By Joshua Tyler | Published
Science fiction often reaches its peak when unusual circumstances are used to highlight real-world issues. One of the best examples of this is the way science fiction deals with PTSD and the horrific realities of the practice of torture.
Star Trek in particular has never shied away from torture. One of Star Trek: The Next Generation The best episodes, “Chain of Command,” revolve around him and featured plenty of discussion about counting lights. Yet while characters like Picard or Kirk have suffered, no one in the franchise, and perhaps not in the history of the entire human race, has suffered more than a key science fiction character .
He was not an officer. He was not a scientist. He is an enlisted man without any rank. This is a man who rolls up his sleeves and gets to work in the dirt.
His name is Miles O’Brien. And he’s a unionist.
Miles Edward O’Brien (Colm Meaney) was featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation very first episode and returned as a recurring supporting cast member. It has been featured regularly throughout The next generation run as the head of the Company’s carrier.
Her professional position has endeared her to both fans and the creators of the series. So when it came time for the first Star Trek spin-off, Star Trek: Deep Space NineO’Brien was cast as the character who would act as the head of operations for this series. I suspect he would never have agreed to this transfer if he had known the hell that would follow.
After his arrival in the first episode, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine quickly embarked on a week-by-week mission to break the body, mind and spirit of Miles O’Brien. There were even times when the series succeeded, although it generally bounced back and forth. Above all.
At first, his torments were more minor inconveniences like the station always breaking down, the constant nagging from his wife, or being forced to chase voles in crawl spaces. However, the torture inflicted on Miles O’Brien soon took on a much darker tone. After seeing the full history of his character, there is no longer any doubt that Miles O’Brien is the most tormented person in the history of the Federation. And perhaps in all fiction.
What follows is an account of the most horrific ways in which this lovely worker was viciously persecuted.
And no, we’re not talking about being married to Keiko. But that would be pretty bad.
THE TURNING OF MILES O’BRIEN
A visionary hell
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine In the season 3 episode “Visionary”, Miles ends up clashing with a future version of himself, before dying. Again, actually die.
This wasn’t one of those fake sci-fi shows, he’d be fine at the end of The Dead. New deep space completely kills Miles. Then, to add insult to injury, he is replaced by his future self. From then on, everyone pretends that the real Miles, the one who was killed, never existed.
The Miles who replaced him probably endures constant existential fear. He’s doomed to spend the rest of his life wondering if he’s really the person everyone thinks he is, or if he’s just a weird future clone of himself.
A court of humiliation and pain
In the Deep Space Nine Episode “Tribunal,” it seems like Miles has finally caught a break. He goes on vacation with his wife, at least until he is tortured and falsely imprisoned by the Cardassians.
The Cardassians are particularly adept at torture and do everything they can to make Chief O’Brien suffer. It culminates with the hapless Starfleet officer having his tooth pulled out with pliers, before being told that he has already been found guilty and will soon be executed.
Eventually his friends prove he was framed and free him, but the fact that he spends an entire week enduring physical abuse in Cardassia’s brutal prison system, while expecting to die, is all because he wanted to go on vacation, must have left some traces. a kind of lasting psychological damage.
The orphan of time forces the leader to see his daughter destroyed
Sometimes the torture Miles endures is due to what happens to others. Miles O’Brien prides himself on being a devoted family man and an excellent father. So, of course, in the season 6 episode “Time’s Orphan”, his daughter Molly falls into a time portal.
By the time Miles picks up Molly, she is ten years old and has spent that time living alone like a wild animal. His little girl is gone and in her place is some kind of crazy barbarian. He is forced to send her back into the time portal and accept her as dead, because she is so damaged that she can no longer live in the normal world.
In the end, a younger version of Molly comes out of the portal and Miles gets her back, but he still had to spend weeks dealing with the psychotic older version and experiencing the anguish any parent would suffer when would realize that her child is gone. .
Insane whispers
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine In the season 2 episode “Whispers”, Chief Miles O’Brien returns to the space station after completing an engineering job on another planet, only to find that his teammates and family are behaving strangely towards him . Everyone is strangely distant and suspicious.
