“The moon, yes. That will be my home. My paradise.”
It’s “Flowers for Barclaynon,” in a return engagement for Dwight Schultz as Barclay that’s very nearly as good as his inaugural appearance in “Hollow Pursuits” the previous year. The inept lieutenant gets zapped by an alien probe and becomes an intellectual superman – but what I like about the episode is that it takes pains, early on, to demonstrate that Barclay has already come a long way from his holaddicted personality from the year previous. Barclay has very quickly become an astonishingly fully-fleshed character on the Enterprise crew; in fact, it’s a shame he never got bumped up to series regular. Seeing him play Cyranno – badly – is appallingly touching, while also nicely setting up a parallel scene later on where the super-brained Barclay knocks a dramatic scene clear out of the park, even bringing Beverly (now the ship’s resident amateur dramatist, a character turn I quite like) to tears.
Like “Hollow Pursuits,” “The Nth Degree” seems to be gently positioning Barclay as representative of the fans of Star Trek. Where the previous episode may have been about their obsessive relationships with the fictional characters of their favourite show, however, “Nth” is pure wish fulfilment: I’m sure there are more than a few closet nerds and shy scientists out there watching Trek who dream of a day when, for whatever reason, all the lenses come into focus and their intellectual prowess vaults them to the top of the social food chain, as happens with Barclay here. (He even makes a pass at Counselor Troi – “a good one,” she insists.) There’s also a preening ego satisfaction to the notion of Barclay starting to care less and less about working with his colleagues, who he is now far smarter than; when you become such a supergenius that you circumvent Captain Picard and save the ship, you’d probably be feeling pretty good about yourself.
Barclay actually saves the ship twice in “The Nth Degree,” with Ron Jones pumping the music to the rafters in direct relation to Barclay’s burgeoning intellect. (Jones is one episode away from getting himself fired for writing music that’s “too bombastic” – and it’s on fine display here.) Both sequences are delightful, the first because it’s such a surprise – Barclay quietly implementing the solution without telling anyone, even as Picard admits to being baffled by the problem and requests suggestions from the crew – and the second because it’s not a surprise, but is so well-played. I like the design of the neural interface that Barclay constructs in the holodeck quite a bit, with lasers dancing around his skull as he “talks” wordlessly to his crewmates; and the creepy, “Barclay as Dave” back half of the episode plays better for it.
This episode really freaked me out the first time I saw it, for all the good reasons. It is, sadly, the only other Barclay episode (after “Hollow Pursuits”) that really works in my estimation; after here, the once-a-year character falls into caricature. But Schultz is in perfect form here, even down to small touches like super-Barclay standing politely when Counselor Troi joins him at his table, or his easy repartee with Albert Einstein (!) on the holodeck.
One last thing, which I noticed pretty much for the first time as the episode wound down. Restored to normal by the alien intelligence that enhanced him, Barclay comments on feeling smaller; Counselor Troi has some kind words about all of us reaching a point in our lives where we exceed what we believe to be our own potential, even if only for a short while. That rings true for me this year – and the corollary advice, to try to carry that experience forward into the rest of your days, even more so.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Four is in stores now.