The Greatest Generation - Toolbox Full of Dildos (DS9 S4E18)

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

When the Chief comes home from a diplomatic trip, he’s got about 20 years more memories than he bargained for. But when a disgraceful secret from those memories threatens to push him over the edge, it will take the whole crew to keep him from self-dustbusting. Does Bashir practice any form of medicine other than memory wipes? Is Muñiz angling for the Chief’s job? Can you phaser out a bad aftertaste? It’s the episode we recorded while rocking twenty years of beard growth. Follow The Game of Buttholes: The Will of the Prophets! Support the production of The Greatest Generation.

Priority 1 message from Starfleet coming in on Secured Channel. Hey friends of Disodo. Before today's episode, we just wanted to take a moment to talk about the historic labor actions being taken by writers and actors in the American Film and Television industry. If you're a fan of the work done by the people who make Star Trek, we hope you'll join us in standing in solidarity with the folks who actually bring these adventures to life. Over the past several years, the AMPTP, the organization that represents the American Film and Television Production Studios, have reduced the profit from movies and TV going to workers. And in so doing,

they've attempted to weaken the labor unions that represent those workers. They wouldn't even engage the unions on many issues in their negotiations. And so a strike was the only course of action to take. Adam, Wendy and I have been having a lot of internal discussions about how best to stand with the unions and we are continuing those conversations in a dynamic situation. We're doing our best to understand where the picket lines are in these digital spaces,

and we would never intentionally cross one. With the information we have, we feel like we can do more good talking about and supporting the strike and continuing our show as planned. We'll keep you informed about what all this means for greatest trek specifically. Today we're making a contribution to the Entertainment Community Fund. This fund exists to help all the people whose livelihoods have been put on hold because the AMPTP refuses to negotiate

in good faith with the unions. It provides financial support for writers, actors, and all the thousands of laborers who make the shows that we talk about here and without whom we wouldn't have Star Trek to cast pot about. Those folks are all out of work because billionaires, company shareholders, and the executives of these companies don't want to compromise on the length of their yachts. We hope you'll join us in supporting entertainment workers in a challenging time, especially after they've already endured several years of challenges brought on by the pandemic

and season two of Star Trek Picard. We've set up a page where you can also contribute. It's at friendsofdecotoforlabor.com. That's friendsofdecisoto for labor.com. That's friendsofdisoto for labor.com. Link in the episode description. Okay, now let's get on with the show. Here's to the greatest generation. A Star Trek podcast. A couple of guys who are a little bit embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast.

I'm Ben Harris. I'm Adam Pranika. Then I've been feeling lately like something is missing from my life. No. You got an iris Steven bear shaped hole in your soul. Yeah, I just, I sit in the dark and then I look in the corner and then I see iris Stephen bear like hold his hands out. And in those hands.

But there was only one set of footprints. It was because iris Stephen bear was carrying you. Yeah. When, when I couldn't get a word in edgewise, it was Iris even bare cutting me off. It's good to see you all in church. It's cool to the Bible. That's the way God wants it. I don't know why, dude.

All these questions? It's a little blind thing too much to ask! It's been a while since we've done a deep space 9 Bible study, Ben, and being that this episode is so miles-o-Brian-centric, I thought I might read to you from the chapter about him. Wow, I like this liturgical turn to get to the bottom of this character. Alright, Ben, here is the reading. Miles O'Brien. O'Brien has been the transporter chief on STTNG for five years. This assignment represents a promotion to master chief of operations

in a tremendous career opportunity for him. He's an Irishman, a man'sman, with a down-to-earth quality, he's organized efficient and smart, and knows the hardware as well as any man in the fleet. He loves his work. He has a wife, Keko, and a three-year-old baby girl Molly. He will be in charge of the comings and goingsessels, plus the nuts and bolts maintenance of the station. He's constantly frustrated by the jerry rigged way this thing is put together. The Cummings and Goings thing, I feel like they kind of went astray from, right?

I don't get the sense that he's like... He's not like the reader like Riker was. No, and he's not like the reader like Riker was. No, and he's not like air traffic control either. Like I feel like Dax and Kira are often doing that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of differences between the show Bible character outlines

and what we get in the show. I think that's a good example of that here. Well, I mean, and I think that that's like something that's interesting about the difference between TNG and DS9 is like that showbible basically worked for TNG like all the way through, but you write a showbible at the beginning of deep space 9 and it's out of date at this point, in a lot of ways.

Yeah. Like the characters have changed. This is the King James version. And stuff done changed. Before he joined the crew of the Enterprise, he served aboard the USS Rutledge along the Cardassian border during territorial disputes that led to bitter fighting. He saw Cardassians commit unspeakable atrocities

and lost close friends in the massacre at Setlick 3. The war changed him, hardened him. First man he ever killed was a Cardassian, you jumped him on patrol. Wow. As he tells the story to another Cardassian in the STT&G episode Thou wounded, he says, I'd never killed anything before. When I was a kid, I would worry about having to swat him a skeeto. It's not you I hate Kredacian. I hate what I became because of you.

Yeah, so ends the reading, Ben. I like that that's a quote that we have come back to many times and I like that that's in the in the Bible. That makes me feel like us bringing it up was intentional on the part of the writers. I would say that the idea of hard O'Brien is in dispute up until now, but maybe this episode will do something about that. You want to just get into it, Ben? Let us get into it Ben? Let us get into it

As we talk about deep space 9 season 4 episode 18 hard time No, of course you don't. It's old Brian, Adam. That old Brian, it's old Brian. It's unabombered, O'Brien. It is spider-hole Saddam Hussein of Brian. How long do you think it would take for your hair and beard to get this way? Because we are told this is 20 years of O'Brien aging to get the Moses look. I think I could probably get there in 20 years.

