4x19 Hard Time

[9.3/10] The single-serving nature of most Star Trek episodes pre-DS9 means that you rarely got to see the aftermath and scars of all these grand adventures. Geordi gets the Manchurian Candidate treatment from a bunch of Romulans? He’s fine the next episode. Troi gets genetically altered without her consent and thrown into a tense espionage situation? No worries, she’s okay by the following week. Riker gets kidnapped by aliens and made to question his own sense of reality not once but three separate occasions? Don’t worry about it! Never mentioned again.

There are practical reasons for these things that make them excusable as a product of their time, but it’s frustrating because it elides one of the richest veins of storytelling. High water marks for The Next Generation like “Family” and “I, Borg” and even Star Trek: First Contact partly owe their power to the fact that they explored Picard’s scars from his encounter with the Borg in “The Best of Both Worlds”, a rarity for this era of the franchise.

That's what’s so cool, and also so harrowing about “Hard Time” from Deep Space Nine. It starts the story where so many episodes from Star Trek end it. When we meet Chief O’Brien, he’s effectively already escaped the danger. The peril is over. Now, for once, Star Trek can focus on the aftermath, the trauma, the picking up the pieces after dealing with something unimaginable, that the franchise has otherwise glided over for so many years. And it is masterful.

In a strange way, the episode asks, “What if we did ‘The Inner Light’ from TNG, except instead of being brought into a welcoming community, you were sent to a POW camp?” O’Brien must suffer, after all. So the aliens of the week accuse him of espionage, and punish him with a technology that gives him memories as though he’s spent twenty years in a brutal prison. He comes back psychologically ravaged, if physically fine.

“Hard Time” is about the lingering psychological challenges of having experienced such a trauma. On a broader level, it’s about PTSD, and the people who come back from horrible experiences that test the limits of the human soul and struggle to make it back to what used to be their normal. There’s no external threat here. No ticking clock. No galaxy-altering stakes. Instead, it’s just one man’s struggle to live with the torture he was unjustly subjected to.

In truth, at times it’s hard to watch. Colm Meaney often gives the kind of unshowy but impeccable performances that are easy to overlook but also easy to take for granted. He commendably underplays most of his scenes, bringing a sense of grounded realism to everyday interactions that helps the wild stuff that goes down in Star Trek feel like something genuine happening to real people.

But “Hard Time” gives Meaney a lot to do, and a lot of challenges as an actor, and he responds with what can only be called his most vulnerable, most honest, and most outstanding performance yet, which is saying something. O’Brien, and by extension Meaney, shows such layers here. It’s not easy portraying someone who is reacclimating to a life without horror, who is straining to present himself like everything is fine and normal, but who is breaking down on the inside. But Meaney is more than up to the challenge, with moments of reluctance, anger, and abject pain that cannot help but move the viewer (or, at least, certainly moved me).

There’s also so many little lived-in details that add to the sense of verisimilitude of what Miles has been through. The way he reflexively ferrets away his food, the way he reverts to sleeping on the floor because it’s what he’s used to, the way he struggles to remember that his wife is pregnant are all quietly heartbreaking. It would be a long time between “Hard Time” and Homeland, but these scenes call to mind an American soldier’s painful, uncomfortable return home after so long away on that show. Deep Space Nine doesn’t skimp on the realness of all of this, which makes Miles’ struggle that much more visceral and full of pathos.

Candidly, it’s hard to watch sometimes. If you’ve ever had friends or family members who’ve dealt with similar experiences, there’s something uncomfortably familiar about his reactions. The initial hesitance and uncertainty, the attempts to pretend that everything’s fine, the slow burning but quickly-erupting anger that shows a side of Miles even he doesn’t recognize. This episode is a very internal story, about someone recovering from an unimaginable trauma. The plausibility of the slow grind to coping with this hardship, mixed with scenes of his imprisonment and torture, are piercing and painful in how much truth rests within them.

The good and uplifting thing is that everyone around Miles is understanding and supportive. Deep Space Nine is rarely an aspirational show in the way that The Next Generation tended to be. But the way that everyone aboard models an encouraging response to O’Brien’s recovery is one of the most laudable things here. Keiko is endlessly understanding and supportive, and her covering him with a blanket on the floor is one of the most understatedly sweet moments on the show. Tough-as-nails Kira taking a soft tone with him, Worf wanting to play darts with Miles even though he doesn’t like the game, even Sisko insisting that Miles get help and get right before he can return to duty shows an understanding of the difficulty of what Chief O’Brien is experiencing, and the need to give him long runway and ample to support to help him start to get better.

