30 Years Ago, Star Trek Went Full Black Mirror With One Chilling Episode
Was O’Brien really made to suffer?
Star Trek loves giving people retroactive memories. Most famously, the Morgan Gendel-penned Next Generation classic “The Inner Light” allowed Jean-Luc Picard to live an entire lifetime in just a few minutes. TNG gave Picard even more heartbreak by having Sarek mindmeld with him on more than one occasion, making those family memories, including Spock, part of him, too. Recently, both Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy have also gone to the condensed memory well, with tender and heartbreaking results. But what if the instant-memory thing wasn’t a sweet little sci-fi parable? What if, instead, having condensed, implanted memories was a punishment?
30 years ago, during the week of April 15, 1996, Deep Space Nine flipped the script on this sci-fi twist with the brutal episode “Hard Time.” Partly, it was so chilling because it didn’t bother to hide the sci-fi twist. Instead, “Hard Time” attacks things the way Black Mirror might today. It’s not about the revelation that these memories are “fake,” but about what that might do to a person after the twist is revealed.
The smartest thing about “Hard Time” is that what could have been a Twilight Zone-esque rug pull is revealed in the minutes before the title credits even roll. Chief O’Brien (Colm Meaney) is sitting in a strange prison cell, drawing an ornate pattern in the sand. Some green energy filters through the room, supposedly decontaminating him, and wipes away his sand art. He’s got a giant beard, and we’re clearly supposed to think this is an older version of him. Suddenly, an alien prison guard says he’s been there for 20 years, and it’s time to let him go. Cut to the present, and the younger O’Brien we’re used to seeing is unstrapped from a medical bed while Kira (Nana Visitor) looks on sadly. Does Miles have some hallucinatory illness? No, after being accused of espionage by the Argrathi, O’Brien was given a prison sentence that was carried out virtually.
The fake prison sentence is only the beginning of O’Brien’s troubles.
From there, the episode dives into what such virtual memories might do to a person, and how someone could actually live with 20 years of simulated prison time in their mind. The most interesting twist here isn’t just that O’Brien has serious (and instant) trauma, but that he lies about his virtual memories to his friends and family. The twist of what he’s lying about is a massive spoiler, and if you’ve never seen the episode (or if your own memory has been altered), you should watch “Hard Time” to witness the revelation.
If someone you knew was catfished by an AI bot, would they tell the truth? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what level of guilt they might feel about the real emotions they transferred onto the AI. This isn’t to say that “Hard Time” is about AI, but it predicts some contemporary conversations about it. O’Brien’s cellmate, Ee'char (Craig Wasson), never actually existed, but O’Brien’s intense memory of him is life-changing. This differs from “The Inner Light” trope in which the people of Kataan actually existed. None of this happened in “Hard Time,” which makes O’Brien’s pain and suffering much creepier.
O’Brien suffers through another tough one.
Fans of DS9 are probably aware that the show often has episodes featuring O’Brien going through some horrible situation, seemingly because the writers loved torturing him. Generally called the “O'Brien Must Suffer” formula, longtime DS9 showrunner Ira Steven Behr described it like this in the Deep Space Nine Companion: “Every year, we like to drive O'Brien totally mad ... We just like to hammer him because he's such a great character. And he's so accessible.”
Of all the “O’Brien Must Suffer” episodes, “Hard Time” stands out as the most creative. What could have been an episode that ended with “it was all a dream” became something much darker. Yes, it was all a dream, but that didn’t make anything better. In fact, it made it much worse.