It would probably take you like 40 or 50 or right? It would take me 20 years to get to your five o'clock shadow. It just seems like it's weird for me to watch the scene and think of it as aspirational. Yeah, yeah. That's not what the tone is here. It's something that I always have to think about because I do not have much of a beard. Like my beard is quite patchy compared to most, I would say, but compared to yours, it is full and thick. Lustrous even.

But you have a great big dick and I don't so, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's also my inability to grow hair down there. Oh, so it's an optical thing. It just looks big because there's not much to compare it to. Exactly. He's in an alien cell. Feels very, very similar to the type of cell that Riker was in in that episode where Riker was in a play, but also in jail, starting to lose track. And he's doing like a design on the floor, and then there's a starship, mind style,

Verdeon sweep, and it wipes the floor clean, and he starts over. I bet if you're in production on this episode, you wish it were that easy to, because I thought a lot about this during the episode, like when you work in a sandy environment, the continuity is a fucking nightmare because you've got people walking around the set. Yeah.

I imagine it takes some time, like you're setting Kalamini in the middle of the scene, you're lighting it, and then you're sweeping everything before you start rolling. I don't like sand. Sand and snow present a big challenge to shoot on for sure. One thing that you talk about when you're on a set that is like, that is dressed, a set with props and things on it is it's a hot set.

And so unless you're, unless you're a prop or an actor that's actively performing something in the scene, you don't touch anything because a computer screen moving might fuck up continuity from one shot to the next. And if you're like a lighting guy and you need to like get at something, like you actually like bring somebody from that department over to like at something. Like you actually like bring somebody from that department

over to like move something if you need it moved temporarily. Kalamini is like sitting on a hot set. He's on the hot lava. He can't touch it, but for a very specific way. Yeah, and we'll come to understand this design that he's doing, but not yet. We have him kind of shaky, seeming very disoriented, and then the doors to this cell open and in walk a couple of green, lofie aliens, the likes of which we have never seen before.

And they announced that the agrathe authority has decided that he has performed, that his prison sentence is up. They say he's free to go, and he kind of, he kind of, you know, like the camera cuts back to him, and he's like, no, I don't wanna, like this is where I live, this, you know, he's Brooks in Shawshank, you know, he, like, he's he's Brooks in Shawshank, you know, he like he does not want to get a job

bagging groceries in some town that he doesn't understand. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't want to return to a world that's gotten itself in a big damn hurry. You, you definitely get the sense of this later on when he's constantly asking Ben Sisko to piss. You don't need to ask, O'Brien. You can just go. Let's tell you, you wakes up and it's the room is very similar to the cell he was in, but just like a little cleaner and a little bit more, you know, there's like a wall sconce that wasn't there before. And it's not sand on the floor.

It's like a hard floor. But he's been in some kind of clip show device. A clip show device in a German wheel, like from a circus. What do you make of this prop? This is great. Yeah, I wondered why the big hoop, like, it must serve some function. Yeah. We don't get any exposition on what that might be though.

So, yeah, and Kira is the familiar face that's there to welcome him back to reality. And what we come to understand is that the aggrathy are some kind of G-quad creeps who convicted O'Brien of a crime and subjected him to 20 years in jail O'Vaya a mental simulation. So this is, he, from his perspective, he's been in jail for 20 years, but, you know, it's only been a couple of hours since the sentence was handed down in real time.

So he's kind of waking up like a much younger man in a world that hasn't gone through what he's gone through. I really like that it's Kira in this scene. Like what you don't get is the scene before where Cisco makes a decision about who to send to go pick up O'Brien. And I've got to believe that there was a lot of thought about who would be best in this role. And Kira for having been through the shit that she's been through.

Like there are a lot of similarities between Kira and O'Brien and we don't get a lot of them together up until this point in the show but great choice to send her because she is a great combination of someone who's been in the shit but someone who is also like can be extremely gentle and and shows great empathy for people in a way like like her her bedside manner with him I think is perfect in her scenes. It's as good as anybody's and maybe better than anybody's compared to, I mean, because everybody knows that he's been through some trauma and she maybe has the best approach to dealing with him. It wasn't real. It's real to me, Major.

Yeah, and so she puts him on a runabout and takes him back home and he is not right. Gold to cotton, the cotton, gold to cotton. So... Everybody is aware that he's going to have some reintegration to do. We have a brief scene with Cisco and Keko. Cisco is kind of like explaining what happened and prepping her for receiving a husband who is fairly badly damaged compared to the one that departed a few days ago.

Takeo is the viewer proxy here instrumentally. But Miles would never break the law intentionally. I know that. Because she's asking a lot of questions and Cisco is giving all of this backstory to her and us. And I guess the deal is that they have a sort of justice style of criminal justice on Agrith, where they decided that he committed a crime that to us seems like not a crime and they convicted and punished him before

anybody knew what had happened without rocking an ounce of neck the entire time. It's always sad now doubly so. How does this not mean war? Cisco is pretty chill talking about how the Argathans just sort of put him on trial immediately and then gave him the sentence immediately without even communicating with DS9. Yeah. Oof. Yeah, I think maybe like drop a couple of photons off from orbit before the defiant takes

him home. It's like, hey, fuck you. I wonder if there's something to fear from them. If the agrathees have this sort of technology, I wonder if there's someone you don't want to fuck with, militarily. Yeah, unclear, because it seems like what he was like there on a friendly mission and just asked the wrong questions.

