Hollow Pursuits
Lieutenant Broccoli reporting for duty!
A shy Lieutenant is struggling since getting assigned to the Enterprise-D, and works out his frustrations in a holodeck program where he acts out his power fantasies with the other members of the crew. Riker suspects that the glowing performance review that Lieutenant Barclay’s former captain provided was just an opportunity to off-load him onto another ship, but Picard is determined to give him a shot and tasks LaForge with encouraging him. Alas, this assignment is not a great fit to our Chief Engineer’s skills.
Meanwhile, the ship is afflicted with all sorts of weird malfunctions (not for the first time...), and nobody - even Wesley - seems to be able to figure it out. The situation gets uncomfortable when LaForge stumbles upon Barclay acting out a Three Musketeers story on the holodeck (the novel, not the candy bar). It gets even worse when Riker and Troi see what Barclay has been imagining - but suddenly the ship is in danger because somebody cut the interstellar brake cables - oh no! Fortunately, Barclay out-Wesleys Wesley to save the day. Hurrah!
Words
This is Sally Caves only episode for TNG (although she also later worked on the DS9 episode, “Babel”). A professor of English, she had written a script during early season two and an agent submitted it to Paramount, where presumably it languished on their slush pile for some time. It seems as if Michael Piller took an interest, and he and Melinda Snodgrass worked on it with Caves, winnowing down six different plots before settling upon the one we got. I dearly wish I could get hold of the original screenplay, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be in circulation anywhere. I have the final draft version, but this is after all the tinkering was completed and represents substantially what we see on screen.
There’s a fair bit of technobabble in Act five, but it all works because it's structured as a puzzle to solve, with the crew eliminating each of the nonsense molecules in turn in order to work out how the malfunctions are happening. The biggest problem with all this is that it doesn’t really support the main storyline, except that Barclay has a key role in solving the crisis, which after all is the point of it. It doesn’t really let the side down very much, to be honest, it just stands out because the rest of the story is so successfully character-driven.
Some Star Trek fans took this episode as a satire about obsessive fans. That’s not without precedence - the Doctor Who serial “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” from the preceding year had done precisely this about continuity-obsessed Who fans, after all. But the production staff deny this was ever on the table. The episode’s director, Cliff Bole rebuffed this claim by saying “I didn't feel that, and I would have heard if it was intended.” In fact, Michael Piller suggests that if it was about anyone, it was about him:
It really was not intended directly at Star Trek fans. It was certainly about fantasy life versus reality. More than any other character in the three years I have been at Star Trek, the character of Barclay was more like me than anybody else. My wife watched that show and saw what was going on, and said that’s because I’m constantly in my fantasy world. Fortunately, I make a living at it. I have an extraordinary fantasy life and use my imagination all the time. It’s real life that I have the problems with. I was delightfully happy with the episode.
Honestly, the way this episode deals with social anxiety, the retreat into fantasy, and so many other aspects of mental health is not only ground-breaking it’s far beyond anything else you will find in science fiction at this time. On the downside, the sci-fi aspect of the story is fairly pedestrian (we have already had two episodes built around random malfunctions, and nothing here is a patch on “Contagion” in that regard), but gladly will I turn a blind eye to this and revel in what it does brilliantly - taking us into the mind of someone who runs away from his anxieties and has to overcome his own limitations.
Acting Roles
To say that this is Dwight Schultz’s episode would be almost too obvious to be worth saying, were it not for the fact that there really would be nothing here without him. Don’t get me wrong, this is an ensemble cast story, and everyone gets something to do (even Marina Sirtis’ Troi for once). But it revolves entirely around a guest star to an extent that even the Majel Barrett Lwaxana Troi stories have never done before. Schultz is so good he becomes a recurring guest star after having been brought in originally for just this one episode.
Apparently, Schultz had been a long time Star Trek fan and had approached Rick Berman to ask if he could get on the show. This did not initially bear fruit. However, Whoopi Goldberg worked with Schultz on the 1990 movie The Long Walk Home, where he confided in her how much he loved both the original show and TNG. It was she who advocated for him with the production crew, and ultimately made it happen. Schultz apparently had no idea that Goldberg had been fighting his corner, and the first he found out was when they called him to invite him to take on the role of Lieutenant Barclay. He was over the moon!
Overshadowed by Schultz is Charley Lang’s Lieutenant JG Duffy, who is largely here to pad out LaForge’s engineering team so it doesn’t seem to be just him, Barclay, and Wesley Crusher.
Lang is fine in the role, but there’s not much to work with and he mostly has to seem like he fits in, which admittedly he does. A couple of years later, he was to grab a 21-episode run in Days of Our Lives as a minor character, which in turn got him a small role in 1993’s Fire in the Sky, with a screenplay by none other than ex-TNG writer Tracy Tormé. This seems to have baked him into a pattern, as he also had a recurring role in the UFO conspiracy series Dark Skies as well as playing a MIB in TV time travel romp Seven Days. There are other actors padding out the engineering team in this episode, but Lang is the only one who gets billing for it for some reason.
Guest stars aside, the regular cast are clearly having a ball with this one! They not only get lots of things to do, they get to play for comedy while also dealing with serious issues, and the holodeck versions of the crew are a hoot.
All this and a little bit of Colm Meaney's O’Brien too, albeit mostly just pushing buttons on the transporter and getting annoyed by it.
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
A great story, wonderful performances, and an outstanding guest star - so I guess it’s not really surprising that there's not too much going on with the SFX this week. There’s a planetary matte, but we already saw it in “Up the Long Ladder”. But there’s one special effect that has to be discussed: miniature Riker!
It’s not just that they shoot him in such a way as to make him look smaller, it’s that they also post-process his voice to be just that little bit higher pitched. Between this and the ‘goddess of empathy’, there’s no doubt that everyone was having a great deal of fun making this episode.