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Lieutenant Reginald Endicott Barclay III is a recurring character in the Star Trek fictional universe, created by Sally Caves and played by Dwight Schultz. He first appeared in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (initially in the episode "Hollow Pursuits") as an engineer aboard the Enterprise-D, in which capacity he also appeared on the Enterprise-E in the movie Star Trek: First Contact. He also had a recurring role in the later seasons of Star Trek: Voyager.
Perhaps the most human character known aboard the Enterprise, Barclay had many flaws that he was forced to overcome. He was shy and insular with a tendency to stutter, fearful of being transported, having a holofiction problem, and was a hypochondriac.
His holofiction problem was first seen in the episode "Hollow Pursuits", in which he created simulacrum of the ship's bridge officers who behaved very differently than their "real life" counterparts; for example, his version of Captain Picard was a weakling who cowered before him, while Deanna Troi was in love with Barclay.
In the episode "Realm of Fear", Barclay dealt with transporter phobia when assigned to an away team. Though he was capable of allowing himself to be transported, he believed that he saw large worm-like creatures while in transit. When no evidence of a problem was found, Barclay believed himself to be going mad; however, Data and Geordi La Forge afterwards discovered that these were human patterns in the device's pattern buffer, thought lost in transit. With Barclay's help, these people were materialized, alive and whole.
In "Genesis", Barclay's T-cells had a bizarre reaction to a medicine, creating an airborne virus which caused Barclay to deevolve into a spider and its other victims to revert to various earlier forms.
Barclay remained under Picard's command after the destruction of the Enterprise-D, for a few years on the Enterprise-E until being re-assigned to Starfleet Headquarters circa 2375. Working on the Pathfinder project, Barclay became obsessed with the crew of the lost USS Voyager, which had been stranded in the Delta Quadrant for about four years. He created simulacrum of the Voyager crew on a holodeck based on the facts available to him. With the help of those holograms and Deanna Troi—with whom he developed a close friendship—he devised a clever way to use a tiny wormhole to establish two-way communication with Voyager.
In an early episode of Voyager it was revealed that Barclay was involved in the creation of the Emergency Medical Hologram program.
An alternate future in the Voyager series finale "Endgame" showed Barclay teaching at Starfleet Academy.
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