Yeah, yeah, he seemed too curious and that was, they took great umbrage with that. Ha ha ha ha ha. O'Brien's first stop is with the doctor who actually greets him getting off the run about. Chief. Julian. And the doctor is interested in doing something to kind of unburden the chief of these memories, because nobody, nobody on Deep Space 9 thinks that it's fair what happened to him and

they'd like to, they'd like to take this trauma off his shoulders if they can. What they need is a cyborg bin share your pain with me They need cyborg to take his pain away Yeah, where's cyborg at these days? The Vulcan's are very oh no, I can't really die fighting yeah, he forgot times were long enough to do it times were long enough to do it.

We get the way the story is told is fairly unique for Deep Space Nine. We get flashbacks in vignettes. Yeah, the first flashback we get is the doctor's asking, like, what was it like? Was there anyone there? And O'Brien's like, nope, nobody was there. I was alone the entire time. Smash cut to him being thrown into the cell

and like a, a, a, a my graphy alien cell mate, a, each are being really nice to him. Yeah. But, you know, this is one of those things where it like, you, you got to beat the shit out of the first guy you meet in jail. I cast the tree! The chief beats each are to death,

and then that episode's over. I guess the chart! For decades, we have always gotten the new fish thrown into a cell and then in immediately being a life-threatening situation. Yeah, and that's happened several times in Star Trek. Yeah, this is not happened several times in Star Trek. Yeah This is not Oz, you know, like this. This is the best possible Selma you could possibly get each are does not look at you and lick his lips each are each are is not like doing pushups in the corner

Like getting totally swole each are is like laughing at shit and like he's affable and fun. He's got like all of the strategies for, you know, doing the time and not letting the time do you. And he's willing to share that. He is an emotional counterpoint to O'Brien in every way because when we cut away from O'Brien and the present to each are in the past, you get serious, to each are in the past, you get serious, dour, shattered O'Brien, cross cut into this other character, which is not like that at all. It'll help you feel better.

And he seems like the perfect person to have to do along stretch of time with. The doctor finds that these memories are not really going to be easy to wipe away. He's like explaining to Kiko, this is not like a chip that they installed in his head that can just be removed. Like, he really experienced this from his perspective. And so, this is going to be something that is likely to be a long-term aspect of his life from now on. They established right away that this is not correctable. I thought it was interesting that the two characters that I wanted the most in this were

Councillor Troy and Captain Picard. Yeah. Because counselor Troy knows miles from way back. And I felt like for all the lip service that is paid to the existence of a counselor on the station, I thought this would have been a great opportunity to bring a friendly and familiar face back to the show. Same. And Picard actually experienced something not terribly unlike this in interlite. Like, obviously, it wasn't a punitive version of this, but like, the idea of moving forward in life where you have a set of memories that didn't actually happen to your physical body, but our real memories to you is something that I would actually happen to your physical body, but, but our real memories

to you is something that I would have loved to hear peace to rap with O'Brien about. The cards experience in interlite isn't even referred to obliquely, which is something that this show has not, has not shied away from like this show talks about TNG a lot and the missions that they went on specifically O'Brien's involvement and even in this episode they talk about three instances from TNG where O'Brien has has suffered trauma because later on like Bashir tells Keko like your husband has been through some shit, but he's been through shit before and he's come out fine on the other side.

It's just going to take some time. And he uses those examples. Yeah, but yeah, the memories are there to stay. Bashir says, like, I could wipe these memories, but I would have to wipe all of his memories to do it. And a ship puts in at the station with a passenger that says, don't do it, chief. I have heard tell that this doctor will attend things

like this from time to time. He's entirely willing to wipe a man's memory. It's like the doctor has some kind of punch card for erasing patient's memories. Why does he seek to do this in such quantity? Did he not swear an oath to do no harm? It's shocking, like, why is this always on the table for Bashir?

Someone get Bashir? Someone get Bashir away from the clip show device. Get it away. It's about this time in the episode that O'Brien starts seeing visions of each R and It's to the viewer at this point. It is unclear whether or not each R is real or a figment Because O'Brien treats him as a as a real person. Right. He's having a real reaction and And it's it's that thing where sometimes each R is is there and O'Brien sees him in place of a person who's actually there.

Like when he and Kiko first see each other, O'Brien thinks it's each R initially, but then other times like he's just like chasing each R around the station and unable to locate him or whatever. Right. But yeah, so the the fam fam is there, is there for him and wants the like, Kiko really wants to help him deal with this, but it like he's, he spent a lot of this episode in his civilian clothes

and it seems like he's been given all the time he needs to, to cope with this. And it is a really rough transition for him. Like the like they have like a family dinner where he's like he's like subdividing his food and squirreling it away at a napkin. Why else? What are you doing? There's a scene where he's like sleeping, sleeping on the hard floor because he's not used to a bed. There's the scene where he's drinking toilet wine that he made himself. Yeah, he goes to Quirks bar and orders a toilet wine.

And they're like, we have good stuff too. Like you don't have to have pruno chief. He's like, it's all I drink anymore. Quirks. Quirks gives him a ziplock bag of pruno with like chunks in a straw in it. Gross. Warf is like, what is that? Can I have one of those too?

Give me the gallon size version of that, please. A warrior Ziploc. Wow. One of the things that this episode does best, and I don't think it's going to give away how much I like the episode at the end to say so, is the asymmetry in the relationship between Keko, Molly, and Miles, because it hurts so bad to see Keko and Molly love Miles and for Miles to be incapable of receiving that love in any way. It is really well done and it made me ache to see it because Keko is so good to him and so patient and Molly just doesn't understand what's happening.

