Realm of Fear

Let's warm up for the Mindwarp season by someone who has some experience with unhinged adventures: Lieutenant Broccoli

A science vessel has gone missing - this seems to happen a lot, it’s almost like deep space isn’t a safe place to be sending researchers… Anyway, it’s in just such a risky situation that O'Brien has to beam the away team over one at a time - all except the last member, who chickens out. It seems our friend Lieutenant Reginald Barclay is terrified of being transported, but Counsellor Troi manages to persuade him to give it a go - whereupon he is attacked by an interdimensional worm! Was it real, or he suffering from the dreaded Transporter Psychosis? I’ll give you one guess what the answer to that question is.

Words

This was Brannon Braga’s concept coming out of his own fear of flying and his love of the classic episode of The Twilight Zone “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, in which a young William Shatner sees a gremlin on the wing of the airplane he’s flying on. Braga considered it one of his most personal episodes and noted “People around here say I am Barclay”. He was especially fond of the title, which he felt could have been a classic Trek title.

Michael Piller was not keen on the parallels with The Twilight Zone, and played down those elements, but he was pleased with how it all turned out:

I always like the Barclay shows. I think it’s a perfectly valid fear to explore, whether you have a phobia about spiders or about being molecularly taken apart and put back together. As Star Trek viewers we have come to take it for granted, but why shouldn’t somebody be afraid to get into a transporter?

However, Braga himself wasn’t entirely happy with the result:

The first three acts are fun and then the tech gets in the way... I envisioned a scarier episode where the creatures in the transporter were a little more frightening, but then again what a tall order to the effects guys, “Make it amorphous, but terrifying”. What does that mean? It’s easy to write that, but difficult to visualize. I just wanted you to feel scared with this guy and you never really did.

Piller blocked that path, and the result was an episode that doesn’t quite land for a lot of people. As Jeri Taylor put it:

This was an episode that a lot of people just didn’t respond to and I don’t know why. I thought it was a wonderful idea. I thought Brannon wrote a terrific script. It just seemed so perfect, Barclay with a transporter phobia just seemed like a marvellous marriage of something people can relate to today and in the future: technology. I just thought everything worked with the exception of the visual effects.

Taylor also thought that after they’d gone too far in the other direction after “Time’s Arrow, Part II”, they let the explanations get “painfully detailed” in this one.

Speaking of explaining things, this episode sees the debut of the ‘kiloquad’, which the tech nerds (Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda I presume) invented to overcome concerns about Moore’s Law, which implied that using ‘bytes’ and their scaled up versions to express computational power would be almost instantaneously out-of-date. Hence the ‘quad’, a nebulous and meaningless measurement to plug the gaps. TNG had a very clearly defined way of using this, and apparently Barclay’s “billions of kiloquads” remark in this episode (about the data required for a transporter pattern) was consistent with this. Voyager, however, went off the rails and ended up with “billions of gigaquads” and “billions of teraquads” in no time at all. Inflation, eh? What can you do.

Incidentally, Zayra IV was named for Zayra Cabot, who was Jeri Taylor’s assistant, and worked with her all the way through to the end of TNG (she even got a credit in the final episode).

Acting Roles

Colm Meaney’s O’Brien is back! Enjoy it, he’s only got one more episode, not counting the show’s finale. It’s always fun to see him in action, even if his anecdote about Talarian hook spiders is woefully inappropriate for calming Barclay down!

Speaking of Barclay, the entire story rests on Dwight Schultz’s performance, as with nearly every episode he appears in, and unsurprisingly this is the best aspect of this episode. While as Jeri Taylor points out, this is an episode not everyone responds to, I personally very much enjoy Barclay’s wrestling with his issues, especially the scene where, as my wife put it, Barclay “Googles his symptoms” - always a great way to convince yourself you're sick!

Schultz is given able support by Marina Sirtis’ Troi, who is back in her counsellor role and feeling very plausible here. I like the way they take an acupressure technique, call it ‘plexing’, and then claim the Betazoids invented it. Cultural appropriation at its finest!

Incidentally: I have used this technique myself once or twice since seeing it in this episode, and it’s surprisingly helpful, although I suspect as with most psychological props you could replace the actual actions with just about anything and it would still work.

Schultz’s Barclay also has several scenes with LeVar Burton’s LaForge, but this pairing doesn’t work quite as well this time since Burton is given nothing substantial to do here. Most of the intimate scenes between Barclay and another member of the crew are weirdly transposed onto O’Brien - not that I’m complaining!

There’s a weird guest spot in this one: Renata Scott appears as an Admiral warning Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard about the Cardassians (it’s about all that Stewart does this week!).

Clearly the Cardassians do nothing in this story... as far as I can tell, the only reason this scene is included is to foreshadow Deep Space Nine - the new show didn’t start airing until nearly a hundred days later, but it was already in production at this point and must have been on the production team’s mind. Other than misdirection, this seems the only reason for Scott’s scene in this episode. Scott herself had a career of about thirty bit parts, including two different roles in L.A. Law prior to appearing in this episode, but probably nothing that you noticed.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

The opening shot is modified from one created for “Evolution”, here are examples side-by-side from each episode (left is from this episode, right from the season three episode):

The new shots are recomposited, but using SFX shots prepared for the previous episode, which is much less lazy than the usual reuse of stock footage we see on TNG.

Welcome back to the USS Grissom studio miniature from Search for Spock, which we’ve not seen since last season’s “Hero Worship”.

And say hello to this week’s puppet!

These creature designs came from Dan Curry, and were built by modelmaker Carey Howe. Curry himself, clad in a green suit, acted as puppeteer - that’s him in the yellow gimp suit!

Finally, let’s welcome an entirely new set that expands the Jefferies tubes from just being a short corridor to having split levels. They’re going to make good use of this set over the course of the season, and watch them revel in its glory during its not-so-exciting debut!

All in all, it’s not the most thrilling episode, but it has some interesting special effects, and its always fun to watch Dwight Schultz in action.