

   HARD TIME - Part Two (Revised Pitch) 




&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
This is the revised outline for "Injustice:"





Injustice (Outline)


TEASER:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
We open in Miles O'Brien's cell. It's spare, neat, and poorly lit. A cot, a
toilet in the corner(1), a sink. Low tech, ugly, functional.
Sweaty cement walls. O'Brien sits up in bed -- a quick efficient movement,
no grogginess, an "old con" instantly awake. His hair has gone gray and the
wrinkles at his eyes are more pronounced, but he's still fit -- and we see
why. He paces restlessly back and forth, shaking the kinks out, and then sits
down and starts doing sit-ups, then pushups. We cut and come back on his
hundredth pushup (he's counting, out loud), and he comes to his feet --


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
The door to his cell opens, surprising him. A woman stands there with a
pair of guards. They are all dressed head to toe in white robes that covers
everything except the eyes. The woman informs O'Brien that his sentence --
15 years -- has been completed. He's going to be released today.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
O'Brien takes the news calmly. They leave his cell and walk down a long
corridor together. The end of the corridor is simply an indistinct white
glow. The woman asks O'Brien if he repents his crime; he says he does, that
he's seen the error of his ways -- it's plain he's lying.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
She nods, accepting the lie; and they walk into the white glow together --




ACT ONE:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
A week before the opening of "Injustice," Keiko, Molly, and Miles took a
trip into the Gamma Quadrant together, to a world that sports some of the
genetically "oldest" life forms the Federation has ever encountered -- the
natives, for example, might look a lot like the "progenitor" race from
which humans, Klingons, Vulcans, etc., are all descended.(2)
The world, Rojas I, orbits a red dwarf and receives less of the high-energy 
radiation that causes mutations in creatures based on DNA -- as, evidently,
most species in the Star Trek universe are.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
The native species is ruled by another race that conquered them several
generations ago. (Much like the Bajorran/Cardassian situation.) The natives
are "Rojeni," the invaders "Vadeen." Miles, visiting the world with Keiko,
interfered with a Vadeen's administration of justice; the Vadeen was about
to summarily execute a disobedient Rojeni. Miles attempted to stop what
looked to him like simple murder -- and was restrained, convicted of
assault upon a Vadeen, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. (And the
Rojeni was executed anyway.)


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
By Vadeen standards, this is an extraordinarily lenient sentence -- due
solely to the fact that Miles was ignorant of their laws, and that he's a
husband and father.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Sisko arrives in the Defiant just as O'Brien is being released from his
prison sentence -- and we learn, along with a terribly disoriented Miles,
that only a week has passed; and that his prison term consisted of memories
implanted during that week. At first Miles refuses to believe what he's
being told; it was real, he tells them, as real as they are. But slowly he
appears to come to accept the reality of his circumstances -- he's fifteen
years younger, the arthritis that came upon him during his prison term has
vanished . . . and his daughter didn't grow up without a father. Indeed, in
a remarkably short time he seems to have come to grips with what's
happening.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
They return to DS9 and hand O'Brien over to Bashir. Bashir runs a variety
of tests upon O'Brien, and finds that O'Brien's completely healthy, except
that he really remembers having been through fifteen years imprisonment.
Bashir asks O'Brien if he's sure he's all right, and O'Brien assures him
that he is -- pretty convincingly; even the viewers should be left
wondering. Bashir finally concludes that there's nothing he can do about
the implanted memories -- O'Brien will just have to live with them -- and
O'Brien accepts this with remarkable equanimity. O'Brien's due to have
dinner with Keiko and Molly, but Julian asks O'Brien, a little awkwardly,
if he'd like to go throw some darts together before then. O'Brien stares at
him -- and then grins. He remembers that they used to do that.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
They head on down to Quark's, order their drinks and get their darts.
Julian steps up to the line, throws . . . and turns to O'Brien. He sees
that O'Brien is just standing motionless, staring at his darts. O'Brien
reaches out a finger, touches the sharp tip of the dart --


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
"They wouldn't . . . let me have anything . . . sharp," O'Brien says. Tears
begin to trickle down his cheeks. Bashir steps forward, as though to make
some comforting gesture, and O'Brien motions him back, and turns away,
making no noise, with the tears flooding down his face. He stands at the
bar with nobody around him, alone, holding his dart, and finally says
again, his voice breaking, "They wouldn't let me have anything sharp," and
we go to break.