Molly's a little kid and like to just see an out of control guy react like to to see someone reflect love with hate or fear is especially painful and I thought that those scenes where we see that were particularly effective. I agree. We spend maybe a third of the episode in these memories. Yeah. There's a lot of time spent between a Brian and each are, you know, like when he's filling his napkin with food and Kiko asks him what the fuck?

He, like, we go back to the cell and show, like, we see each are like showing him how to, like, how to, like, ration yourself because they were starving in this cell a lot of the time and couldn't, you know, the, when the guards would be, would be feeding them was unpredictable and would occasionally go, they would occasionally go to long stretches of not receiving food. This is an example of a war crime

and this is a thing that would seem actionable from the Federation, right? Yeah, it does, it is weird that it's like a simulation. But because it's imaginary, yeah, like maybe it doesn't prescribe to those rules. It's a weird gray area. Except for if the trauma is real, which it is, like he experiences the trauma is real, like that's kind of the, like that's what you're trying to prevent when you make an agreement about not doing bad shit like this. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. So I don't know. I mean, I guess,

I guess they're like psychological and physical consequences to work right? So if half of that equation is not on the table, maybe it's, I don't know. Like it makes you ask a bunch of questions like that. Like what, and why is there no, like, I think going to war might be an extreme reaction to this, but the federation should be way more pissed. And I wished there was an element of this episode talking about what measures would be taken to help these, these a graphy understand that that would not be an acceptable move going forward.

Like, Cisco, like a full me once, like, OK, well, we can't deal with those guys anymore. There's a strange treatment of cultures here because on the one hand, Cisco does not allow warf to ritually murder a current, but he seems to be a little more forgiving of the a graphy culture in this case because it's just an embedded part of their society to to administer punishment in this way. Yeah, but strange that that's, I don't know, maybe maybe there's a whole, maybe there's a whole scene that's on the cutting room floor of them talking about like the diplomatic reaction to this. It's weird how like very bad episodes evoke these questions and also very good episodes.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think that this episode answers a lot more of the questions that it evokes than a bad episode would, but there's definitely one one question that I feel goes unanswered. So you have Cisco, he's not a major presence in the episode. Now, not at all. I mean, he pops up a couple of times, but he's not like the... He pops up when shit gets really bad. And then the middle of third of this episode, it does, because it's not just O'Brien's inability to accept the love for Miss Family, he starts really going off in public on quark and on co-workers, he's sort of a loose cannon, and you just can't have that, he's disturbing the peace.

Everybody is rallying to try and help him, like Worf is trying to be like, like, darts buddy with him. To be honest, I don't feel much like playing myself. Well, we could go kayaking in the hollowsweed. trying to be like, like, darts buddy with him. To be honest, I don't feel much like playing myself. But we could go kayaking in the hollow suite. Jake is trying to help him kind of reconnect with his knowledge of engineering by like, quizzing him on what, what all the tools are in his toolbox.

A combination square, a hammer, a level, for hanging a picture of stuff like that, or even a little miter box, for doing a little bit of trim work. One thing I wondered during that scene was like, do the prop masters know the names of all these props? Also, like, is an ODN coupler the same object from episode to episode?

Oh, I bet that's someone's job. Cause like, they call for shit like that all the time and it's never like, what these devices are doing is kind of anybody's guess, right? It really is a toolbox full of dildos though, right? Like all of those tools basically look the same. Yeah. Yeah, if he put that in his checked luggage, it would for sure get opened up because half of that shit would be vibrating. Occasionally, it's an electric razor. Did you think that there was like a yellow shirt that checked his work in that one scene?

That's minions. It is no? Oh yeah. He's back. He was from that episode where they were in the atmosphere of that poison planet. Remember when that unexploded torpedo went into the ship and Quark had to... It had to disarm it with his little buddy.

Yeah. That's a great call. It seems like he's kind of temporarily the boss and like gives O'Brien an add-a-boy. I wondered if O'Brien was gonna like walk out of the scene and he was gonna be like, Jesus, he really blew this and like fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the thing about his performance about Munia's

specifically is that there's something about his manner that indicates that, but we don't see it. Like his treatment of O'Brien seems so neutral that like I was projecting something onto him that wasn't there. Right. Yeah, you're like, why is he being so nice? Yeah.

Yeah. What's the catch? Come to a fore. Alvarain. Come to a fore. What are you doing? Come to a fore. What are you doing?

Come to a fore. Come to a fore. Come to a fore. Come to a fore. Come to a fore. Not be gone. Not be gone. Not be gone. Not be gone. Exactly. I'm not a big guard, I'm not a big guard, I'm not a big guard. This is where we come to understand though that O'Brien has not really been pursuing any

kind of treatment regimen. The agreement that he made with the doctor was that he was going to be doing regular counseling three times a week. That's kind of a lot right. It is but I think with something this heavy that's not unheard of you know. Yeah. And he hasn't been doing it. He hasn't been doing anything to process what he went through. Yeah. What he's doing primarily is telling people he's okay and he wants to be left alone. And he's often screaming those words at people.

I've been there. He explodes on Bashir for being the doctor slash friend in this case. And I think it's a problem that they have such a close friendship outside of their like doctor patient relationship. Yeah. Because I think that I think it is very common when you're having a psychological problem of some kind to react negatively to the suggestion that you get help.