O’Brien is no fool, and he quickly notices subtle changes in the way the station operates. As he tries to discover the reason for this sudden change, his paranoia grows, pushing him to investigate further.
Tensions rise, when O’Brien decides to flee the station on a runabout, convinced that everyone is part of a plot to replace or harm him. Pursued by his own friends, he goes to a meeting of Federation ambassadors, believing he must warn them of a potential infiltration on DS9.
However, in a dramatic twist, it is revealed that O’Brien is actually a replicant, created by an unknown entity, and the real Chief O’Brien undergoes surgery safely at the station. The episode ends tragically for replicant O’Brien, who is fatally shot just as he begins to understand his own identity.
This episode may seem like a rare victory for the real O’Brien, but it’s not. O’Brien is deeply disturbed by the whole ordeal. He is particularly affected by the replicant’s desperate attempts to connect with his family and the crew, highlighting a struggle for identity and belonging. The real Miles tries to reconcile the fact that his double, while not really him, shared many of his memories and emotions while interacting with the people he cares about.
20 years of torment in difficult times
What Miles O’Brien endures in season 4 New deep space The episode “Hard Time” may be the worst torture anyone has ever experienced.
It starts when Chief O’Brien becomes interested in alien technology and ends up being wrongly accused of espionage. He is sentenced to 20 years in prison and thrown into prison.
In case you haven’t noticed, Miles spends a lot of time in prison. This time he doesn’t come out.
During this episode, we watch the decades pass as the current former head of operations lives out the rest of his life in a gruesome prison cell. He is often on the verge of starvation. He is not allowed to receive visitors or come into contact with the outside world. His only socialization is with another prisoner, who ends up becoming his best friend.
Conditions become so bad that O’Brien and his friend begin to lose their minds. The guards abandon them and stop feeding them. On the verge of total starvation, half-lost of mind, Miles and his friend begin to fight for the few scraps of food they have left. In the ensuing struggle, Miles intentionally and brutally kills his best friend.
That sounds bad enough, but this isn’t a normal prison. It’s a prison simulation, it only happens in his mind. What seemed like decades to Miles was actually just seconds.
For Chief Miles O’Brien, it’s very real and it always will be. Yet the twenty years he spent there weren’t real, and when they were over, he was thrown back into his normal life as if nothing had happened. But this happened to him.
The things he believes he did and endured fuel intense post-traumatic stress, causing him to attempt suicide rather than continue. Doctor Bashir denigrates him and puts him in therapy, but Miles O’Brien is never quite right again.
Chief O’Brien’s Endless Torment
We could make an entire book out of it, there are so many horrible things in the chef’s story.
There was a time when Starfleet Intelligence forced Miles to go undercover and pressured him to intentionally have his friend killed.
There is his distant past which haunts and torments him already before we even meet him. Before he knew Miles on TNG, he was a soldier fighting in brutal conflicts against the Cardassians, barely surviving to tell the tale. So of course he ends up being forced to serve on a former Cardassian space station and befriend the enemies who killed his comrades.
There is more. Like the time he almost died from an ancient biogenic weapon
Or that bizarre incident where an alien takes control of his wife’s body and threatens to kill her unless he sabotages the station. Miles must protect his daughter from her own mother, a horrible prospect for any father to endure.
Chief O’Brien is the most important person in Star Trek
If there’s any comfort to be found here, it’s that it seems like Miles has finally been recognized for his courage and perseverance. In the distant future, beyond Star Trek: Deep Space NineMiles O’Brien is recognized as one of the most important people in Starfleet history.
He is immortalized in the third Star Trek: Lower Decks episode, “Temporal Edict”, during a scene in “the distant future” where a class learns about notable figures from Federation history. The scene ends with the reveal of a huge golden statue, immortalizing Chief O’Brien as one of Starfleet’s greatest figures.
Why was O’Brien chosen for this honor? It’s never been said, but it could very well be that surviving all these many torments will ultimately make him the perfect Starfleet officer.
Or it could simply be that he is the best, because Miles O’Brien, like his ancestor Sean, is more than a hero. He’s a unionist.