ACT TWO:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
O'Brien's breakdown at Quark's is warning enough; the word goes out to
treat O'Brien with extraordinary care. And they all try to --
intellectually, they understand what's happened to him; but emotionally
they can't. Fifteen years hasn't passed for them -- hasn't passed for
anyone except O'Brien.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
(Roughly at this point we introduce Kasidy Yates into this episode, having
mentioned her briefly during the first Act. We send her off with Worf
and/or Jake(3) -- ).


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
O'Brien spends the night with Keiko, sleeping poorly -- he has waking
nightmares where he's back in his cell. A female voice says, "You're being
punished, Miles O'Brien." In the morning he reports to work. But he's . . .
forgotten things. Little things -- he turns down the wrong corridor on his
way there, he's forgotten changes and improvements he was working on in the
months before he was "imprisoned" -- and big things. He has a new assistant
who was brought aboard two weeks before he and Keiko went to Rojas I; and
Miles doesn't remember him, not his name, not even his existence. Miles
gets his bearings slowly as the day wears along, but keeps running into
things that he doesn't really remember very well -- and this bothers him.
Things that should be familiar, aren't.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
At the end of the day, he goes home -- just long enough to get into a fight
with Keiko. She's made dinner for him, and wants to talk about his day; her
interest is a little forced, and a little obvious, and it strikes a certain
distrust in Miles. He's looking for a fight and finally manages to pick
one; before she even realizes what's happening -- she's still setting the
table -- Miles is packing, and walks out, leaving her and Molly alone with
their dinner.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
In a very brief scene, Sisko, Bashir, Kira and Worf are seen discussing the
problem of what to do about Miles. Worf suggests they take the Defiant to
Rojas I and see if they can't . . . reason . . . with the planet's Vadeen
overlords. Sisko says that he tried that already, and failed -- and Kira
says, "Perhaps I should go."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Miles ends up back at his workstation, where things went so badly earlier
that day, staring at the computers and systems he no longer understands as
he should, and sits there in the empty room, with the lights dimmed, and
leans back. . . .


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
We go back to Miles's first moments in his cell -- to a woman's voice
telling him, "This is your cell, Miles O'Brien. This is the place where you
will spend the rest of your natural life, unless your sentence is commuted.
And for your sentence to be commuted, you must repent your crime."
(4)
Miles leans forward and he's at his workstation and he snarls, "I didn't do
anything wrong," and goes on to instruct the computer to tell him
everything that he, Miles, has done aboard DS9 in the last six months. We
go to break as he's getting to work.




ACT THREE:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Sisko calls O'Brien in to talk to him. Keiko is with him. He tells O'Brien
that they're concerned about him, that they want to see him readjust to
life on DS9; and that they're willing to make allowances for the ordeal
he's been through. They understand that he feels as though fifteen years
have passed, even though, of course, it hasn't -- after all, what happened
to Miles didn't really happen . . . and O'Brien completely flips out. He's
just spent fifteen years in prison because he made a trip with Keiko to
look at a world she found professionally interesting; and here she is, she
and Sisko, trying to tell him that nothing happened, really --