Yeah. Like, I think somebody, like, because it comes frated with some kind of condescension and some unfortunate social baggage, the suggestion. People want agency too, right? Like people wanna come to those decisions on their own. They wanna be, they don't wanna be told to do things.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. But like, you know, if you're, if you're armist broken, you don't take the suggestion to go, to go head to the hospital as, as a shaming suggestion. But, but unfortunately, when a psychological arm is broken, it is not uncommon. So, I don't know. Like, I thought that the character stuff about the way O'Brien resists the help that is being offered to him was very, very true.

Yeah. It's about a character that is having a realistic reaction to something that unfortunately prolongs his own suffering. Right. Like that's one of the really confounding things about these types of issues. It's a moment that makes O'Brien think of a time when he exploded in a similar way in his cell at E-Char. Yeah. This is the moment in the episode when I knew for sure that O'Brien would eventually kill him. At what point did you get there in your mind?

I guess I predicted it when I first saw E-Char. Oh, it was much later for me then. Just because I like the idea that he would not want anybody to know that he had had a cellmate. Yeah. It was. And then we find out that he has a cellmate. I that was kind of it was either going to be that he killed each R that each R was going

to be his, his torture, but that but that seemed pretty clearly not to be the case right off the bat. But yeah, and O'Brien gets very physical with each R and vice versa in this scene, but it also seems like when you're cooped up with somebody in a confined space for an extended period of time like the like that can that could be really stressful You know, yeah, that's why we never talk to each other off stage when we're on tour It's one of the rules. We always go through Rob. Yeah, there you go between Yeah, oh Brian seeing that Bruno is not on the menu Assault's quark O'Brien, seeing that Bruno is not on the menu, assaults Quark.

Wait, don't you give me my drink? I'm gonna break every bone in your worthless little bobby. And then sits down and has a real interaction with fake E-char. And I'm real. You're just on my head. And it's at that point that E-char says that he's always been a figment of his imagination But I'm real to you and that's all the matters and this further kind of muddies the The water of what each are is and what he represents. I mean like

Definitionally, of course, that's true But like why is the chief seeing him here and now like what is that? Yeah? What does that mean? And I think that the clue to this is that, is that line at the beginning when he's first kind of coming out of his, out of his days on Agreth and one of the, one of the jailers there that was part of administering this thing says,

like the punishment is especially tailored to each offender like that. So it seems like maybe this is an after-image or even potentially still part of the punishment. Yeah. Pretty brutal. so take the D back out there and drop a couple more photons off. Yeah, I don't think they're done. These... Cisco Desri appear about this point in the story to discuss the incidents with Bashir and Quaric. This is not just an isolated thing. This is now becoming a pattern of behavior that Cisco can't abide. And so he relieves him of duty and orders him into a regiment of daily counseling.

Yeah. I mean, I think that the fact that it's a pattern is why. Like, I can totally understand being frustrated that a busy bartender is ignoring you. You don't assault that person. Oh, Brian shouldn't have done that thing where he holds his money in his hand and just flips it around. You don't want to do that either, Miles. The strategy is tip really well and that bartender will come find you when you come back up to the bar. But the bartender does not know it's an O'Brien episode. You have to make the bartender understand it's an O'Brien episode.

Pruno is also a very bartender. Right. It takes a long time to make. It's going to slow down their flow. A lot of ingredients. If it's a beer bar, you know, like order a beer, you know, don't throw them a curve ball. It's very bartender-intensive. I understand, Quark wanting to maybe save that until after the rush.

If Quark had like a waxed moustache and a sleeve garter, order the most complicated pruno you want, like that's what he's there for, for, but that's not the kind of, that's not the kind of bar he's running. No. One, two, three, four, one. You need everybody. One, stop.

Hammer time. O'Brien is pissed. Pist enough to throw his combatge on the ground. Yeah. And he storms into the infirmary because the reason that he sees for all of his problems is Bishir. Right.

And Bishir to his credit maintains a very even and professional keel here. He's like, I am trying to help you. I understand that you're not well, but as your doctor and your friend, like I cannot in good conscience let you pretend that nothing happened to you. And this is when each hour kind of appears

overbixie as shoulder and in one fell swoop, O'Brien, can announce to both of them, I don't want your help and I don't want to help and I don't, I don't want to be friends with you anymore. Like, they can both potentially interpret that as being directed at them. Yeah, friend breakup. Pretty brutal. You don't want that.

And I mean, to a certain degree, he's also broken up with Starfleet, like the throwing of the combat away signifies potentially the end of his career also. Well, he's broken up with life, you know, like he is, he's fucking storming through the station, like each hour is trying to talk him off the ledge. He goes home to try and, to try and seek refuge there and winds up being agitated to the extent of screaming his head off at Molly, which is like a very genuinely frightening scene.

Like Kalimini threads an amazing needle in this episode of tiptoeing right up to the edge of familial violence, well, like maintaining sympathy as a character, like you understand that he is having a bad reaction to a bad situation and that like he is ashamed of what he does. Like it's a tricky scene, right? Cause this could permanently make this a hateable character.

Right. I couldn't help but think of how difficult it has to be for a child actor to do a scene like this. Like Hannah Hete has got to sit for what has to be a couple of takes and be screamed at by an adult. An adult that you know in a certain context and have worked with before, but you know, like Hannah Hete is tiny. How old is she in this show right now?

Like, like, she's like four or five years old. She's young enough to wear. I wonder, I wonder how difficult this is to go through. Like, she's clearly, she can't be sophisticated enough to truly get it here. And that's got to be hard for both Kalamini and her. Right. It's a weird thing to have to portray on all sides. And it is not hard to imagine that those tears that Molly Sheds are real.

