4x19 The Nth Degree

[7.0/10] “The Nth Degree” wears its influences on its sleeve. The episode opens with Lt. Barclay performing Cyrano de Bergerac a play about a hapless (or at least tongue-tied) man who achieves his grand romantic objectives through the help of a friend who tells him what to do and say. It’s not a far leap from there to the story here, where hapless Barclay himself is suddenly capable and confident, able to achieve his own grand objectives (save, notably, for his romantic ones), thanks to a mysterious alien force working through him.

But I also couldn’t help thinking of Flowers for Algernon a science fiction short story about rapid increases in intelligence and its effect on the capacity and social reaction to the being undergoing it. You might retitle this episode “Flowers for Barclay”, particularly when a chance encounter with an alien probe seems, at first, to merely have unlocked Barclay’s natural intelligence and hidden confidence he’s shown in private moments. It’s not hard to see this episode as a fable on what happens when you lead a person to their full potential and the changes in personality that journey can bring.

Except that “The Nth Degree” is a very cartoony episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s difficult to know whether the show wants to be serious or a comedy. Ideally, it seems to want both, but it’s hard to tell when the episode is explicitly going for laughs and when it wants the audience to take Barclay’s supergenius routine more seriously. There’s some exaggerated bravado and over-the-top megalomania involved in Barclay’s transformation, which works fine if you’re aiming for chuckles or at least something with a heightened tone, but weakens the handful of moments when the episode wants to get introspective about who Barclay really is and who he could be.

That said, it’s fun to see actor Dwight Schutlz taken off the leash a bit here. He made for a distinctive presence in “Hollow Pursuits” as a fumbling, uncertain officer, in direct contrast to the preternaturally professional members of the crew. In this sequel episode, though, we see him not only as the cool and commanding individual he aspired to be in many of his holodeck fantasies, but as an ascended demi-god, looking down benevolently on his comparatively infantile colleagues. Seeing Schultz’s range in these guises is a treat, despite some tonal wonkiness.

Things just get a little silly in the process. Barclay’s over-the-top, brain-enhanced suaveness is entertaining, but his demeanor almost feels like a parody of uber-confident characters. The image of him in a giant mechanical chair while strobe lights beam onto his brain is an eye-catching design, but also a laughable image. And the giant floating head of a bearded old man speaking in stilted tones legitimately made me guffaw. There’s some goofy old sci-fi clichés at play here, and while some of them are amusing on their own terms, they make for an odd fit for the more down-to-earth vibe of TNG.

But it is fun to watch the show take on different postures with homages to other works both in and outside the franchise. With computerized Barclay’s “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Captain Picard” line, Star Trek makes its most explicit homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey since Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Speaking of which, the crew’s slow-motion disorientation feels of a piece with the original Enterprise crew encountering a wormhole in TMP. But that’s not the only prior Trek film revived here, as someone hijacking the ship, taking it to the center of the galaxy, and encountering a glowing old man with a big white beard leaves the episode seeming of a piece with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Hell, “The Nth Degree” even manages to presage Her (albeit in a less piercing way) with the concept of a digital person ascending beyond their connections to the mortal world.

All these disparate ingredients turn the episode into a bit of a jumble. We move very quickly, from Barclay fumfering around as usual, to showing newfound confidence, to interfacing with the ship directly, to absconding with the Enterprise across tens of thousands of lightyears. There’s little time to take stock of any of the escalating weirdness here, for Barclay, his friends, or the audience, which means many of these dramatic developments don’t leave the impact they ought to on paper.

That said, I ultimately enjoyed the explanation of Barclay’s metamorphosis. It turns out the probe that kickstarted Barclay’s cogitation came from a species called the Cytherians. They are, like Starfleet, a group of explorers. But rather than traveling the galaxy, they bring strangers to them. Their method is to reprogram ships, computers, and in Barclay’s case, even human beings, to lead others to their homeworld. Once the deed is done and the Cytherians are able to engage in a bit of cultural exchange with the Federation, they fix Barclay up to his old self.

The sci-fi concept at the core of that is a neat one. One of the cool things that Star Trek allows for as a franchise is dreaming up different races and communities with unorthodox or fanciful methods of communing with the rest of the universe. Most of the time, we simply meet similar species with one unique cultural trait. That makes it extra fascinating to see our heroes deal with alien whose methods and manner are truly, life-alteringly different from ours, in a way that seems normal to them.

“The Nth Degree” offers some solace to Barclay as well. If you squint, you can see writer Joe Menosky straining to make this a character story. The emotional throughline seems to be that this alien augmentation leads Barclay to strive to earn the respect and admiration from his peers he’s always craved, and not just the polite applause his performance as Cyrano provokes. But even at his slickest and most commanding, Troi turns down his offer for a date, only to take him up on it once he’s back to normal. It’s a choice that works to make her and the others’ appreciation for the real Barclay feel sincere, and not tied to abstract accomplishments, even with hints that the smarts he unleashed didn’t entirely owe to the Cytherians’ mental mucking.

One of the truths of network television in the early 1990s is that the status quo is god. With a few exceptions, everything has to return to normal by the end of the hour. So it seemed ordained that Barclay would eventually revert to his usual self (or, you know, die in the process). Works like Cyrano and Flowers for Algernon explore the melancholy and even tragedy when the jig is up and life returns to how it was.

“The Nth Degree” follows suit, another tack borrowed from the works it pays tribute to. Troi and Geordi reassure Barclay that even if this grand experience is over, there’s pieces of it he can carry with him for the rest of his life. I don’t know if TNG fully earns that sentiment with its over-the-top tale of mental rewriting and galaxy hopping, but like his literary forebears, its nice to see Barclay valued for who he really is when the veil falls.