“Hard Time”
Written by Daniel Keys Moran & Lynn Barker and Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 4, Episode 18
Production episode 40514-491
Original air date: April 15, 1996
Stardate: unknown
Station log: O’Brien—with wild gray hair and a thick beard—sits in a prison cell, drawing an elaborate design in the sand that covers the floor. A decontamination procedure wipes out the design, and so he starts again.
But then two people walk in and tell him that, after twenty cycles in prison for espionage, he’s free to go. They toss him out of the cell—
—and then he awakens, looking just like he normally does, in uniform, with a device attached to his head. The same woman is there, along with Kira. O’Brien’s confused, as it’s been twenty years, yet Kira looks the same. It turns out that Agrathi prisoners are punished by implanting memories of being imprisoned rather than actually maintaining a prison system. So O’Brien only thinks twenty years have passed—it’s actually only been a couple hours. But even though none of what he remembers really happened, it was real to him.
Sisko explains what happened to Keiko: O’Brien had asked some questions about Agrathi technology, questions O’Brien thought were just innocent queries, but were enough to get him convicted of espionage. By the time the Agrathi informed Starfleet of what happened, the sentence had already been carried out.
Bashir meets with Kira and O’Brien at the runabout pad. The doctor doesn’t want him to be overwhelmed, so he keeps his exposure to others minimal at first. He’ll let him see Keiko after he’s run some tests. Bashir asks if O’Brien had any company during his imprisonment, and O’Brien says he was completely alone the whole time.
We then flash back to O’Brien’s arrival in the cell, where we see he had a cellmate, an Agrathi named Ee’char, who gives him a fruit. Ee’char’s been alone for six years, so he’s grateful for the company. So he lied to Bashir.
After his examination of O’Brien, Bashir reveals to Keiko that the Agrathi didn’t just implant memories, they ran him through a time-compressed simulation of the prison experience. O’Brien’s memories are genuine, and Bashir can’t remove them.
In the infirmary, O’Brien asks the replicator for the Agrathi fruit that Ee’char gave him, but the computer doesn’t have the pattern for it. When Bashir brings Keiko in, at first O’Brien sees Ee’char before realizing that it’s his wife. He’s forgotten that she’s pregnant.
At dinner that night, O’Brien unconsciously sets food aside in a napkin. He wasn’t fed regularly, sometimes going days without being given food, so when actually was fed, he would eat as little as possible and hide away the rest. In flashback, we find out that he learned that particular trick from Ee’char, who also showed him how to draw geometric shapes in the sand to occupy his time and his mind.
Back in the present, Keiko awakens to find that O’Brien isn’t in bed with her, but instead curled up on the floor, like he was in the cell. She puts a blanket on him.
Worf plays darts with O’Brien in Quark’s, and O’Brien again hallucinates Ee’char. O’Brien works with Jake to recall what the various tools are in his box (an amusing reversal from when Jake apprenticed with O’Brien) before going to work. Muniz checks on one of his repairs, and says, “Keep up the good work, Crewman—inside a week, you’ll be running the place.” O’Brien smiles and says, “Don’t you forget it,” but as soon as Muniz walks away, the fatigue and exhaustion of keeping up appearances catches up with him.
Bashir checks up on O’Brien, concerned that he hasn’t been to see Counselor Telnorri in ten days, when he was supposed to go see him three times a week. But O’Brien just wants to forget Agrathi and get on with his life, which he informs Bashir of in the nastiest manner possible before storming off. We then flash back to a very similar meltdown he had in the cell, exploding at Ee’char. Back in the present, he snaps at Odo, and physically assaults Quark when he doesn’t bring his drink fast enough. Then he hallucinates Ee’char again, but this time they converse, with Ee’char insisting that O’Brien needs him, and O’Brien insisting that his erstwhile cellmate is the last thing he needs. But Ee’char’s image won’t leave him alone.
Sisko has no choice but to relieve O’Brien of duty and order him to attend daily sessions with Telnorri until the counselor says he’s ready to return to duty. O’Brien is exceedingly unhappy with this, going so far as to toss away his combadge before heading to the infirmary to yell at Bashir. But walking out on Bashir doesn’t get rid of the Ee’char hallucination.
What finally convinces O’Brien that something is really wrong is when he explodes at Molly, coming within a hairsbreadth of hitting her, and still scaring the crap out of her. He runs to a cargo bay and starts smashing everything in sight before going to the weapons locker and pulling out a phaser. He puts it on his maximum setting and points it at his neck.
However, Bashir walks in on him. O’Brien insists that he wants to kill himself to protect Keiko, Molly, and the other people on the station from the monster he’s turned into. O’Brien finally tells Bashir about Ee’char. Not long before he was released, O’Brien and Ee’char hadn’t been fed for more than a week. O’Brien discovers that Ee’char has been hoarding food without telling O’Brien about it, and O’Brien attacks and kills him, and then discovers that he was hoarding enough for both of them, but by then it’s too late. The very next day, the guards started feeding him again.
Bashir tries to tell O’Brien that he didn’t mean it, but O’Brien did mean it. If it had been Bashir instead of Ee’char, he would’ve done the same thing. O’Brien thinks he’s no better than an animal, but Bashir points out that an animal wouldn’t have regretted killing Ee’char. For one moment, the Agrathi did strip away his humanity, but he can’t let that moment define his life or cause his death. The hallucination of Ee’char then says, “Be well, Miles,” and disappears. Bashir takes the phaser away, and gives O’Brien a treatment that will help with the hallucinations. O’Brien agrees to continue seeing Telnorri.
Then he goes home to his family.
There is no honor in being pummeled: At some point, every member of the crew tries to help O’Brien out, but (aside from Bashir at the very end) Worf is the only one who seems to succeed, as they are seen playing darts together—Worf also offers to go kayaking with him. At different times we see Odo and Dax trying to be nice to O’Brien and getting snapped at for their trouble.
