“There’s a nerve cluster just behind the carotid artery. It stimulates the part of the brain that releases natural endorphins.”
It’s back to business as usual on the Enterprise, which brings us the annual Barclay episode (though, I realize, there was no annual episode last year; and there’s two this year, actually). Having previously featured in two of Next Gen’s best episodes (“Hollow Pursuits” and “The Nth Degree”), poor Mr. Barclay has now been reduced to a functional caricature. Need a neurotic Enterprise crewmember to have neurotic problems related to something that other people are just fine with? Barclay’s your guy.
I don’t have an issue with it necessarily – despite having Counselor Troi aboard, Next Gen never really addressed modern problems like ongoing mood disorders or mental illness, and Barclay somewhat fills that gap. It’s a bit annoying, though, that every Barclay episode seems to follow the same essential growth curve: Barclay’s neuroses get in the way at first, but later come to solve the episode’s core problem. Here, we get an episode-long gloss on Bones McCoy’s old distrust of the transporter beam, which Barclay is naturally petrified of. And with good reason: while in the midst of a tricky beam, Barclay gets bitten by a beam slug!
Or something. The episode’s psychodrama would be better served if the visualization wasn’t so freaking ridiculous (seriously: beam slugs! They look like poops with mouths!). As usual, though, Dwight Schultz gives as good as he gets. Barclay’s descent into paranoia is relatively effective, in spite of the silliness factor and the script’s childish interest in serving up various “nervous man tries to relax” gags rather than committing to anything like serious inquiry.
The story and performance address a legitimate undercurrent of Trek’s favourite contrivance: the transporter. The complexity of deconstructing and reconstructing the human body is one thing, but doing the same thing to a functional mind verges into voodoo magic territory. Unfortunately, the episode deals with its own core concern by presenting a bunch of technobabble reasons that transporters are actually safe, when what it should be doing is acknowledging, on some level, that all of our technologically magnificent transit mechanisms are dandy when they’re working, but a stone’s throw from being flat-out insane once they’re not. (Yes, cars, I’m looking at you.)
Some liner notes:
- This is the first (and as far as I know, only) time we get a POV shot from within a transporter beam. As indicated above, it’s not as enthralling as one would hope, but it’s worth mentioning.
- O’Brien’s fear of spiders is raised for the first time; I recall this phobia getting a bit of subsequent life on Deep Space Nine.
- After a fairly shitty image in “Time’s Arrow, Part II” (owing to the overuse of a ProMist filter in the original photography), it’s nice to be reminded of how terrific a Next Gen episode can look on blu-ray. The beam slugs might be dumb, but the regular photography inside the Enterprise looks terrific.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Six is finally in stores.