And that's not a great feeling to watch. Like the idea that they might actually have done something that was traumatic for her. Like hopefully you get like a satisfactory conversation between Kalimini and Hannah Hattay on the set and say like what we're gonna do is just for pretend and it's not real and hopefully, like, what we're gonna do is just for pretend and it's not real. And hopefully, I don't know. Their child actor handlers on set,

like whose role is to safeguard children from emotional trauma. I wanted to what degree one of those, or several of those was deployed in a moment like this. I wonder, like that documentary, the what we left behind documentary, one of the things I talk about is that the production schedule for this show

was such that sometimes they were working like 18 hour days. Yeah. And it's always really amazing to me when I hear that about television production. I've never worked on a television show. I know people that have it, I know that that's somewhat commonplace. And it's a budget and schedule issue, you know, like the the beast needs to be fed. You need to get an episode done every week. So the, you know, the constraints are are not entirely economic, but they are somewhat economically.

If you had a lot more money, you could just have 25 more production days sprinkled throughout the year and like longer weeks to shoot each episode. And the toll that working like that must take on you as a like whether no matter what side of the camera you're on, it's got to be pretty intense, right? Yeah. I really can't imagine that weekend and week out for months at a time. That's what makes me really afraid that something like a scene like this would actually have been like entered into without considering the like fragile emotional lives of the people who are being asked to do it. Yeah, I mean, and I think you're saying that specifically about Kalamini because the

rules are different for child actors. Like there's no way she's on set for longer than what like like, four hours. I don't remember what the specific rule is. Right. Which is why they often work with twins for little children. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, this scene is super intense. It leaves terrible taste in her mouth. And yet, I think that it is you understand in it that O'Brien is having a breakdown. And... It's a taste in O'Brien's mouth that's so bad. It can only be removed with a phaser beam.

Jesus Christ. Because O'Brien goes to a cargo bay and just destroys it with a wrench and then goes for the weapons locker in the rock bottom moment. He's standing there getting ready to punch his own ticket and the doctor comes down. And starts to try and talk him off the ledge.

Get out of here, Julian. And O'Brien says, I'm not doing this for myself. I'm doing it to protect all of you. Like, I just, I came very close to getting violent in my own house. I don't feel like I'm in control anymore. And I feel like I have a track record of violence now that I can't protect you from. And the doctor's like, what do you mean?

Like a track record of violence? And he's like, well, you know like there's each R of course and the doctor says who's each R and O'Brien goes he's right behind you Because there's each are there in the in the cargo bay This year it goes for the weapon soccer and it's like I'll do it myself I'll finish what you started, Chief. I mean, it's still a figment that the doctor can't see, obviously, but the conversation keeps going and they talk about how O'Brien came to murder each hour that were like very, very desperately hungry at a certain point. They'd gone over a week without being rationed

any food by the prison. And I thought that the scene, the flashback was a little, a little imperfect in my mind, because O'Brien kills Echar and then finds the package of food that Echar was hiding and is relieved by how much food is there and is like believes definitively that Echar was definitely saving this food for both of them. But I just, I couldn't quite get there. I couldn't get to a point where each R had a secret secondary food stash that he wasn't telling the chief about, and that the chief would be utterly

convinced that it was for both of them in that context. Yeah. And especially because Miles seems uncertain about whether or not he'd killed each are when the sound of snapping chicken bones makes that fairly evident. Like, yeah, he he does not seem traumatized by the idea that he'd just killed a person. He'd he, but this might be just a glimpse at his broken pathology. Is he so delirious with hunger that he doesn't really have a firm grip on?

That's how I read it. That's how I read it. I guess that could go to explaining why he believes that each hour was saving the food for both of them also. You're treated to just a three-minute montage of O'Brien going to town on this food. Just like... Eating and eating until he's, he like makes himself sick. It's like the heroin seed in a wet-hot American summer.

Yeah. It's always fun to get away from camp even for an hour. You really want to do this here. Now, okay, okay, let's do it. The sheer having learned of this, of the significance of this makes the case that one moment doesn't define a life. A bad moment can't destroy a good person. And a bad bit moment can't destroy a comedy podcaster.

Yeah. Boy, are we lucky? That's true. Yeah, well a lot of people aren't aware that this is a comedy podcast. Yeah, I think most people would be pretty confused better at. Oh, Brian. You should never have categorized this is comedy.

That is not how it is understood in the world. Oh, Brian. You should never have categorized this as comedy. That is not how it is understood in the world. Oh, Brian gets it. Bashir's counseling works better than anyone's. It's smart that Bashir takes the self-hate is an example of your evolution tactic because that's something that O'Brien is here for. He's like, oh, yeah, I do really hate myself. Yeah, because you're never going to remove the self hate from the equation. You just need to redirect that energy into something that works. That's what you hate, Echar. It's what killing you made me become.

Yeah. Yeah, and that works, and it makes Echar disappear. After appearing to forgive O'Brien, for murdering him in a cell over a couple of scraps of food, each are very forgiving. The disappearance seemed dramatic enough that it felt like it might have been an intentional part of the program that the agrathe installed in him.

Oh, oh shit, man, I didn't even consider that that was part of his like punishment journey like that's part of the programming you think. I don't think that the episode says that explicitly. It just I wondered it in watching it. I would like to believe that that this show was sophisticated enough to do that. So I'm going to choose to believe it. That's pretty great. The button on the episode is the doctor and giving the chief a hyposprae. He's

going to be slamming well butrin intravenously going forward and and and meeting with the counselor. The idea that these memories can be extracted is totally off the table. So it's going to be about learning to live with them, but he's going to be taking something that kind of dulls the edge of that. And then he returns home and finds a loving family that is excited to see him. Daddy's home, daddy's home. Molly ain't holding no grudges. Yeah, they've forgiven.

