The Book Lightwalker Files

Today I present my entry of a special blog chain called “The Discomfort Zone,” which I’m doing with several writing buddies at christianwriters.com. (See the end of this post for an update.) Since I usually make my points based on science fiction, I’m going to tell my side through Lieutenant Reginald Barclay of The Next Generation.

When we meet Barclay in his first episode “Hollow Pursuits,” he appears to be a John Wayne-type character in Ten Forward: powerful with the ladies—specifically Deanna Troi—and overpowering the men, including superior officers Geordi LaForge and “Number One” Riker. But this turns out to be Barclay’s holodeck fantasy.

In reality he’s shy, unsure of himself, and dutifully meek. A pushover, some might say. His social life is a disaster; he’s casual, always late for work, unable to fit in. “How does a guy like that make it through the Academy?” asks LaForge. Good question. Indeed, how does he rise in rank to lieutenant?

Wesley Crusher has taken to calling him Lieutenant Broccoli—a cruel and childish moniker, to be sure, but it has stuck with other crewmembers. “Let’s just get that unstuck,” says Picard firmly. Yet in an unguarded moment later on, Picard also calls him Broccoli to his face. It’s a funny moment in a way, though clearly embarrassing to both.

Holodeck fantasies are Barclay’s way of coping, and his favorite is a peaceful forest setting. Here, the people in his life are recreated as more exciting characters, in his view. Beverly Crusher is a Southern belle on a tree swing. Picard, LaForge, and Data are the Three Musketeers, always spoiling for a swordfight and easily defeated by “Master Barclay.” And Deanna Troi, who has been trying to counsel him, transforms into a lofty “goddess of empathy.”

LaForge is the first to discover his fantasy, but he reluctantly agrees to keep mum about it. However, when Riker fumes over Barclay missing an appointment, he learns from the computer Barclay is in Holodeck 3 and marches there, with LaForge and Troi in tow. Desperately LaForge tries to explain: “Barclay has been running some … unusual programs on the holodeck …”

Too angry to care, Riker marches right in. Shocked upon seeing the Musketeers, he begins to order the computer to delete the program, but Troi stops him.

“If Barclay is having difficulty facing reality, to suddenly destroy his only means of escape would be brutal, and could do considerable damage.” Wise psychological advice. In fact, she finds the whole fantasy amusing—until she comes across the goddess of empathy.

“Cast off your inhibitions, and embrace love, truth, joy,” says the image in overdramatized tones. “Discard your façades and reveal your true being to me. Cast off your masks and let me slip into your mind.”

During this corny speech, Deanna Troi paces forward and glares at her. “Muzzle it!”

By the second episode, “The Nth Degree,” Barclay has cast off his inhibitions and façades, at least on some levels. Instead of creating fantasies on the holodeck, he’s now rehearsing the part of Cyrano de Bergerac, playing to Dr. Crusher as Roxanne. Naturally he finds this more fulfilling than private fantasies, but at work he’s still the uncertain little man trying to fit in.

Meanwhile, the Enterprise-D comes across a plain of 18 deep-space telescopes known as the Argus Array, which has lost power. The obvious culprit: an alien probe which has wandered near the array and drained its energy. When LaForge and Barclay venture out in a shuttlecraft, the probe sends an energy surge that startles LaForge and knocks Barclay cold. Had it not been for his VISOR, LaForge would’ve been out, too.

When he comes to, suddenly Barclay displays a lot more knowledge than he did before, knowledge which continues to increase. But unlike Gary Mitchell in the original Trek’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (May 12), it doesn’t make him think he’s a god, nor is he exactly arrogant. He constantly apologizes for the insights he has, but have them he still does to everyone’s amazement.

Once the probe is destroyed, they discover the array is far from out of danger. A nuclear cascade effect has begun through the telescopes, bound to overload and destroy the whole system. The engineers are hard at work, trying to counteract it in time, but for Barclay, the on-board computers simply don’t act quickly enough.

“I must find a faster interface,” he says, leaving Engineering.

He returns to the holodeck, where he instructs the computer to build a device to his exact specifications. “No such device has ever been made,” it says.

“No problem. Here is how you build it.”

The result is an impressive machine which he mentally controls from a central chair, while light beams play around his brain. He has the computer link his thoughts into the Enterprise’s system and caps the cascade before it runs out of control.

In “Realm of Fear,” Barclay has clearly gained more confidence, but now he deals with a phobia toward transporters. Whereas Dr. McCoy in the original Trek always complained about his molecules being scattered and reassembled, Barclay fears he could die if even the tiniest step of the process should fail.

He explains it to Counselor Troi: “Every single time I tried to do it, I had this certain feeling. I guess you could call it … mortal terror!” To get out of it, he has always finagled his way into a shuttlecraft instead, as in “The Nth Degree.”

“Even when I was a child, I always had this dreadful fear that if ever I was dematerialized, I would never come back again … whole.”

Nevertheless, Troi encourages him to face his fear and transport to Riker, Dr. Crusher, and LaForge, who are already aboard the science ship Yosemite, which hasn’t been heard from lately. The trip there is uneventful for Barclay; it’s great to see what transporting looks like from inside the matter stream. Once on board, Riker’s team discovers the crew is dead, with four of them unaccounted for.

On his way back, however, Barclay sees in the stream what appears to be a deformed, free-floating bass which mouths his forearm, just before he materializes. As it turns out, the “fish” is really one of the four missing crewmembers, trapped in the buffer. By grabbing hold of them, Barclay and three others rescue them, and somehow this translates into Barclay getting over his phobia.

These three episodes, showing Barclay’s growth as a person, have remarkable parallels to my own journey from an obscure young writer to a confident author. I used to be picked on in school, to the point where I was shy, unsure of myself, and lonely. I rarely made friends; I didn’t know how. So I retreated into my fantasy world of Dreamland and the Ebbs family, as I mentioned in my bio. Originally I had used my classmates as characters, like Barclay using his shipmates, until I learned to create my own.

In time, I went on to short stories, and in college I learned to relate to people more fully. My best friend there was Steve Mitchem, who mentored me to see my own potential. Since then, I’ve met other people who challenged my thinking “to the nth degree.” And when I began posting on Christian Writers about four years and four months ago, I started to see editors, agents, publishers, and other writers not as nondescript fish in a stream, but as ordinary people like me.

These are far from the only Barclay episodes around. There are several more which I don’t have time to get into right now—not only in The Next Generation, but in the latter seasons of Star Trek: Voyager. Eventually he was instrumental to ultimately bring the Voyager back home to Earth. In the same way, I wish to be instrumental to ultimately bring several of my brothers and sisters to a better understanding of science fiction, as well as bringing unbelievers of God’s choosing Home to be with the Lord.

Like Barclay, I had to step out of my comfort zone to grow and become the author I am today. And I’m still growing. It wasn’t human self-will that did this, it was the Lord using my pliable heart. “That is why Scripture says: ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’” (James 4:6b).