Rules of Acquisition: When Quark—who is quite overwhelmed with customers—doesn’t bring O’Brien his synthale fast enough, O’Brien assaults him.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Keiko does everything she can to ease O’Brien’s transition, and is generally supportive and understanding.
Keep your ears open: “After six years in a place like this, you either learn to laugh or you’ll go insane.”
Ee’char telling O’Brien his theory on how to survive prison.
Welcome aboard: Rosalind Chao and Hana Hatae are back as Keiko and Molly, and F.J. Rio makes his second of three appearances as Muniz, following “Starship Down”; he’ll be back in “The Ship.” Margot Rose, last seen as Eline, Kamin’s wife in TNG’s “The Inner Light,” plays Rinn, while Craig Wasson plays Ee’char.
Trivial matters: The story for this episode was one of several pitched by screenwriter Lynn Barker and science fiction author Daniel Keys Moran in the first season to Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Evan Carlos Somers. Wolfe championed it, but Michael Piller wasn’t interested in buying it. When Ira Steven Behr took over show-running duties from Piller, Wolfe convinced him to buy the story. However, by this time the very similar Voyager episode “Ex Post Facto” had aired, with Somers listed as the co-writer. Moran considered legal action, but decided not to pursue—and then was really surprised to find out that Paramount wished to, years later, finally buy his story (which was called “Injustice” at the time). Moran’s contract, which gave him and Barker story credit, and which promised a future teleplay deal for either DS9 or Voyager (which then never actually happened), wasn’t signed until after shooting had begun on “Hard Time.” Two drafts of the story and the process of it being bought can be found online here, here, here, and here.
The character of Ee’char was not part of the original story, but grew out of another story that was never produced. The writers room had been batting around a sequel to TNG’s “The Lower Decks,” where Sito Jaxa was found in a Cardassian prison, and one of the story beats was that she was suffering PTSD in part because she killed her cellmate, someone she had previously befriended. The Sito story never came together, so Wolfe used that plot point here.
Bashir makes reference to O’Brien’s past traumas when talking to Keiko: the Setlik III massacre, first mentioned in TNG’s “The Wounded,” his imprisonment by the Paradans in “Whispers,” and his trial on Cardassia in “Tribunal.”
Bashir says that he can’t remove O’Brien’s memories of his imprisonment without wiping his entire memory, which makes one wonder if he’s unfamiliar with Dr. Pulaski’s technique used on Sarjenka in TNG’s “Pen Pals” (and which failed when Crusher tried it in “Who Watches the Watchers?” which may be why Bashir didn’t consider it here).
This is the first time there has been any mention of a counselor assigned to DS9, in the person of Telnorri, who’s never seen, nor is ever mentioned again. The next time a counselor will be seen on the station, it will be in the person of Ezri Dax in the seventh season.
Walk with the Prophets: “Daddy’s home.” Modern Trek has loved its regular (usually annual) traditions: the Q episode, the Barclay episode, the Lwaxana episode, the Zek episode, the Mirror Universe episode (which we’ll get next time)—and, of course, the “let’s abuse the holy crap out of O’Brien” episode. We got “Tribunal” in the second season and “Visionary” in the third, and now we have this. (“The Assignment” will be next.)
And it works because Colm Meaney does such a wonderful job of playing O’Brien’s quotidian qualities that it’s particular fun to watch him get his ass kicked.
Plus we have a great science fictional concept here. If you have abandoned the notion of imprisonment as anything but punishment, and you have the technology, this method of VR imprisonment makes perfect sense. As Rinn points out in the episode, it saves a lot of management and infrastructure, as long as you don’t really care about rehabilitating.
Part of me would’ve liked a bit more about the Agrathi, about what O’Brien was doing there by himself, about whether or not there were consequences to their imprisoning an alien for twenty years without even alerting his government before passing sentence. It’s made worse by our never seeing the Agrathi before or since.
But that would’ve taken time away from O’Brien’s PTSD story, and that’s where the story meat is anyhow. Wisely, most of the screen time is given over to O’Brien, his family, and Bashir, so the focus can be entirely upon how O’Brien readjusts to life on the station.
What I especially adore about this episode is that it examines the consequences. Too often in episodic television, that’s ignored because of the need to finish the story in the allotted time. As great an hour of television as “The Inner Light” was (ironically, also with Margot Rose as a guest), the one thing that was missing from it (or, more accurately, from subsequent episodes) was showing how Picard reintegrated into life on the Enterprise. This episode provides us with that (without shortchanging the actual experience O’Brien had, as the flashbacks do a superb job of showing what he went through).
Everything in this story just works. Meaney absolutely sells O’Brien’s trauma, showing how he’s changed, but allowing the old O’Brien to bleed through periodically—like when he snarks off Jake and Muniz. And I love how everyone is patient with him, and helpful, but not to the point of obnoxiousness—nor do they indulge him past the point where it might hurt him. Keiko simply is there for him, letting him work through what he needs to work through. Worf—the one who’s known him the longest—does the same, while both Bashir and Sisko refuse to let him hurt himself more and force him to take care of himself whether he wants to or not.
But the heart of the episode is Craig Wasson’s stellar performance as Ee’char. He’s the perfect companion for O’Brien, someone who will help keep him sane, give the always voluble O’Brien someone to talk to—and, of course, we know from the first act that something horrible happened to him, because O’Brien spends the bulk of the episode denying his existence. However, the actual fate is something we don’t expect, as it’s something O’Brien would normally never do, and it’s something he can’t forgive in himself. It’s left to Bashir to remind him that it wasn’t a normal circumstance, and that he regrets the action is all he needs to prove that it isn’t an action he would usually take, and it’s one he can recover from.
Daniel Keys Moran’s story, submitted with Lisa Barker, had Keiko be the one to have the climactic conversation with O’Brien, and when they pitched the story in the first season, that made the most sense, as the O’Brien-Bashir bromance hadn’t developed yet. But I still think that this scene should’ve been between O’Brien and the woman he chose to spend his life with, not the guy he plays in the holosuites with.
