[DS9] "Hard Time" Review

WARNING:   "You'll have to tell them about spoilers for DS9's "Hard Time" sooner
or later."  "The hell I will!"

In brief:  Excellent.  Gripping and raw.


Written by:
    Robert Hewitt Wolfe (teleplay);
    Daniel Keys Moran &amp; Lynn Barker (story)
Directed by:  Alexander Singer

Brief summary:  After being convicted of espionage and given
memories of a 20-year prison sentence, O'Brien returns to the station
to attempt to live a "normal" life.


I will admit that "Hard Time" took me completely
by surprise.  The preview from the week before had looked more than a
bit goofy, and Trek's last use of implanted memories (VOY's "Ex
Post Facto") had come off so poorly that the taste of it was still
sour.  Add to that the fact that Daniel Keys Moran has been claiming for some time that "Ex Post Facto" was... appropriated...
from an O'Brien implanted-memories DS9 story he pitched, and my
expectations were more than a bit low.

Fortunately, I couldn't have been more wrong.  "Hard
Time" is among the season's best episodes, up there with "Accession" and "The
Visitor".  It's intense, it's emotionally powerful, and it's
difficult to stop watching.

One of the reasons I found "Hard Time" so superb
has its roots back in the days of TNG.  After TNG's
superb "The Inner Light", I grumbled for two years that it had no
substantive followup.  Aside from "Lessons" a year later (which
certainly wasn't bad; it just wasn't enough), any hint of consequences
to Picard of living out another lifetime seemed to be simply
nonexistent.  Similar issues like Geordi's brainwashing in "The Mind's
Eye" and Picard's experience at Cardassian hands in "Chain of Command"
only intensified that grumbling--I started wondering if anyone would
ever show any consequences of anything.

That was a large part of "Hard Time"'s appeal.
It began more or less where "The Inner Light" ended--with the end of
the "other life".  The rest of the episode was devoted to nothing
but consequences.  That is an astonishingly powerful, and
depressingly rare, course of events to examine--and the fact that for
once we saw consequences of something I think richly deserved
examination was a big selling point.

Also appreciated was the fact that the consequences were real, and
irrevocable.  The question of "can these memories be purged?" was a
valid one--but for once, the answer was no.  Once it was established
that O'Brien was stuck with them--that, as he put it, "it's real to
me"--there was no place for the show to turn.  This could easily have
been something like "Ex Post
Facto", where the implanted memories were part of an Evil Alien
Plot [tm], and the victim was only being used as a pawn.
"Hard Time" could have been that--and I'm just
glad it wasn't.

Looking at things a little more specifically... boy, O'Brien tends to
get his mind played with a lot.  Between "Whispers" (alluded to in "Hard
Time"), his time-jumping in "Visionary" last year, and now this, he has had a
great many situations where he's been questioning what's real and
what's isn't.  I think there are probably two reasons why he in
particular gets so picked on.  The first is that he is and ever shall
be DS9's "everyman" character--he's down to earth, he gets his
hands dirty, he has a family--basically, he's "just zis guy, you
know?"  That makes it very easy for people to identify with him, I
think--and perhaps makes him more suitable for a role like this than,
say, Picard, who was just so [very]  good at
everything that he seemed a little untouchable at times.

The other reason why O'Brien gets targeted, I think, is that Colm Meaney's
shown he can handle it and any other challenge that comes his way.  I've
maintained for years that he's one of DS9's hidden strengths, generally
supporting a show without stealing it; now I'm firmly convinced that Meaney is
the best performer on the cast.  Everything we saw here, from the black
humor to the rage to the tears to the embarrassment to the confusion,
was extremely different from the O'Brien we usually see, but it
nonetheless felt real.  Never for a moment did I feel that
O'Brien's reactions didn't make sense.  In a show like "Hard Time", that's a crucial thing to achieve, and
everyone involved deserves recognition for it--but Meaney in
particular.

O'Brien's progression from confusion to denial to rage, as I said
above, felt very real.  It felt a little on the quick side, but the
references to this episode taking place over a period of a few weeks
helped.  (It probably should have been more gradual still, but there's
a limit to exactly what can be done short of a substantial change in
format to the series.)  We started off with little things--the hoarding
of food, sleeping on the floor, that sort of thing--and only gradually
came to realize that there was something very deep and very dark that
O'Brien was still hiding.  There were certainly major hints of it very
early on, starting with O'Brien's very first flashback to meeting
Ee'char followed by his insistence that he was "completely alone", but
it wasn't clear initially exactly what he was refusing to remember or
refusing to acknowledge.  We got more of a sense of it as the show
progressed, as O'Brien began lashing out more and more and trying to
avoid interacting with any real friends--but the buildup was gradual,
only towards the end culminating with his nearly hitting Molly (every
parent's nightmare, and an excellent choice of something to totally
drive O'Brien over the edge).  This sort of "hidden secret" has been
done before in Trek (one instance that comes to mind is TNG's
"Dark Page"), but I can't recall a time when it was done even remotely
as well as it was here.

