10 Awkward Things That Must Have Happened After Star Trek Episodes

10. Barclay's Soiled Reputation

The holodeck is a brilliant invention, but, as we've learned many times before, it can be easily abused in some truly disturbing ways.

In the Next Generation episode Hollow Pursuits (which you knew we had to talk about at some point), we got introduced to 'holo-addiction'. Lieutenant Reginald Barclay became so obsessed with holographic fantasies that he started completely avoiding real-world interaction and showing up late to work.

Eventually, La Forge went looking for Barclay and walked in on him playing a holodeck program where he fought and demeaned holograms of his superior officers in a 17th century setting. La Forge tried to explain that it was weird to recreate real people on the holodeck, and tried to help him out of his addiction, but it persisted, and he was soon caught in the act once again. This time, Riker, La Forge, and Troi all barged in to find the same program running, but this time encountered the 'Goddess of Empathy', a sexualised recreation of Counselor Deanna Troi, who was madly in love with Barclay.

They responded incredibly calmly, given how weird and invasive this program was. Regardless, it must have been hard for the three of them (especially Deanna) to walk past Barclay in the corridors after seeing all that. Like Riker said, there should really be some rules on the books against recreating real people on the holodeck. Maybe these rules were created later because of Barclay's creepy programs.