That is, however, a minor complaint, and one probably dictated by the fact that Alexander Siddig is in the opening credits and Rosalind Chao isn’t, though it’s more evidence of the writers’ ability to only sporadically write a good marriage. Overall, this is the best of the O’Brien abuse episodes, not because of any particular flaws of the others, but because this one just fires on all thrusters.
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at LI-Con 1 in Rockville Center, New York this weekend, alongside fellow authors Jody Lynn Nye, C.J. Henderson, John Grant (a.k.a. Paul Barnett), T.J. Glenn, Roy Mauritsen, Paul Levinson, Anatoly Belilovsky, and Alex Shvartsman, voice actors Kristen Nelson and Amy Howard Wilson, editor/packager Bill Fawcett, science writer/editor John Rennie, game publisher Oscar Rios of Golden Goblin Press, and bunches more. His schedule can be found here.
While this is a superb character piece, part of me wishes there had been some follow-up to this event. Once again, the episodic nature prevents past events from interfering with different shows.
We could have had brief glimpses into O’Brien’s PTSD troubles later this season, and in the fifth one as well, especially in episodes like The Assignment, where it could have caused some extra inner conflict. The Ship, a brilliant episode in its own right, could have benefitted from a PTSD revisit as well.
And I disagree about using Keiko as the one to resolve O’Brien’s troubles. I agree about the occasional need to show the marriage, but I don’t think Rosalind is strong enough as an actress to carry such a scene.
And besides, Siddig nails it. After four seasons of growth and development, this was the perfect culmination of the Bashir/O’Brien friendship. Behr and Wolfe’s efforts with these two paid off and it was one hell of a ride.
I thought Bashir was the perfect character at that scene with O’Brien at the end. Aside from Keiko and family, Bashir was the person who had the most emotional investment in O’Brien’s well-being, while having the benefit of having just enough distance by virtue of not being a family member. That gave him some freedom to support him in a way that Keiko may not have been able to. Also, largely agree with the first comment here.
Eduardo: I could not disagree with you more about Rosalind Chao. The character of Keiko rarely if ever gave her the chance to really show off her chops, sadly.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I agree with that. They should have revisited this character aspect again. At least with Picard after “Inner Light” they brought out the flute on occasion, mentioned it again once or twice. With O’Brien, they could have at least mentioned:
Bashir: Want to play Darts?
O’Brien: Can’t; I have to go see Telnorri.
That doesn’t bring this episode down any because it’s not this episodes fault that they didn’t do that, so I agree with the rating.
It’s well written. It’s certainly well acted (Colm Meaney is severely underappreciated as an actor). And yet, I just hate this episode. Mostly because it is the textbook example of “the universe shits all over Miles O’Brien” episode. Yes, it kept happening because Meaney is a good actor and O’Brien is supposedly the everyman that the viewer can best identify with, but it became so horribly overdone. It makes me resent this episode, perhaps because it is done so well.
That said, I have come to wonder if the murder of Ee’char was programmed into the memories. The whole thing about him having squirreled away enough for two and food suddenly being delivered again the very next day is just too pat. I also wonder if the hallucinations of Ee’char are also programmed in as a sort of halfway house/rehabilitative effort.
Obviously they don’t care about rehabilitation because this whole system just seems crazy – if anything, it seems like it would make a prisoner WORSE and less able to be re-integrated into society. I wonder if the incident with Ee’char was somehow intended to happen that way – were they attempting to drive things to a point where O’Brien would snap? It was actually my first thought as soon as we had the flashback – I had a feeling it was something like O’Brien having killed him or hurt him in some way.
This is also somewhat similar to the previous episode in that it deals with a character trying to come to grips with a serious flaw that they thought at the time led to people being killed, but in the end did not – but was still real at the time.
But, I have to agree with the others commenting back when this started that O’Brien should have gotten his own category :)
@5 – I actually thought the same thing at first! That maybe the hallucinations were part of something implanted to help with the recovery.
But, the more I watched the episode, the more I decided the whole system was way too effed up and sadistic and that, like your first comment, the whole intent was probably to get him to snap and kill him in the first place (and why would you do that, just so you could then ‘rehabilitate’ them with hallucinations?) because the Agrathi are assholes.
I have to agree @1; that the show basically hits the reset button for O’Brien after this episode makes these events less memorable or important.
@7
But, the more I watched the episode, the more I decided the whole system was way too effed up and sadistic and that, like your first comment, the whole intent was probably to get him to snap and kill him in the first place (and why would you do that, just so you could then ‘rehabilitate’ them with hallucinations?) because the Agrathi are assholes.
Now, that I agree, and it also deserved a follow-up, even though we never see the Agrathi ever again (after all, the plot is merely an excuse to make O’Brien suffer).
Because, honestly, after watching this episode, in terms of the Trek universe as a whole, these guys deserve the same end the Cardassians are going to have at the end of the war: 800 million dead or preferably more.
I have zero sympathy for the Agrathi.
Lisamarie, I very much agree with you there, and I’m sad that Bashir doesn’t point that out to O’Brien at the end: He simply broke under torture.
In an extremely twisted way, one could even admire the Agrathi, as they seemed to have developed the ultimate punishment: A device that makes you hate yourself.
When I flew out to LA to pitch to DS9, the person next to me on the couch as I waited in Ron Moore’s outer office was Daniel Keys Moran. I was surprised to hear him say how unhappy he was with how “Hard Time” had been revised by the producers, since it’s one of my all-time favorite DS9 episodes. It’s an ideal example of how DS9 acknowledged the complications of ST’s better future without invalidating it or tearing it down. This is a world where humanity truly has bettered itself, and O’Brien can’t live with himself because he feels he’s failed to live up to the ideals that he believes in and strives for. Which is just the kind of dilemma people would have in a society where they hold themselves to such high ethical standards. It’s easy to write stories where characters come into conflict because they’re jerks or immature or dysfunctional people, but it’s more challenging to find meaningful conflict among more noble and well-adjusted people in an optimistic world. That’s what I aspire to in my own writing. And this episode proves that it can be done, and done powerfully. More to the point, it finds a way to generate a moving character conflict not in spite of those utopian values, but as a direct result of them. That’s just brilliant.
