Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Lt. Barclay

4. He Has An Illness Named After Him

Reg Barclay Star Trek
CBS Media Ventures

Reg Barclay has quite the medical history - holodiction, transporter phobia and hypochondria. The latter led him to self-diagnose with transporter psychosis and Terellian death syndrome. He had neither of these conditions but does have the questionable honor of having one particular illness named after him.

Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome is something of a misnomer, given that the disease was accidentally created by Beverley Crusher. What is with the Crusher family's grudge against Reg? The reason that Protomorphosis Syndrome is named after Barclay isn't that Dr. Crusher was avoiding blame, it's because it was intrinsically linked to a genetic abnormality in Barclay's body.

This abnormality meant that when he was given a hypospray to activate a dormant cell that could fight the flu, all of his dormant cells were activated. This caused a nightmarish transformation into a prehistoric creature which soon affected everyone else on the ship. Barclay blamed himself for the bizarre transformations of his crewmates, but Crusher assured him it was all down to her. Before then offering to name the condition after him.

Read the room, Beverley.

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Citizen of the Universe, Film Programmer, Writer, Podcaster, Doctor Who fan and a gentleman to boot. As passionate about Chinese social-realist epics as I am about dumb popcorn movies.