag.”
You Say Holo, He Says Goodbye
On paper, giving Barclay a different outing the second time around is a good way to keep the character from being typecast. In reality, however, that never really worked. This is partially because Barclay was so delightfully weird in “Hollow Pursuits.” From the beginning, our TNG heroes were written as nearly perfect people, something Gene Roddenberry emphasized by forbidding character conflict. Compared to that, Barclay is hilariously flawed…like, his job performance literally suffers because he’s spending too much time gooning to deepfake porn of his coworkers! If nothing else, early Barclay is memorable for being an honest portrayal of exactly what the average dude would be using the holodeck for.
Aside from that, the other main reason Barclay never shook his reputation as a pervert is because the franchise kept reminding us of his earlier holographic exploits. In The Next Generation, he’s the guy who accidentally releases the evil hologram of Dr. Moriarty. In Voyager, we find out that he helped to develop the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram. In subsequent episodes, he obsessively recreates the Voyager crew as holograms, pals around with the EMH, and figures out how to send holograms of himself to Voyager. In short, after TNG tried to change things up, VOY emphasized that Barclay never stopped obsessing over all things holographic!
Because of this, Barclay has a rather complicated legacy as a character. He’s quietly brilliant and played to perfection by Dwight Schultz, which is why fans love him so much. But he’s also the biggest pervert in Star Trek history, and the fandom will always remember him as the guy who banged a holographic Deanna Troi so much he nearly lost his job. If nothing else, though, Barclay paved the way for the franchise to be more honest about having sex in the holodeck. Just ask Quark, whose most popular holographic program seemed to be the delightfully porno-sounding “Vulcan Love Slave!”