Still, I agree that the total lack of any followup in later episodes is deeply frustrating. I mean, O’Brien is subjectively 20 years older, even aside from the hellishness of those perceived years. He should be a radically different person from this point on — just as Picard should’ve been after “The Inner Light.” Instead, they’re both reset to their default personalities by the very next week. In my first published Trek tale, SCE: Aftermath (thanks again for buying that, Keith), I made a point of having O’Brien reference his time in therapy with Counselor Telnorri as something that was beneficial for him (in part to acknowledge the episode’s impact in some way, and in part just because I’m so sick of the cliche of characters dismissing the value of mental health care).
As for the Agrathi “prison” system, yes, it’s totally dysfunctional and terrible at actually achieving the goals of a penal system — but the same goes for the modern American penal system, so it’s hardly implausible that such a thing could exist.
Ah, my favorite of the “O’Brien Must Suffer” trope.
Superbly acted, and the attempted suicide scene was one of the most beautiful moments of acting on Trek that I’ve ever seen. I think that Julian was the best choice, not only becuase he had the medical background to properly counsel Miles, but also because had it been Keiko, I think it might have come off as a) emasculating for him to be so vulnerable in front of his wife (I know, not a bad thing, but O’Brien is kind of portrayed as the Man’s Everyman) and b) would have had a different connotation than the “best friendship” that Miles has with Julian.
My take on it was that Ee’Char was Miles’ best friend in that he knew him for 20 years, so in some ways, that’s the longest time he’s known anyone outside of his family and childhood friends we don’t see. And whereas he’s known his wife and Worf for longer, Julian now occupies that “Best Friend” space. So, I felt it was kind of the original Ee’Char, and that kind of bond that isn’t romantic love is what allowed Miles to feel safe and not go through with the suicide.
I don’t know, there’s just something I find truthful and endearing for a Best Friend who abrogates all judgment and opinion in the pursuit of selflessly trying to help you, showing that they care, and that you aren’t alone. It might be a similar personal experience, or a longing for a best friend as comparable to Julian in this situation.
In any case, this is one of my top 5 DS9 episodes, and I love it to death.
I hate this story because it’s a lets torture O’Brien in new and sadistic ways episode. He goes in an innocent guy and comes out a murderer. Everyone’s performances are great especially Meaney’s but I’ve never rewatched this one because it makes me to sad, which tells you how memorable it is so, I agree with the rating. The problem with Keiko is the way the character is written not Rosalind Chao’s ability.
You know, it would take away the drama of the episode, but there’s current research into drugs that can impede the retention of memories, with an eye toward administering them shortly after traumatic events in order to prevent PTSD. There are ethical questions about memory removal, of course, but since these memories were false and placed in O’Brien’s mind as, essentially, an assault, I wouldn’t see any ethical problem with just erasing them altogether. So medically it should’ve been possible, but of course then there would’ve been no story.
Also, similarly, it should’ve been possible for Bashir just to contact ops and have the computer shut down the phaser remotely. The TNG Tech Manual established that phasers interface with the ship’s computer to prevent them from firing above about Level 8, in order to prevent damage to the ship. So the computer link should enable full shutdown as well. Starfleet has occupied DS9 long enough that the station computer should be interfaced with the phasers by now. Again, though, there goes the story.
http://shop.startrek.com/deep-space-9-obrien-suffers-t-shirt/detail.php?p=496978
Who else has one?
@9 Ah, the peace, tolerance and understanding promoted by the Trek franchise. Somfin’ special.
The Outer Limits did a very similar episode only 4 months later. Season 2’s “The Sentence”. I liked that episode just as much as this one, which oddly enough I saw before I saw this one.
@14 We’ve the that phaser trick on screen during TNG. Didn’t Worf shut down Rasmussen’s phaser by remote in ‘A Matter of Time’?
@18: Ah, yes, I believe you’re right.
If you just want to hurt the criminal, it would be a lot simpler to flog them. And if you want to incapacitate them to stop them from committing further crimes, it is totally useless.
This form of punishment would seem to make most sense precisely to encourage rehabilitation. Whatever experiences you expected to induce rehabilitation could be programmed into this virtual penitentiary. After all, killing your cellmate might well make most cons emerge feeling penitant.
Of course, it did not work well on O’Brien! But he is not a member of the species on which it was designed to work.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html
I couldn’t help but think of this episode when I started seeing ethicists discussing the use of VR and drugs to do just this sort of thing in the media a few weeks ago! Star Trek really DOES think of the future before it happens? :D
@bhaughwout –
In fact the Slashdot discussion on that report was subtitled “from the miles-was-never-the-same dept.”
@20: It’s a myth that traumatic experiences somehow “shock” people into going straight. Generally they just cause more damage and make people more prone to harmful behavior. Abuse does not heal; it only leads to more abuse. That’s true whether the abuser is a parent, a teacher, or a state.
If you want people to go straight, you need to show them what that’s like, teach them how to lead better and more constructive lives. Positive reinforcement leads to rehabilitation.
Anyway, think about the people who did this to O’Brien. They accused him of espionage for asking some simple, innocent engineering questions. They convicted and punished him before his superiors could even be notified of his arrest, which means there’s no way in hell he got anything remotely resembling a fair trial. To all indications, these are people who worship “efficiency” above all else, including fairness, justice, and compassion. So I don’t believe for a moment they gave a damn about rehabilitating people. They just wanted to punish and break them as efficiently as possible, because that’s what that kind of state does to people.
Meanwhile: Keith, I thought “Agrathi” didn’t sound quite right, so I checked Memory Alpha, and apparently they’re actually the Argrathi.