Of course, the most significant player on that front is Julian. It’s a bit of an awkward position, because he’s both Miles’ doctor and his friend. But it’s also a unique position, because he cares about the Chief’s health and recovery from a medical perspective, but is also gentle, patient, and yielding but firm with him from a personal perspective. As “Accession” signified, the two have formed a close bond in Keiko’s time away from the station, and seeing that bond tested, yet affirmed, by how Julian helps Miles face this crisis even when Miles is pushing him away, is one of the more wholesome things in a tough episode.

But the pushing away is the point. Because Miles isn’t just struggling with adjusting to normal life again after a horrendous experience. He is alienating himself from others, isolating himself from the people he trusts and loves, because he’s scared of what he might do to them, because he feels guilt for what he already did -- murder his cellmate over a scrap of food.

I love the way “Hard Time” spoon feeds us that reveal and O’Brien’s growing discomfort with the memory, as represented by hallucinations of his quasi-departed friend, Ee’char. The “flashbacks” to O’Brien’s implanted memories illustrate the connection they formed over the course of years, the slow degradation of Miles’ ability to hold it together, and the fateful day when he was starving and beleaguered and could handle no more, so took it out on the only person around to bear his wrath.

It is sad, not just because it’s a tidy little story about what torture does to people, or because Ee’char was a bolt of light in a pit of darkness, but because it disturbs Miles into thinking he’s a monster not fit to be around people. We see him snap at Odo, at Sisko, at Dax, and at Julian. We see him physically assault Quark when he can't get his synth-ale on time. And most harrowing of all, we see him yell at young Molly, and eventually admit he might have struck her.

I’ll confess that the last part made me tear up, a sign of how this kind man had been brought low by this cruel punishment he’d done nothing to deserve. I hate that the show turned it into an act break tease, but it’s tragic and disquieting to watch him charge up a phaser and hold it to his own throat. It’s sad because you know he needs help, because what happened to him is entirely unfair, and because however wrong he is, you can understand why he feels that way. Seeing a part of yourself you hate, that puts the people you love at risk, is incredibly difficult.

Miles can't write the murder off as a simulation because, real or not, it was real to him, and he made those choices. He knows what he would do when pushed to that terrible limit, and he hates himself for it. And to the same end, this story is obviously fiction, but it mirrors the experience of too many who’ve been through hell, come back in need of healing, and worry that they’re too broken to stay around anymore. Rarely has Star Trek, in any form, cut to the quick of something so true and so sad in such an unflinching way.

But I love Julian’s response to his friend wrestling with his lowest point. Miles is worried his captivity stamped out the humanity in him. Julian reassures him that his pain and guilt is a sign that it’s still there, that it only left in for a moment, under the most dire and extreme of circumstances. And he tells him that the greatest tragedy would be to lose a good man, who does feel the empathy and care that make this hard for him. It’s the very sensitivity and fear about all this that show Miles’ captors didn’t eradicate his humanity. They forced him to slip for a single moment of weakness under impossible circumstances, until the true and noble part took back over again.

Accepting that, accepting the help he needs, accepting that it’s okay to let the people who love you get close to you without worrying that you’ll hurt them, allows Miles to make some peace with his demons and send the vision of Ee’char on his way. More importantly, it allows him to step back into his home and hold his daughter, gratified in the knowledge that the gentle, loving man is still there, and worthy of love. Were that all those who suffered like Miles did could believe and receive the same.

Despite the amateur, armchair analysis I deliver in these write-ups, I am not a psychologist or a counselor. I can't speak to the accepted practices for helping others recover from trauma, cope with PTSD, grapple with guilt and depression. I can suspect that even with a whole episode devoted to the aftermath and recovery for once, it takes more than one story-friendly “breakthrough”, and more time and healing than even a full forty-five minute episode can reasonably convey.

But I also believe it involves kindness and empathy from those who care about the person suffering. I believe it means letting people in, letting those who love you show it and help you on that path.I believe it requires recognizing, as Julian cautions at the end of the episode, that there are treatments, not cure, and any road to healing is a winding and open-ended one.

Too often, Star Trek skips over that part. There’s good justifications for that. People watch these shows to escape and to be able to enjoy the adventure and excitement of these complex but talented characters. Watching good people struggle with their slow-burning misery on an extended basis isn’t fun television.

But I think it’s necessary to show this sort of thing, at least once in a while, to recognize that these whiz-bang or intellectual adventures are not weightless or costless, and to acknowledge that even when the credits roll, real people take time to readjust, to forgive themselves, and hopefully, one day, to heal.