It would be pretty intensive. If she was though, right? Like he leans down to hug her and she says, it's not you, I hate daddy. It's what you made me become. Oh, no. She just runs away screaming. Which would be an understandable reaction.

Yeah. A really positive ending to a fairly dark episode, Ben. Did you like it? I did like the episode. I feel like it is an example of an episode that sets a pretty high bar for itself in terms of what it's going to try and deal with. Like the emotional truth of what it's going to deal with is going to be pretty intense. I feel lucky not to have any PTSD-based psychological problems because they seem really, really tough.

And I know a couple of people that do have like that kind of, you know, struggle with those kind of demons. And I don't envy it at all. But I think that you can trust Colin Meaney to take this really seriously and give it a performance that is very true not only to the kind of condition that his character is in,

but the way his character would experience that condition. And I think he really rises to that challenge. What about you? Yeah, I really agree. I think it's easy to compare this episode to Interlite and turn it into kind of a black mirror interlite, Fro Brian. And you know, Picard was so instructive

about how Starfleet officers, like the stoicism of a Starfleet officer giving way to an acceptance of awful circumstances and like the breakdown that he gave his character permission to have. And I was wondering whether or not Kalimini would take O'Brien that far in that direction. And interestingly, he doesn't.

Like, he doesn't have the breakdown in the field of grapes after best of both worlds. Like, he does not have the total collapse. Yeah. And that's because Miles O'Brien isn't like that. Like he's a soldier who's been to war in a way that Picard hasn't. And I like how hard he fought to maintain

before finally breaking. Like I thought that was true to what we know about him. I mean, I felt like in a lot of ways this was the biggest and smallest episode of DS9 so far because it really exploded those feelings of what this kind of trauma must be like, but put it inside of maybe one of the most well-liked DS9 characters on the show. And their ability to do that and do it effectively, I thought, is what made it great.

I'm curious about to what degree they will be able to maintain any callbacks to this episode at all. Like, this being the type of show that it is, it shows at times a willingness to do those kind of callbacks, but this has the potential to change him forever. I wonder if that's a consequence of it. Yeah, I mean, it feels a lot like the time that Jordy got, got abducted by the Romulans and tortured. And you know, they mentioned at the end of this episode,

that episode, this is gonna take a lot of really hard work in therapy to unburden yourself of the trauma of this, or learn to live with the trauma of this or whatever. Yeah. It's just like the next episode. He's like, hey, I'm dirty, I'm the same guy. You know what's weird is like, Star Trek really wants to engage with these serious issues

a lot, and I think, you know, we're at a point in society right now where therapy is destigmatized in such a way that it's like, talked about in a really great way, in an open and honest way. But I think it has a long way to go still. There's still plenty of people that are like, you know, that's great for other people, but that's not me. My point is that for as progressive as Star Trek is, it only ever depicted therapy in a Barkley context. And Barclay was in there for social reasons in a way that I think to have sprinkled Jordy into the counselor's office or Picardin to the counselor's office or in the future of Deep Space 9,

Pudobrayan in counseling going forward would have been a far more progressive way to demonstrate a therapist necessity in instances like these, but yeah, it's uh, yeah It's a hard thing to depict because it's it's one of those things that You know you try and go in for an hour a week and The changes are fairly incremental and That's not that dramatic of a thing to show. Yeah. Like you occasionally have the therapy session where you're shredded and ugly crying

on the couch and your therapist is getting up the hand, you have the box of tissues, but a lot of the time it's just like trying to remember what your childhood was like or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, I like or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, a tricky thing to do. I think this is a great episode and a very special one. Yeah, I do too.

I feel the same way. Good stuff. Do you want to see if we have any priority one messages at him? Yeah, let's see if any of our priority one messages are as good as this episode. I'm gonna challenge them right now. Wow. Fuck. Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on Secured Channel. Need a supplement on it.

supplement. supplement. Yeah, it's extra. The interest alone could be enough to buy this ship. Adam, we have a couple of priority one messages here. The first one is of a commercial nature. And it goes like this. If you run a web design development app, PR, or marketing agency, you know sales is often the hardest part. Good work is the best business development, but hope is not a plan. That was clutch consults with agencies to help them level up their business development

practices, close more proposals, generate more leads, buy more Yemmaksos. Also a non-sequitur ro-Laron mentioned. Because that's a sick drop and we don't get to hear it enough. Yeah, fair. So please visit thatwasclutch.com to learn more and make first contact. And then parenthetically, I'm sorry. Wow. That's great. That's awesome, right?

Like, as a semi-retired small business owner of a film production company that I never did enough to develop new business with, that's the kind of business that I absolutely needed. Like, somebody to talk to me about what business development could look like for a company like mine and what I could and should be doing to To you know help myself grow my business right

Yeah, that was clutch is based out of Philadelphia Checking out their website now pretty cool and you get to work with friends of DeSoto to To expand your business. I mean, that's the best right right? You know about the road drop that that was clutch. Now all about it. Do we have any other priority one message is Adam? Sure do, man. This one is of a personal nature. It is from favorite big brother and the spelling of favorite would indicate to me that this could be from a north of the border person. Oh yeah, a Canadian or a British big brother. Yeah, you're talking about that.