Like some other commenters, I never really liked this episode in spite of its quality. Just too macabre, I guess.
However, I do like the Worf parts. After Odo and Worf a few episodes ago discussed antisocial-lifehacks, it’s nice to be reminded that Worf really does have some empathy, and really does value how long he and O’Brien have worked together, even though sometimes (if he’s sober) he likes to pretend that it’s not much of a friendship. This episode presents a form of suffering that Worf’s Klingon pride doesn’t prevent him from sympathizing with, and it’s nice to see his efforts as a result.
I’m on board the train of “with there’d been more follow-up” but, like most, also thought this was a really good episode. As I’m pretty sure was pointed out back in the ‘Inner Light’ review, at least in TNG, there’s no specific timeline between one ep and the next, it’s possible that there were weeks or months between the end of one ep and the one that followed, so it’s reasonable that Picard DID go through some intensive therapy that we just never saw. With the heavier reliance on the story arc in DS9, it’s a bit more obvious (well, to me, anyway) that there’s a gap.
7. Lisamarie – But, the more I watched the episode, the more I decided the whole system was way too effed up and sadistic and that, like your first comment, the whole intent was probably to get him to snap and kill him in the first place (and why would you do that, just so you could then ‘rehabilitate’ them with hallucinations?) because the Agrathi are assholes.
Well, duh – obviously, this is WHY we never saw the Agrathi again! Actually makes a certain amount of sense. I mean, shouldn’t the Federation put up a big “Here there be extremists” tag on every map they’ve got (or at the very least a strongly worded “Traveler warning” from the Federation Bureau for Interstellar Affairs or something), just so something like this doesn’t happen again?
@25: Even if Picard or O’Brien did go through extensive therapy, that doesn’t change the fact that, from their subjective viewpoints, they’d lived through decades of life-changing experiences. Therapy could’ve stabilized them, but it wouldn’t have reverted them to the exact same people they were 20 or 50 subjective years earlier. They should’ve been written as radically different characters from those points onward.
That would be a good story to tell. Star Trek: Federation Bureau for Interstellar Affairs…basically a travel agency to the stars. Don’t go there, too much Klingon activity. Oh, and there, Orion Slave Traders.
Then, one of their offices have a scandal where the Department of Temporal Investigations discovers an agency is selling trips to the past/future. Interesting, indeed.
@23 I said nothing about “shocking” anybody into anything. I said that O’Brien might be expected to feel guilty about murdering his cellmate.
And arguing that this guilty memory would be less effective on humans than some other memory is beside the point – the system was set up for members of an alien species, after all. For all we know, it could work perfectly well on them.
@28: Regardless of the exact words, the point is that traumatic experiences are not as rehabilitative as we tend to assume. Torturing someone for 20 years in order to drive him to the point where he would murder his best friend is the exact opposite of how you’d rehabilitate someone. Remember the dialogue — this wasn’t just some holodeck game, these were his real life experiences as far as his brain was concerned. They conditioned his brain to a point where it was more prone to violence. That would make him worse, not better. It would do the same for any being whose brain functioned in a way we could comprehend, because it’s a basic matter of conditioning, a learning process of the kind we observe in just about any species with the ability to learn at all, from Pavlov’s dogs to a simple flatworm learning a maze. His brain was trained to function in that way by reflex, and that training would stick whether he wanted it to or not. We saw that all through the episode, all the habits he’d learned like hoarding food, and the increased aggression that led him to attack Quark. He couldn’t stop behaving the way he’d acted in the simulation. That’s not just my hypothesis, it’s what the episode itself spent 40 minutes demonstrating.
And again, it is obvious that the Argrathi’s motives here were not remotely benevolent. They convicted and punished him without giving him a chance to defend himself. They’re so paranoid that they put a stranger through 20 years of hell just for asking a few questions. This is clearly not a civilization driven by benevolence. They don’t give a crap about rehabilitating their people, they just want to maintain their grip on power and torment those who defy them, just like any oppressive state does. The Soviets sent people to gulags to “rehabilitate” them, but it wasn’t benevolent or helpful.
CLB@11 and Keith, I completely agree that the Argrathi penal system is effed up and counter productive. And there is an entire separate discussion on the validity of the US penal system, but one thing the US system does that the Argrathi system does not is remove prisoners from the bulk of society. Ethical or not, I think this is the primary goal of the US system – to help people *feel* safe.
The Argrathi system takes individuals, conditions them to be more violent and then lets them go… It makes no sense.
I suppose the true goal of their system could be to drive the prisoner to suicide, thus effectively issuing capital punishment. It nearly worked on Miles after all.
I don’t think we should assume that the Argrathi system actually does work as intended. We have no evidence of that. All we do have evidence of is the Argrathi’s belief that their system is more “efficient” than regular prisons — and of their extreme haste to convict and sentence accused offenders. That suggests to me that this is the kind of situation where ideology has trumped practicality, where they believe the system ought to work a certain way and thus convince themselves it’s actually better even when it isn’t. It’s certainly not unprecedented for a state’s approach to penology to be based more on what’s politically or ideologically popular than on what actually works.
Heck, given how bad they are at rehabilitating criminals, maybe the reason they switched to virtual prisons is that they have so many criminals that they just don’t have the budget to maintain enough prisons, so the VR thing is a money-saving policy. Although, again, I doubt very much that it would actually work as intended. I’d say they’re due for a collapse or crisis of some kind before much longer.
Perhaps Argrathi prisoners aren’t sent on their marry way as Miles was. His may have been a unique case due to being a UFP citizen. It seems to me releasing these prisoners would quickly create a violent and disruptive subset of society. Something a totalitarian government would want to avoid. So, either the system is due for a major collapse as you say or maybe Argrathi prisoners are dealt with differently.
I second those that have stated this is a difficult episode to rewatch. It deserves a 9, but I usually skip it when perusing the Netflix episode list. It is just too unsettling.
edited to add:
or… Perhaps this is an example of a government fabricating a problem to justify tightening its control.
