History Recap / StarTrekTheNextGenerationS6E2RealmOfFear

* PitifulWorms: The Yosemite crew-members that were "trapped in the beam" looked like worms. Might qualify as NightmareFuel - although the worms did not look particularly slimy, one of them looked at points like it was going to eat Barclay.

The ''Enterprise'' finds the lost ''USS Yosemite'', which disappeared while studying a plasma stream. Sensors can’t tell if there are life signs aboard because of the plasma’s interference, and any attempts to pull the ship out with the tractor beam would be equally futile, so Picard contacts La Forge to ask if beaming an away team to the Yosemite would be feasible. La Forge is at first hesitant to try it for fear of getting the away team stuck with no way of bringing them back, but Lieutenant Barclay suggests bridging the two transporter systems together to improve the transporter strength. La Forge likes this idea and gives the go-ahead. He asks Barclay to join him on the away team, a prospect that Barclay clearly has trepidations about. Seems he’s got a bit of Bones’ mistrust of the idea of being torn apart and hurled particle by particle across the vacuum of space. He agrees to go along, but before O’Brien can beam him over, he chickens out and dashes out of the room.

He heads straight to Counselor Troi to talk about it. She agrees that on paper the whole idea of the transporter sounds downright terrifying, but tells him he can overcome his completely rational fear by tapping a sensitive spot behind his ear to stimulate his endorphins and calm down. Armed with this technique, which he constantly uses for the rest of the episode, Barclay faces his fears. After confessing to his own phobia of spiders, O’Brien beams him over to the ''Yosemite''. The investigation of the ship is going smoothly, but they can’t figure out what happened to it. There are signs of an explosion on the transporter pad, though the transporter is still operating normally. The ship’s engineer is found dead and covered in burns, but Dr. Crusher doesn’t think the burns are what killed him. And there are four crew members completely unaccounted for. Picard gets a tip-off from Starfleet that the Cardassians might have been involved, but they don’t find any evidence that proves it. They all beam back over, but this time while Barclay is mid-transport, he sees a hideous leech-like creature floating in front of him, which draws closer and touches his arm.

They run a diagnostic on the transporters, but find nothing wrong with them. O’Brien and La Forge try to assure Barclay that transporters are completely safe, citing that only a handful of accidents have ever occurred with them. Barclay counters that there is a condition known as transporter psychosis associated with them, but they tell him that there hasn’t been a case of it in ages. Barclay then notices a strange feeling in his arm. He asks the computer to list the symptoms of transporter psychosis, becoming convinced that he’s suffering from the disorder.

La Forge theorizes that the ''Yosemite'' attempted to transport a sample of plasma onto the ship and it exploded. They look into it, but Data notices that Barclay seems preoccupied with his physical condition. They let Counselor Troi know that he’s acting strange, and she responds by temporarily relieving him of duty. He tries to take it easy, but can’t get his mind off the transporter. He checks the transporter logs and finds an ionic fluctuation that occurred during his transport to the ''Yosemite''. He wakes O’Brien in the middle of the night and tells him to beam him to the ''Yosemite'' and back again and recreate the fluctuation, claiming that La Forge wants a tricorder reading of the phenomenon. O’Brien notes that Barclay didn’t bring a tricorder with him, and Barclay admits he was lying, but O’Brien understands and does it for him anyway. Barclay sees the leech thing in the matter stream again, and he orders O’Brien to wake the senior staff.

The senior officers hesitantly decide they believe Barclay’s story, and Crusher examines his arm to find traces of ionization similar to what they found on the ''Yosemite''. The engineering crew recreates the accident on the ''Yosemite'', and Geordi’s visor picks up life signs in the plasma. They decide that microbes in the plasma must have gotten into the transporter stream and onto Barclay’s body, and that the life form Barclay saw was probably a magnified image of one of those microbes. They decide to decontaminate Barclay by suspending him in the transporter stream so that the {{technobabble}} can technobabble. Barclay doesn’t like this idea one bit, but they tell him it should be perfectly safe, unless his signal degrades and he’s lost forever, which could totally happen.

They suspend Barclay and run the decontamination. Barclay sees the life form again. This time, he grabs onto it and pulls it out with him. It turns out that it’s one of the crew members of the ''Yosemite'', accidentally lost in the matter stream when they’d tried to decontaminate themselves the way Barclay did. After the other missing crew members are retrieved, Barclay chats with O’Brien in Ten Forward, casually mentioning that he’s not afraid of the transporters anymore. O’Brien one-ups him by showing off his pet tarantula, which starts crawling on the nonplussed Barclay's sleeve as O'Brien fetches their drinks.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: When examining Lt. Kelly's body, Crusher observes that he is covered in burns, but doesn't believe that's what killed him (the autopsy later confirms that they were purely epidermal). So... what did? (It's implied that it was something to do with the plasma microbes infesting his body, but this is never confirmed.)

* OOCIsSeriousBusiness: When Barclay barks an order at O'Brien, you know he's in extreme circumstances.

* SequentialSymptomSyndrome: While listening to the computer list the symptoms of transporter psychosis, Barclay acts out some of the symptoms. He gets to a few that he hasn't really experienced before, but then the list ends with dehydration, and he realizes that he's been chugging water for two straight scenes.

* SpidersAreScary: O'Brien tells Barclay about his arachnophobia, and how he overcame it. In spite of the fact that Barclay claims that spiders have never bothered him, he looks extremely uncomfortable when it starts crawling on him.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: The discussion between Picard and the Admiral mentions increased Cardassian activity in the sector, possibly alluding to the events seen a few episodes later in ''Chain Of Command Parts 1 and 2''.

