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UP2 Presents: Hard Time
This week the crew reviews the episode “Hard Time”.
Convicted of espionage, Miles O’Brien is given the memories of twenty years in prison in a matter of hours. Returning to Deep Space 9, O’Brien finds he cannot shrug the memory of his awful experience or rid himself of the guilt he feels over the death of his cellmate.
Well, this week O’Brien really gets put through the wringer. A fairly hard hitting episode that generated a lot of good discussion. Continue the discussion with us. Let us know what you think about this one.
Sorry, I’ve fallen a bit behind due to work commitments again! How am I still first on here though?!
Did Matt Hansen call this episode fun?! I know we like to torture O’Brien once a year, but I wouldn’t call this one fun!
I wouldn’t even call this one good, sadly. And clearly that’s a departure from what the rest of you thought.
I love the concept. Yes, it’s one that’s used a lot around this time of Star Trek, but here they try to focus on the actual punishment and not clearing of the crime that brought it on.
But there are a lot of problems with it.
One, the usual episodic issue of never coming back to this. Just like Geordi la Forge in The Mind’s Eye where he ended with a session with Troi to rebuild after his torture, he’s fine next week and this is never touched on again. Deep Space Nine falls into that trap less than any of the other Star Trek series, but sadly it does so on this occasion.
Two, the treatment of O’Brien after his punishment causes most of the problems! Let’s get him back, put him back to work as soon as he’s proven he can remember how to do the job and never mind whether he’s mentally stable enough to do it, suggest he have counselling sessions but don’t actually order him to take them through command or medical grounds, let him back into his normal family life as if nothing has happened – therefore actually endangering his family in my book…
A lot of people need sacked for this. First up, Sisko and Bashir. Their blaise attitude to the psychological problems that O’Brien has directly leads to O’Brien attacking Quark and even considering hitting Molly. No wonder Miles thinks he should kill himself, he gets literally no proper help whatsoever.
Three, why don’t they wipe the memory again? Well… exactly. As you pointed out, they’ve done it before. Okay, so two episodes ago it was a full wipe, but the Pen Pals episode you also reference wasn’t anything so bad. Maybe the problem here is that it’s 20 years worth of memories so it’s not short term memory like Sarjenka.
But even accepting that, these aren’t real. So a good psychological session programme should be enough to get O’Brien thinking that way and to stop worrying about it. That’s if you set him on that path anyway, which they don’t because they just let him avoid it the whole time.
So what we have here is an episode that does showcase the psychological problems that O’Brien has, but apparently is friends and colleagues are far too uncaring to do anything about it until it’s almost too late. I’m truly astounded that you thought differently about that! As far as I can see, O’Brien is lucky Bashir walked in at the right time, a few more minutes and he’d be gone and they would all have to live with the regret that could and should have done a lot more.
Is that what they were going for? If the message was that friends shouldn’t be so blaise about friends psychological problems, then they nailed it. But sadly I don’t think that was the aim. They wanted to highlight O’Brien’s PTSD and missed the mark because I was far too distracted by the fact they were trying to force him back to normal!
Credit where it’s due though, Bashir is great at the end, I’ll agree with you on that one. But it really shouldn’t have come to that point if he’s been great to begin with.
Four, how come you can kill someone in your memory punishment and not have your punishment extended because of that? What kind of rehabilitation lesson is that? O’Brien literally kills another guy for food in this episode, and there are precisely no recriminiations because of it whatsoever. It’s near the end of his twenty years, he just kills him and lives out the last of those days on his own instead.
So what happens after his punishment is complete? You can just kill people for food now? Again, someone has to sit down with O’Brien ASAP and point out that none of this actually happened and he didn’t actually kill anyone. It was all in your head Miles.
Except it’s not, because if O’Brien has control over what happens in this punishment memory dump then it seems O’Brien has a major problem. If pushed hard enough, O’Brien will revert to primal instincts and kill. Most of us never get to that point so it’s only ever a theoretical concept that we probably all hope wouldn’t be the case – I know I don’t fancy killing if I get pushed far enough but until I’m in that position I’ll never know. Well, O’Brien has been in that position and now he knows – he does!
What do you even do with that? Aside from speaking to a psychologist I mean. There are some aspects of your own psychological make-up that are best left untouched, but unfortunately that’s just not an option for poor Miles.
This should be a brilliant episode. At times, it feels like it might be. But then they the writers go and throw in something stupid and it just annoys me. And there’s nothing worse in Star Trek than episodes that actively annoy me.
And then you go and throw in the idea of bringing Sito Jaxa back, and I’m even more annoyed that they didn’t. But I accept that one is down to my wishful thinking rather than this episode.
Overall, this one is a great idea, very badly executed. I’ll give this a middle of the road three for that, but I’m putting this episode behind me before I mark it down any more!
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