1) get people to fear criminals
2) offer a “solution” to the problem
3) release hardened criminals back into society to sow more fear
4) lather, rinse, repeat
I’m confused as to why the system couldn’t be used for rehabilitation for normal prisoners.
There is a popular theory that the majority of criminals are criminals because they don’t have the education and job skills to acquire and maintain a job. Imagine if, rather than sticking you in a cell for 20 virtual years, you went to school for ten years, catching up on your missing primary and secondary education as well as either a trade school or higher education. Then, for the next ten years, you worked. Initially under the “control” of the penal system, but with more and more freedom during the last few virtual years.
If you can make a person remember being in jail for twenty years, you can make a person learn other things, too. (Of course, this techique could also be used to implant education, etc., into children’s minds. So much for the modern notion of education in general.)
BTW, O’Brien isn’t a normal prisoner. He isn’t a member of the society. They have no real interest in rehabilitating him. He’s educated, but an enemy of the state.
This means that their penal system may work exactly as described for normal prisoners. It’s only people you want to punish that get O’Brien’s treatment.
@33/4: There’s, sadly, plenty of precedent for real-world penal systems that are more about “punishing” people than rehabilitating them. The fact that it makes the inmates even more dysfunctional when they get out doesn’t matter to the people who institute the system, because it’s more about ideology to them than practicality.
So, again, there is no reason to assume that the Argrathi system actually works at all. They believe it’s a good system because it suits their ideology or their political careers to pretend it is, but it’s probably just as corrupt and ineffectual as many real-world penal systems.
And, again, the Argrathi decided O’Brien was “an enemy of the state” because he asked a few harmless engineering questions, and convicted and punished him without giving him a chance to defend himself. This is clearly a paranoid and dictatorial state, so surely they’re going to treat their own people every bit as badly, if not worse, than they treated a visitor from an outside society. States like that are always most brutal to their own people. Look at the USSR under Stalin. Countless Soviet citizens were declared “enemies of the state” for having opinions that didn’t exactly correspond to the party line, or for asking innocent questions that officials didn’t want them to ask, or just for being associated with other people who’d gotten in trouble, or eventually for no reason at all except ones that existed in the minds of the paranoids running the government.
I would guess that if this kind of
treatmenttorture could bring O’Brien to consider suicide, then there probably aren’t many repeat offenders among the Argrathi. They can claim that they punish criminals and set them free without having to resort to the death penalty, knowing that most former prisoners won’t survive more than a few months after release. It’s so much more efficient when the criminals kill themselves after all.@36: We can’t assume that it drives everyone to suicide. Different individuals respond differently to stress. O’Brien was driven to despair because he was raised to believe in the perfectability of humanity and to aspire to high, noble ideals, and he couldn’t live with the idea that he’d fallen so far short of that. That’s what’s great about this story — that the crisis arises directly from the utopian ideals of the Federation and how they shape an ordinary man’s view of himself. It wasn’t just the prison simulation that drove O’Brien to that point, it was the conflict of that simulation’s events with the values and ideals O’Brien has been raised with.
But as I’ve been saying, the implication is that the Argrathi state is dictatorial, oppressive, and paranoid, so the Argrathi themselves probably live in a society that imbues them with much less idealistic values. So they probably wouldn’t react to the prison simulation the same way. Heck, conditions in their everyday lives may be pretty bleak to begin with, which might be why the prison simulations have to be even worse. If they had to kill a friend to stay alive, or commit some other awful and demeaning act for self-preservation, that might just be what they’ve always expected from life, and they’d count themselves lucky to have survived after all, even at others’ expense.
The power of this episode is what it reveals about O’Brien as an individual, as an everyman in a utopian civilization. It does the episode a grave injustice to assume that O’Brien’s reaction was some mechanical, predictable response that would be exactly the same as everyone else’s.
I love this episode but it is so painful (as many DS9 episodes are) for me. I was just talking to my therapist about it when I went to my meeting for PTSD from Iraq, and I even asked my counselor to watch this episode, “Siege of AR-558” and “It’s Only A Paper Moon” to see what I am talkign about in my feelings on some things. Granted, I did not have 20 years of hell like Miles did here, but DS9 will always have such as special place in my heart because I discovered it on DVD while on my 2005 tour in Iraq. I am blathering here, just this episode means a great deal to me. I’ll show myself out now.
“about whether or not there were consequences to their imprisoning an alien for twenty years without even alerting his government before passing sentence”
This. Thisthisthisthisthis. This whole episode is built on a titanic moment of “Wait – WHAT?” that’s never addressed.
I wanted to see consequences. I wanted to see Federation diplomats chewing out Agrathi leaders. I wanted to see sanctions, see trade broken.
(The Federation has a shocking history of blithely ignoring offenses that, in most cultures, would be considered reasonable causes for *war*. “The Big Goodbye” anyone?)
I had no idea that Daniel Keys Moran had written this story. He’s well known in the Star Wars community for writing one of the strongest Boba Fett stories ever made (and my personal favorite) “The Last One Standing” as well as as another strong Fett entry “A Barve Like That”. The fact that such a strong DS9 episode came out of a story he was part of is no surprise at all.
Yeah, I have to say that I hate this episode, for many of the reasons that have been articulated here. The ‘logic’ of the punishment system is just insane and it really detracts from the story for me.
It would be an insane way to run a legal system. I can kind of imagine a society who believes that something like this is just. It forces the criminal to serve the sentence, without taking away his or her ability to live a full life. But clearly this society has no interest in justice. O’Brien is punished unjustly. And the NATURE of that punishment is incredibly cruel. And, precisely because the actual punishment in the real world only takes a few hours, it’s impossible to win an appeal. That’s horrendous. Indeed, that’s the only reason the plot is possible. Star Fleet comes to rescue him but, alas, it’s already too late. But it’s only too late because of the ludicrous system they have set up.
