Entering the Star Trek world as an unnamed extra with a few bits of dialogue, O’Brien soon became a fixture on the Enterprise D as it’s transporter chief before moving to Deep Space Nine to head up engineering and operations on what was thought to be a backwater outpost before it became one of the most strategically important stations in the quadrant!
As the only enlisted or non commissioned officer to feature in the main cast of any Star Trek show to date, O’Brien stands as the only working class hero in the Star Trek universe with a vast and varied career taking from the front lines of the Cardassian war as a soldier, to the front lines of the Dominion War as an engineer, retrofitting DS9, keeping the Defiant from blowing itself apart, and even sniping Dominion troops. All in a days work for the Chief!
In honour of his efforts and inspiration behind our newly re-crafted enlisted ranks, we thought it well overdue to say Hail to the Chief with five of O’Briens best episodes!
EMPOK NOR
DS9 Season 5 Episode 24
One of the highlights of O’Briens run in Deep Space Nine takes place on a mirror of DS9, a decommissioned station being scavenged for spare parts with his cadet sidekick Nog, and Garak as the tour guide. But Empok Nor wasn’t just decommissioned, it was quarantined and their arrival unleashed a psychotropic virus and the Cardassian carriers left behind…
As Garak becomes infected with the virus, and in turn begins hunting O’Briens team, the Chief has to find a way to stop a highly motivated trainer killer and get himself, and his team, out alive. Empok Nor is a fascinatingly dark departure form Deep Space Nine’s usual themes and presents a dark thriller that see’s O’Brien taunted about his past as a soldier as his teams slowly hunted down and killed one by one.
TRIBUNAL
DS9 Season 2 Episode 25
Following an arrest by the Cardassians, O’Brien finds himself on trial for a crime he didn’t commit. But that doesn’t really matter as in the Cardassian justice system, the verdict comes first and the trials just for show…
Sharing the spotlight with Odo in a unique coupling, the Constable has to find out what’s behind O’Briens tale of woe and try and fight against a legal system that’s fixed by default. Turns out O’Briens past came back to him after bumping into a former shipmate from his days during the Cardassian conflict, but it wasn’t a chance encounter after all…
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THE WOUNDED
TNG Season 4 Episode 12
The first real story about O’Brien and a prelude of what was to come in Deep Space Nine, the Wounded is also the first appearance of the Cardassians. After being attacked by a Starfleet ship, Gul Macet leads a retaliatory attack on the Enterprise. A confused Picard promises it’s all a weird misunderstanding and learns a rogue Captain is on the cusp of reigniting a recent war.
O’Brien, largely a background character up until now, served with that Captain during the Cardassian conflict and is brought out of the lower decks as the expert on his former boss. But after fighting in the war, and recounting the brutality of a conflict on Setlek III, O’Brien struggles to put his own prejudice and memories of the fight behind him…
WHISPERS
DS9 Season 2 Episode 14
Growing suspicious of everyone around him, O’Brien tells the story of how he ran away from Deep Space Nine. Recounting the story from a stolen runabout, O’Brien recaps how in recent weeks things has been peculiar. His crewmates seemed distrustful of him, but it went beyond odd behavious at work. His wife was acting strangely too…
Suspecting everyone had been brainwashed, he ran. But things weren’t as they seemed. On a trip to Parada, O’Brien had been replicated in a plot to use the replication in a political move against the planets rebels. Playing on the idea of a conspiracy on the station, it turns out the replica just didn’t realise he was the fake all along…
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HARD TIME
DS9 Season 4 Episode 19
With the amount of times O’Brien was put in bad scenario’s as he was the most down to earth and easiest to connect with, it became a bit of an in joke. O’Brien must suffer. There were few moments as harsh and as painful to watch than seeing him suffer through Hard Time.
Charged and sentenced on an alien world where prison is a memory implant rather than actual incarceration, in a matter of hours O’Brien lived in solitude for decades. It’s an efficient idea as well as it was effective. You get all the punishment of a life sentence without the cost or resource and it’s not just a simple memory implant, the time and experience lives with you and when O’Brien woke up, all that prison time was as real as anything he’d ever experienced.
Struggling to adjust to a normal life and that no time has really passed at all, there’s a lot of tension a both at home and at work as he tries to figure out how to be an engineer again and struggles to cope with balancing the trauma of decades of isolation and suddenly being back in the middle of a happy marriage again. But as his frustration turned to aggression, he had to face the reality of his time in mind prison. He wasn’t in isolation. He had a cell mate. Through periods of being starved and abused, malnourishment turned to paranoia and after decades of having no one but each other, O’Brien killed his only friend in a scuffle over food.
Riddled with shame and guilt, O’Brien wasn’t just adjusting to life after prison, but to the fact that he’d murdered a man over nothing. Coming to a head, it took his space bestie Julian to talk him down when the guilt became too much to bear and O’Brien tried to end his own life showing us just how past breaking point O’Brien had come and how much of a lasting impact his sentence would have on him.
Did we miss out your Favourite O’Brien episode? GEt engaged and let us know at Starbase Europa!
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