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
"You don't know!" he explodes. "It was real, it was as real as you are,
sitting here across the way from me." He tells of the days that stretched
into weeks, into months, and into years, as the decade and a half crawled
by. He paces back and forth in front of Sisko and Keiko, ranting about the
injustice of what's been done to him . . . five paces, turn . . . five
paces, turn . . . until it becomes very obvious to all of us that he's
pacing off the dimensions of his cell.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
We "flashback" into his cell -- and see that gray-haired O'Brien, pacing as
Miles is now pacing, ranting to the empty walls, blasting out his anger at
the universe, come back to Sisko's office, with Miles talking nonstop, in a
furious flood, a speech we see he's given a thousand times: No one came to
visit him in prison, no one wrote to him, sent letters or encouragement,
his daughter grew up without him, he assumed Keiko had remarried because
she never came, and the rage mounted in him, the fury over the injustice
visited upon him, because he made the mistake of trying to protect some
poor alien who they executed anyway.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
It was real, he says pleadingly, slowing down -- so real he could not tell
it from reality . . . and still can't.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Sisko asks him what he means by that -- and Miles tells them that he
escaped once. He broke out of the prison, and stole a starship and escaped
to DS9. And you turned me back over to them. (We flash in and out of the
scene where "Sisko" did this, where "Sisko" tells O'Brien that he's
committed a crime and must be punished.) "And they put me back in my cell.
Don't you understand, I've been out of that prison once already. And I'm
not sure this time is real either."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Finally, reluctantly, Sisko tells Miles that he's being relieved of duty --
sick leave -- however long O'Brien needs it. O'Brien protests, tells Sisko
that the performance of his job is the only thing that's kept him from
going completely insane; that he was working at it all night, and it's
really the only thing he's taking any pleasure in.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Sisko stands tough -- and sends O'Brien out, under the impression that
Miles intends to go home with Keiko.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
A brief sequence follows with Kasidy Yates and Worf. They're walking
through the Promenade, and she asks his advice about how he adjusted to
living at DS9. This gives us an opportunity for something amusing -- Worf's
take on how to get along with humans, Ferengi, Cardassian spies, etc.; who
can be trusted, and who can't. Yates mentions O'Brien, and the humor stops.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Worf, who served with O'Brien, says, "I would trust Miles O'Brien with my
life and my honor." In the BG, as he says this, Miles is walking into
Quark's.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Miles goes on a binge. At night's end, Quark suggests to a cheerful,
drunken O'Brien that, if Keiko's not being cooperative, perhaps O'Brien
should try one of Quark's private holodecks . . . and in his current grand
drunkenness, the thought of even entering a holodeck, another layer of
unreality, sends O'Brien wild. He starts to trash the place, and is stopped
only when Odo shows up and takes him into custody.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
We cut to a jail cell, O'Brien inside, with Odo on the other side of the
force field. Odo tries to talk to O'Brien, but O'Brien's not listening --
he's staring wildly around at the cell, half drunk, half insane -- and
then, very slowly, lays down on the floor of the cell, with Odo staring at
him . . . and starts doing situps, counting aloud. "One, two, three -- "
and we go to break.




ACT FOUR:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
When Sisko comes to get O'Brien out, O'Brien is perfectly in control again.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
He's being punished, and he knows it, and he knows how to deal with that.
He apologizes for his behavior, tells Sisko the things he knows Sisko wants
to hear, and leaves with in company with Keiko. Almost as soon as they get
out of sight, he locks Keiko up in some spare storeroom (or someplace where
she can't raise immediate warning) and tells her, "If I'm wrong, I'm sorry.
If I'm right . . . you should have come to see me. I missed you."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
He heads on down to the power generator(5) and rigs things
up to blow; and then calls up to Sisko and informs him, calmly enough, that
he wants out of this reality, out of this simulation, out of this prison or
whatever-it-is . . . or he's going to blow the station. He's rigged a dead
man's switch. I'm ready to die, he tells them -- I can't go on like this
any longer.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Kira arrives at this point -- she's got with her one of the subjugated,
white-robed Rojeni with her. The Vadeen wouldn't help her -- insisted that
O'Brien's sentence was not merely "just," but lenient. But there's never
been a subjugated race in the history of time, Kira says, that didn't have
an Underground; and this woman is one of them, someone who specializes in
"deprogramming" those punished by the Vadeen.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
The Rojeni woman's of little help at this juncture; she's got to be able to
treat O'Brien to do any good at all. It'll take time, time they don't have.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Julian has been assigned the job of trying to talk O'Brien down. O'Brien's
willing to talk to him, and to Sisko -- but not to Keiko; and he's still
calmly insisting that he's going to blow the station if they don't let him
go, if they don't stop punishing him.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
He won't talk to Keiko -- but she insists on talking to him. Sisko's out of
ideas and options -- so they send her in.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
"I love you," Keiko tells him. "Molly loves you. I'm sorry if I've ever
done anything to hurt you. I know -- you know -- that Molly never has. I'm
sorry we went to Rojas I, I'm sorry they did what they've done to you --
but I love you."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
She's walking forward as she talks. Miles stands motionless with the
deadman switch in his hand. This hits at the heart of it -- at the sense of
abandonment Miles has felt ever since all this started. He repeats, crying
now himself, that she didn't come for him, that she didn't visit --


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
She keeps walking forward, talking over him, repeating through her own
tears, "I love you. I love you and I love the daughter you gave me, I've
never loved anything else in the world more. If we're going to die right
now, then we'll just die . . . but I won't stop loving you, not now, not
ever."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
She's standing right in front of him and reaches out a hand, and whispers,
"Give me your hand." Miles reaches out the hand holding the deadman switch
-- and Keiko's hand closes over it, and they embrace, and we go to break.