Okay, but obviously this is a tyrannical state of some kind. So the ‘justice’ explanation isn’t right and we should instead assume that it’s deliberately based on the desire to inflict terrible pain. But, even if that’s the case, it STILL doesn’t make any sense. All that it does it produce angry and insane people who are returned to society fully capable of committing more crimes.
On top of all that, why on earth, even if they had such an insane system of punishment, would they employ it against a Star Fleet officer? It’s a deliberate and incredible provocation, for no discernable purpose. This isn’t like the Cardassians putting O’Brien on trial, where this is a political backstory to explain things. This is just random evil race doing a random evil thing that is PRECISELY calibrated to exact the maximum amount of emotional damage for no discernable purpose other than to set up the plot.
All of which is to say: the absurdity of the setup and the total lack of long-term significance makes the episode feel like a terrible act of violence against a good man just to set up some emotional scenes. And it doesn’t feel right.
@41: “So the ‘justice’ explanation isn’t right and we should instead assume that it’s deliberately based on the desire to inflict terrible pain. But, even if that’s the case, it STILL doesn’t make any sense. All that it does it produce angry and insane people who are returned to society fully capable of committing more crimes.”
You could say much the same thing about the American penal system, but it remains in place anyway. Because the politicians who put it into effect don’t care whether it genuinely reduces crime — they only care that their “tough on crime” rhetoric gets them re-elected. If the facts show their approach does more harm than good, they’ll have their spin doctors bury the facts. There are lots of government policies and institutional rules that don’t make sense but are kept because some people have a vested interest in keeping them or because the populace isn’t getting informed about what’s really going on.
@42, I get that. I’m saying that it’s completely illogical even by those standards. There have to be some sort of vested interests promoting a policy. But there really aren’t any for this.
Even if we accept the premise of general sadism, it still doesn’t explain why you would inflict that sort of two-decade-long trauma on someone and then immediately send them back out into the wild. It’s totally counterproductive, terribly INEFFICIENT way to punish people. I mean, it extracts the maximum amount of trauma in the minimum amount of time. But it doesn’t distribute that pain in any useful sort of way, nor does it exhibit the pain in a flagrant act of public violence. It’s just dumb.
And this is all especially true in the case of O’Brien. It’s a serious provocation of the Federation for no reason whatsoever. It exists solely so that they can have an episode about O’Brien suffering, and that suffering can be inflicted without creating any actual effects.
@43: I say again — real life is full of penal systems that don’t work and are stupid on paper but that are still used anyway. Governments do things that don’t make sense. That’s part of life. So it doesn’t make a story unrealistic to portray a government enacting arbitrary and nonsensical policies. Maybe the Argrathi are a dictatorship and their dictator is simply insane. It’s not like the Soviet penal system under Stalin made any more sense than what we saw here.
When O’Brien sees Keiko as Ee’Char, it made me think, ‘O’Brien’s not the only one who’s changed in the 20yrs since’, especially with that look on Bashir’s face. When did O’Brien snap at Odo? It doesn’t appear in the episode. O’Brien points the phaser at his chin, not his neck. Quark always knows just the right to say, doesn’t he? O’Brien wasn’t there by himself. Kira was with him, unless she was sent to fetch him in a Runabout, which is doubtful. 39: Argratha is a planet in the Gamma Quadrant, so they’re probably a race the Federation has never dealt with, much less traded with.
Though this episode has some great sci-fi elements, I never cared for how it was implemented. Particularly being built around a main character. This would have proven much more convincing if they had brought in a good guest actor to play the part of an ancillary Starfleet officer that goes through this ordeal. As with ‘The Inner Light’, there never is any real delve back into these traumatic and life-changing events — other than passing comments. But I’m being harsh :/
I’ve read a lot about this episode and it didn’t disappoint. It’s one of the strongest DS9 episodes so far. I just wished they wouldn’t always choose poor O’Brien to suffer, heh.
O’Brien must suffer.
This series has done the most to challenge the Federation’s Utopian ideals, especially when it comes to humans from Earth. When O’Brien talks in the climax about how he was taught growing up that humanity had evolved beyond hate, blah, blah, blah, I have to wonder what kind of insane indoctrination goes on in Federation schools on earth.
Also, are other Federation species saddled with the same conceits or is it just humans who have evolved so much? That would seem kind of prideful and supremicist. I find myself thinking of Quark’s speech from “The Siege of AR-558”.
It seems like this hubris in and of itself gives the lie to the idea that humanity really has evolved beyond having worked out a system that produced a paradise on Earth. As Sisko said in “The Maquis”, it’s easy to be a saint in Paradise. Even then the Federation doesn’t seem to have figured out that teaching kids that kind of doctrine and denying the underlying nature still exists sets them up for just the kind of crisis that O’Brien is facing here.
Overall a great episode – another one that I hesitated to rewatch but I’m glad I did.
This episode contains a wonderful bit of dialog that has become a tagline in my family: as we retell it, at one point Ee’char says: “Miles, I’m worried about you. And you know you are in bad shape when your hallucinations are worried about you.”
Last episode it was Worf behind bars, facing a barbaric form of justice, and tortured by the memory of his victims. Seems odd to release these two episodes back to back.
Also, I know that continuity can be a challenge, but this story might have benefited from a reference that O’Brien was hoping to return to two adult children, instead of little demanding Molly.
It seems to me that even if they had abandoned the idea of rehabilitation, the Agrathi would still want a form of punishment that also acts as a deterrent to future crimes. And I don’t see that here. It’s certainly unpleasant, but the reason doing hard time is a deterrent in our own world is because we are mortal and have finite lifespans. Those 20 years I spent in prison can’t be used to be with my family, or learn to play the French horn. They’re gone and can never be got back. Whereas these 20 years are just an illusion. I can come out and I’ve lost nothing. There are certainly psychological aftereffects, and I can see this deterring small crimes, but big ones? I might do the mental math and decide it’s worth a couple hours strapped into a chair and therapy once a week to kill a guy. And it CERTAINLY would be worth it for something like espionage that could topple empires.