He heads straight to Counselor Troi to talk about it. She agrees that on paper the whole idea of the transporter sounds downright terrifying, but tells him he can overcome his completely rational fear by tapping a sensitive spot behind his ear to stimulate his endorphins and calm down. Armed with this technique, which he constantly uses for the rest of the episode, Barclay faces his fears. O’Brien beams him over to the ''Yosemite'' (after a speech that boils down to, "You know what else is scary? Spiders.") The investigation of the ship is going smoothly, but they can’t figure out what happened to it. There are signs of an explosion on the transporter pad, though the transporter is still operating normally. The ship’s engineer is found dead and covered in burns, but Dr. Crusher doesn’t think the burns are what killed him. And there are four crew members completely unaccounted for. Picard gets a tip-off from Starfleet that the Cardassians might have been involved, but they don’t find any evidence that proves it. They all beam back over, but this time while Barclay is mid-transport, he sees a hideous leech-like creature floating in front of him, which draws closer and touches his arm.

The senior officers hesitantly decide they believe Barclay’s story, and Crusher examines his arm to find traces of ionization similar to what they found on the ''Yosemite''. The engineering crew recreates the accident on the ''Yosemite'', and Geordi’s visor picks up life signs in the plasma. They decide that microbes in the plasma must have gotten into the transporter stream and onto Barclay’s body, and that the life form Barclay saw was probably a magnified image of one of those microbes. They decide to decontaminate Barclay by suspending him in the transporter stream so that the {{technobabble}} can technobabble until the technobabble technobabbles.[[note]]Everybody got all that?[[/note]] Barclay doesn’t like this idea one bit, but they tell him it should be perfectly safe, unless his signal degrades and he’s lost forever, which could totally happen.

They suspend Barclay and run the decontamination. Barclay sees the life form again. This time, he grabs onto it and pulls it out with him. It turns out that it’s one of the crew members of the ''Yosemite'', accidentally lost in the matter stream when they’d tried to decontaminate themselves the way Barclay did (so, uh, yeah... tell me again how safe your plan was, La Forge). After the other missing crew members are retrieved, Barclay chats with O’Brien in Ten Forward, casually mentioning that he’s not afraid of the transporters anymore (if it were me, I’d be more terrified of them than ever after all that, but good for him, I guess). And O’Brien decides that now’s the perfect time to introduce him to his pet tarantula.

* BlatantLies:
** Barclay wakes O'Brien up to perform a transporter test, claiming that he needs to take tricorder readings for Geordi. O'Brien quickly points out that Barclay didn't bring a tricorder.
** For experienced Star Trek fans, O'Brien and Geordi verge into this territory when they're reassuring Barclay about the safety of transporters. O'Brien claims there have only been ''two'' transporter accidents in the last 10 years; any given season of Star Trek can beat that total. Geordi claims nothing strange has ever happened to him in the transporter; he was blown out of phase with the universe by a transporter accident ''four episodes ago''.

* {{Hypochondria}}: This episode actually predicts [[LifeImitatesArt something happening]] [[HilariousInHindsight before it was reality]]: hypochondriacs diagnosing themselves over the internet! In this case, Reg Barclay looking up symptoms for various diseases, including transporter psychosis.

* ProperlyParanoid: Almost entering the territory of TheComplainerIsAlwaysWrong, Barclay's transporter phobia isn't particularly unreasonable when you remember past transporter malfunctions such as in ''Film/StarTrekTheMotionPicture'' or "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E21HollowPursuits Hollow Pursuits]]", Barclay's very first episode ([[http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x21/hollow_pursuits_hd_249.jpg before]] and [[http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x21/hollow_pursuits_hd_252.jpg after]]), or "The Next Phase" just a couple episodes earlier, which affected ''Geordi''.
** It's somewhat comparable to a fear of flying. Yes, planes crash, but the vast majority don't, and pointing out the several cases that would theoretically justify his anxiety leaves out the hundreds of times onscreen (and probably millions of times offscreen) that the transporter works without incident.

* SequentialSymptomSyndrome: While listening to the computer list the symptoms of transporter psychosis, Barclay acts out some of the symptoms, such as excessive thirst.
* SpidersAreScary: O'Brien tells Barclay about his arachnophobia, and how he overcame it. At the end, it turns out that Barclay has it too.

* [[PitifulWorms Worms]]: The Yosemite crew-members that were "trapped in the beam" looked like worms. Might qualify as NightmareFuel - although the worms did not look particularly slimy, one of them looked at points like it was going to eat Barclay.

* [[PitifulWorms Worms]]: The Yosemite crew-members that were "trapped in the beam" looked like worms. Might qualify as NightmareFuel - although the worms did not look particularly slimy, one of them looked at points like it were going to eat Barclay.

* [[PitifulWorms Worms]]: The Yosemite crew-members that was "trapped in the beam" looked like worms. Might qualify as NightmareFuel - although the worms did not look particularly slimy, one of them looked at points like it were going to eat Barclay.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: the discussion between Picard and the Admiral mentions increased Cardassian activity in the sector, possibly alluding to the events seen a few episodes later in ''Chain Of Command Parts 1 and 2''.

* TrappedOnTheAstralPlane: Lt. Barclay thinks he's seeing things while being tranpsorted and thinks he has Transporter Psychosis, but he's actually seeing some people trapped in whatever they transport through when using the transporter. Barclay grabs one of them and hauls him back into reality, and then some security officers are sent in to rescue the rest.

* BlatantLies: Barclay wakes O'Brien up to perform a transporter test, claiming that he needs to take tricorder readings for Geordi. O'Brien quickly points out that Barclay didn't bring a tricorder.