Another strength the show had was in Craig
Wasson's guest turn as Ee'char.  I've only seen Wasson
in a few things before (most prominently, of all things, a Brian
DePalma movie called "Body
Double"--not exactly Oscar territory), but he's generally struck me
as someone relatively capable but not amazing.  "Hard
Time" may have just changed that assessment.  Ee'char, even though
he wasn't "real", was nonetheless powerful, proving exactly the voice
of reason O'Brien needed to cope and exactly the tool put to use by the
Argrathans to hammer down O'Brien's humanity.  From the drawings, to
the advice about food, to his impression of a hawk, to his quiet "maybe
I'll dream about food"...  well, O'Brien put it best:  through it all,
"there was Ee'char", both within and without his prison experience.
(The scene where O'Brien is stalking through the station halls with
Ee'char reappearing at every corner was especially effective in terms
of a nagging conscience; to call it jarring would be an
understatement.)

Then, at the last, there was the fifth act (or more specifically,
starting from the end of the fourth), which was just superb.  For one,
I don't think we've ever had a situation depicted before where a
regular character is contemplating suicide; yes, there was the stunt
pulled with Troi in "Eye of the Beholder", but that was both hackneyed
and caused by external forces.  Here, there was nothing forced at all;
O'Brien's despair was so strong that it was making it through even the
smallest television screens, and I never doubted for a moment that he
was prepared to die.  As Bashir attempted to talk him down (nicely
managed, by the way; he felt like just the right mixture of doctor and
friend) and we finally learned what secret O'Brien had been hiding all
this time, everything fell into place--and everything in the episode
came down to one conversation.

Some might call the ending a little too much speechmaking; I'm not one
of them.  Yes, it was a pair of monologues by O'Brien and Bashir, but
that's what worked.  Each one of them had to be allowed to say his
piece:  O'Brien so that we understood just what he felt he'd sunk to,
and Bashir so that O'Brien could recognize the hope that still
existed.  O'Brien's lament that he'd failed to prove his humanity "when
it came down to it" felt like a more personal version of Sisko's "It's
easy to be a saint in Paradise" speech from two years back, and
Bashir's soft "if you do [let that moment of savagery win]... if you
pull that trigger, then the Argrathans will have won.  They will have
destroyed a good man.  You cannot let that happen, my friend." felt
just uplifting enough to give O'Brien (and the viewer) hope without
being cloying.  Add to that Ee'char's final "be well, Miles" and stroll
into nothingness, and you have the ingredients for one of DS9's
most powerful scenes of the year.

All that said, I have a few small criticisms, but all exceedingly
minor.  The first is that the scene where Bashir explains the situation
to Keiko felt stilted.  The dialogue itself was fine, but the delivery
was off--whether that was the actors or the director is difficult to
say.  The second is more a criticism of the series, not of the
episode:  as powerful as the show was, and as open-ended as Bashir's
"it's a treatment, not a cure" was, I'm not at all sure we'll see this
ever brought up again, and that's regrettable.  The third is more
humorous:  by the end of O'Brien's tenure in prison, he looked quite a
bit like Monty Python's "It's" man, which made those few scenes hard to
take as seriously as they should have been.  :-)  When that's about all
I can come up with, though, that's extremely impressive.  (There are
things I would be curious to know more about--for instance, how much of
the prison simulation was keyed specifically to O'Brien--but a little
ambiguity in those spots is letting our imaginations fill in the
blanks, and I can't fault that.)

A few shorter takes, then:

-- As nice as more dramatic gestures like Worf's removal of his badge
in TNG's "Redemption" are, I actually think O'Brien's grabbing
his combadge and throwing it onto the floor of the turbolift as it
moved worked even better.  A nice way to get across "son of a
[MOTHERLESS GOAT]" without having to risk censors' ire by
saying it.

-- "Gaze into the circle."  <O'Brien stares at him>  "Do you want
to learn, or not?"  "I'm gazing."  I don't know why I liked that
exchange so much, but I did.  :-)

-- Quark's bedside manner left a bit to be desired, didn't it?  He
didn't deserve O'Brien's initial lunge, but I can't fault the second
one quite so much.  "Chief, just because your life's in shambles right
now--ugh!"  heh.

That should about cover it--just as well, since this is getting quite
lengthy.  "Hard Time" is a keeper; if you
haven't seen it yet, do.

So, summing up:


Weiting:Gradual, intense, and real.  You can't argue with that.
Directing:Taut as a bowstring.
Acting:Superb from all three of the most crucial players (Meaney, Wasson, and
    Alexander
     Siddig), and certainly fine from everyone else.

OVERALL:10, easily.


NEXT WEEK:

A time to reflect?


Tim Lynch (Harvard-Westlake School, Science Dept.)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu       <*>
"When we were growing up, they used to tell us humanity had evolved--
that mankind had outgrown hate and rage.  But when it came down to it
--when I had the chance to show that no matter what anyone did to me,
I was still an evolved human being--I failed."
                        -- O'Brien
--
Copyright 1996, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any off-net
compilation without due attribution and *express written consent of the
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