Between this and ‘Tribunal,’ it would have been cute to see O’Brien develop an amateur interest in interstellar law, at the very least for his own protection.
Lockdown Rewatch. A very good episode, I agree with the main review that’s it’s the best of the putting O’Brien through hell episodes, it’s also one of the Best O’Brien / Bashir story’s too, alongside Hippocratic Oath. The only thing I have against it is the ending and it’s the same issue as with the ending of The Inner Light form TNG. I always wondered then why Star fleet would let a Captain continue to stay in command when from his perspective he’d been away from the ship for around 50 years, here exactly the same O’Brien should be given at least a year away from work to recover and from a practical point of view remember and retrain for his job. But of course in the real world of television unless you intend to write a main character out then that’s not going to happen.
Professor Lemonade hits on the real silliness inherent in this system: the locals know about it. If Miles had known he was in a simulation the whole time, what would he have done differently? I doubt they can include “cell mates” with the regular citizens, because what are they going to do to them then if there are no real world consequences? Don’t get me wrong, I like the episode, but the system introduced doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.
@55/kalyarn: I think if you were trapped in a hellish simulation for 20 subjective years, you’d eventually stop caring that it was a simulation. The psychological damage would be just as real regardless. The torture itself is the consequence. I mean, O’Brien almost killed himself as a result of it. How can you say there are no consequences?
@56/CLB: No, I meant if you are dropped in a cell with a cell mate that you know isn’t real, will you be punished for torturing them, raping them, killing them? Miles wasn’t, his sentence wasn’t extended for murdering his cellmate, even though he thought he was really killing someone. If you know there are no consequences for what you do to your cellmate, then one imagines things can get pretty grim, which would further enhance the awfulness of this approach.
There were plenty of consequences for Miles, which would have held even if he knew it was a simulation – he experienced so much time/simulated time that he had forgotten his wife was pregnant, after all. He had been a 40-some year old man – and now fully a third of his experienced life was in a cell.
@57/kalyarn: I repeat: Even if you went into a simulation knowing it wasn’t physically real, after enough time, that distinction would cease to matter, because it would be the only reality you knew. You might well forget it was a simulation.
Besides, it’s missing the point to think that the cost to O’Brien for killing Eechar was further penal sentencing. No. The cost was the loss of his humanity. The cost was that he sank to the level where he could do such a thing. The act itself was the punishment.
@59 I’ve long harboured the belief that that was what they were waiting for to end his sentence. They were going to keep ramping up the awfulness of simulation, or had programmed it to ramp up since real time monitoring would be impossible, until he murdered his cellmate. It was carefully crafted to hit all of O’Brien’s emotional buttons in giving him a cellmate that he, Miles, would related to and bond with, then grind him down until such act of violence occurred. The cruelty was the point.
@60: Yes, that makes sense – they want their prisoners to leave prison feeling self-contempt (even if they felt no guilt for their previous crimes or were innocent as O’Brien)
17: It’s a good thing it’s The Outer Limits and not Babylon 5. That would just lead to more accusations of stealing from one another. And I know I said (five years ago!) there was no scene of O’Brien snapping at Odo, but today I saw that scene in a repeat. Why was it cut out? The bit with Odo and Quark at the bar makes a lot more sense to me now.
@62/David Sim: Did you see the episode in syndication on commercial TV? They often cut out scenes to fit in more commercials.
63: Yeah, I was watching Hard Time on YouTube and I got to see that bit with Odo and O’Brien. It was both jarring and interesting to see a bit of DS9 for the very first time again.
This episode is exceptional in what it manages to do in a single episode. It adroitly shows the morality and effectiveness of treating prisoners brutally – it’s an oddly mainstream set of views that basic judicial and prisoner rights spoil us and encourage criminality; that cruelty to inmates somehow rehabilitates and reconciles them to society, and is anyway their due; and that large, fair trials are a waste of time and money because the authorities probably bag the right guy. That crime and recidivism thrive in such conditions simply proves the system needs to be harsher. The Argrathi have come to the clinical, clean, polite, grotesque end result of that sort of thinking.
It shows us the emotional turmoil caused, as Christopher Bennett discusses so well in comment 11, when O’Brien violates his (and the Federation’s) ideals by doing one of the worst things it is possible to do while, and because of, being the victim of one of the worst things it is possible to endure. I like how the episode talks of therapy and counselling, the individual ways everyone tries to help O’Brien – as DeCandido points out in the review, everyone is patient, supportive and kind without being obnoxious, which takes very clever writing and acting. It feels like O’Brien’s deterioration is so unexpectedly fast and severe – for him it has been happening for very many years – that he nearly slips through an otherwise compassionate mental health system and a loving social network. Star Trek frequently fudges this horribly for the convenience of the plot, and I’m glad it doesn’t here.
Meaney is superb in this episode, and so is everyone else. The character of Ee’char was inspired, so likeable, strong and affable that it is easy to forget he was never real. Really good episode.
As @33 says, if you really had the technology to simulate 20 years of life in a few hours, there are some exceedingly useful things you could do with it (the same goes for the movie Inception). Education; mathematical research; literature writing; computer program writing; many other kinds of intellectual work (especially if it scales down—imagine if, mid-meeting, you could press a button and spend 10 seconds doing an hour of thinking); also vacations, the exact opposite of what’s done here. I suspect a race that invented such technology could use it to massively accelerate their development and outpace everyone else who lacked it.
Of course, we’re not necessarily shown that the virtual experience is truly like real life, only that it convinces the recipient of such, and that it leaves lasting memories and habits. Maybe all their device does is look at the brain and personality, construct a plausible-enough storyline for the person (perhaps it adjusts the cellmate’s personality until it gets the conclusion it wants), and then write a convincing set of memories and habits into their brain; all this without it being capable of eliciting 20 years’ intellectual work from the brain. Still, “implanting a predefined, personalized set of memories and habits” seems sufficient to cover a lot of education.