TRAILER:
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
We come back from break, and O'Brien and the Rojeni deprogrammer are
sitting together. She's saying, "It'll get better with every treatment.
You'll probably never lose all the implanted memories, but they'll cease to
burn as they did, and you'll learn to distinguish them from things that
really did happen."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
We leave the Rojeni deprogrammer talking to Kira -- who's busy giving
advice on how to make life unpleasant for occupying invaders -- and follow
Miles back to his quarters, where Keiko is waiting for him.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
There's just a little tension between them -- Keiko asks him how he's
doing, and he tells her that he's better; and then she asks him what he
wants to do. Miles hesitates, and then, plainly still struggling with his
need, says, "I want to come home."


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
The next scene is later. O'Brien and Keiko are in bed together, and O'Brien
sits up in bed when his daughter Molly enters the room. She tells him she
had a nightmare, and asks if she can sleep with them tonight. O'Brien looks
at her, and says, "Sure, come to bed. I had a nightmare too," he says, "but
I think it's over."




&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Footnotes for "Injustice" Outline:



1.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
  I know Star Trek doesn't usually deal with stuff like that [the
toilet]; but we want to suggest that O'Brien's been in solitary
confinement, in this single tiny cell, for 15 years; and I think that,
subliminally, this would help. The camera needn't dwell on it.



2.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
  This is strictly a note re makeup; aside from telling viewers this
planet is "old," and therefore of interest to Keiko, we needn't mention the
progenitors; irrelevant to this story. But people paying attention should
catch it.



3.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
  If I'm not mistaken, and I may be [NOTE: I was], Worf and Yates know
each other, right? From an old TNG episode? This gives us room for a nice
bit, if this hasn't been done previously to this episode -- a nice little
comedy of manners bit where Sisko introduces Yates to Worf, who it turns
out she knows -- small universe -- at the same time Worf and Keiko are
getting reaquainted, and we learn that they have slightly different
recollections of the circumstances of Molly's birth; all in a quick little
two or three minute scene.



4.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
  The "flashbacks" herein should feel almost like an organic part of the
scenes they occur in -- in this case, O'Brien leans forward, is in his
prison cell, leans back and is at his workstation again. Reinforcing, for
the viewer, O'Brien's lack of distinction concerning his surroundings.



5.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
  Or controls for the new super-torpedoes, or whatever. Some convenient
location from which to destroy the station.




&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
It's intriguing to see the changes that were rung in the episode from this
point forward.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Some of it was continuity stuff for the various character. I stopped
watching Star Trek after the "Ex Post Facto" incident, and had no idea what
was going on with Worf, for instance, or that he'd already been told that
Keiko was pregnant. (I've still never seen an episode of DS9 with Worf in
it.)


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
The character of Ee'char was entirely Robert's invention. (So far as I know
-- there was some question about credit to yet a fourth person on this
episode, at one point.)


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
A couple of substantial improvements --



1.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
 Miles' suicide scene. That blow-up-the-station bullshit was ridiculous
and I never liked it, and I'm glad Robert chose not to go with it.



2.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
 The dropping of the alien species occupation storyline. The only reason
this was in there in the first place was to enable them to remove O'Briens'
memories, which Robert insisted they had to do -- and I refused to write a
scene where Sisko went to the world O'Brien had been imprisoned on, and
give the "Truth, Justice, and the Federation Way" speech that Robert
requested. Once Robert decided that O'Brien should simply be left to deal
with his memories, this entire subplot became unnecessary.



3.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
 Ee'Char. Mixed feelings here ... this was nice background, but it
detracted more than a little from what in my mind was the real story, which
was O'Brien's adjustment to his present. That said it was an interesting
development, and one that I hadn't expected.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Things I didn't like? Well, lots of stuff. The final story was perhaps a
third or a quarter mine. I'd have done the dialog very differently, and I'd
have given Miles and his wife a lot more screen time together. I
understand why they did this this way -- the actor playing Bashir is a
series regular, and Rosalind Chao isn't. But Chao would have been a better
choice for virtually all of the emotional healing O'Brien needed -- either
that, or something I never suspected is going on between Bashir and
O'Brien. You never know ... but in any event, it would have made for a far
better story to have seen O'Brien's love for his family rescuing him,
rather than the friendship of his buddy.


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
I'm always going to regret that they chose not to do the scene where Odo
tossed O'Brien in jail. That shot of O'Brien doing situps would have given
people shivers for weeks.