Yeah, potentially. And the message is for favorite. I guess Australians probably spell it like that too. Yeah. New zealander. This one's going out to favorite Whittlesister. Message goes like this. Happy birthday, Whittle Sister, even though we're separated across the whole continent I'm always thinking of you.

I'm glad we can share and watching the pod and the shows that go along with it. Hope you can come visit me someday in NYC. Thanks Ben and Adam for the pod. It's a great watch every week. Man, I thought for sure that we were thinking Canadians. And now that one of them is in NYC, it could be a brother and a sister from anywhere. That both happen to be on the North American continent. What is it called when you add the U instead of just the favorite with only the O.

Does that have a designation? Is there a term for that? Yeah, I believe it's an Imperial Standard. Oh, yeah, this feels like stolen Imperial Standard. If you're coming out of NYC, huh? Yeah, unless you are from another part of the Anglo-Sphere where they didn't change all the spellings during the Revolutionary War. Happy Birthday, Widow Sister from Ben and me too! Yeah, from us, also. If you'd like to send a priority one message, it's really easy you had to maxonefund.org slash jumbo-tron

to 100 bucks for a personal message, 200 for a commercial message, and we really appreciate them. I got that, got that gold press, I got that, that gold press, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that,

I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that,

I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold press, I got that, I got that, that gold from all over gather at these shows to cosplay, to do pre and post show hangs, to make friends, and share their embarrassment. Hey, let's make a pretty great name for a tour. Let's do it! The Share Your Embarrassment Tour is coming in August 2023, and we've got a bunch of dates in a lot of great places.

Go to GreatestGenTour.com to get more info. That's greatestgentour.com for dates and ticketing information for the Share Your Embarrassment Tour. I'm Jordan Morris. And I'm Jesse Thorne. On Jordan Jesse Go, we make pure, delightful nonsense. We were open awesome guests and bring them down to our level.

We got stupid with Judy Greer. My friend Molly and I call it having the spaceweirds. Pat Noswald. Could I get a Balrog burger and some air-gorn fries? Thank you. And Kumail Nanjiani. I've come back with cat toothbrushes, which is impossible to use. Come get stupider with us at MaximumFun.org.

Look, your podcast apps are already open. Just pull it out. Give Jordan Jesse Goatry. Being smart is hard. Be dumb instead. Oh, rats, hey, hey, hey, oh, I'm about to count you in line. These clouds are really freaking me out. I hate having to stand in line and boy, what do I?

These giraffes do not smell good. No, they do not, and they have such short nacks. But I'm hearing we need to get on this arc. We've got to get on the arc. It is about terrain, about a spout to destroy humanity. Hey, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Are you Noah?

Yeah, I know we look like humans. We're actually, we're podcasters. We are podcasters, so it's different. Have you heard of Ono Ross and Carrie? We investigate spirituality, claims of the paranormal, stuff like that. And you have a boat and say the world's gonna end, so seem like something for us to check out.

We would love to be on the boats. We came two by two. What do you think? Ona Ross & Kerry available on MaximumFun.org. Hey Adam! What's that been? Did you find yourself a drunk Shemota? Drunk Shemota! Ben, I don't know if I've ever done this before. Maybe I have and I just don't remember.

Maybe I have and I wanted to forget. But I am going to... But share wipe your personality. I'm going to abstain from a Shimoda this episode. I thought this episode was so serious and so dark that very little was enjoyable to me in the context of the selection of a Shimoda. And I racked my brain about it. Like, I guess I came pretty close with Quark,

but Quark was the victim of an assault. And like, that was enough fun scene. And I came close to giving it to War for like not knowing how to play Darts, but still wanting to play Darts. Like, that's how he comforts his friend, O'Brien in this case, but like nothing edged close enough to... and we've watched a lot of dark episodes before Ben

and I've always found a way to find a Shimoda, but I just couldn't and maybe maybe yours will inspire me to to daily double it, but I can't do it. I'm not gonna do it. Okay well well, what about you? I guess I will either feel like an asshole or you will copy me. I'll copy you. Cause I do have a Shimoda. What do you got?

I did get close to Quark, but it wasn't Quark. It was the bolion that was sitting at the bar next to O'Brien, O'Brien, O'Brien, assaulted quirk because instead of like intervening or attempting to help quirk or do anything, like this is happening essentially in this boolean's lap. Yeah. When quirk gets his ear grabbed and gets pulled over the bar. This is some of the fun of sitting at the bar.

Like you get a lot of the interplay between bartender and customer, but occasionally it goes wrong. He just sits there. He treats it as up close entertainment. You tell me you wouldn't just sit there? I feel like I would be shocked enough to just sit there. I would move breakable objects and sharp things out of the way, and I would get in there. I would do my best to separate these two men. This is my glass. I'm just going to just going to move my glass.

So that bullying is my drunk Shimoda for not doing that that situation. Right. And also like the like bike extension the entire like it's a it's a crush at the bar. Yeah. And nobody does anything to help. Quark like nobody lives a finger. Good. Samota. Well, Ben, what do we have coming up on the next episode? I can't possibly be this dark, right?

The next episode of season four episode 19 shattered mirror. Cisco follows his son into a war-torn, alternate universe after Jake is lured there by the living counterpart of his late mother. Wow, it's a Jennifer Cisco episode. And it- Mirror Jennifer Cisco. And it is dark. Yeah, it's gonna be dark. But Mirror Universe is like, is like corny dark. Not like deep psychological truth, dark.

It's like purple corn. We get a purple corn episode, great. Yeah. Great. How are we going to watch it, though? That's a good question. I suppose I'll head to gach.bizslashgame where our legendary board game is kept. And we will find out how we will be watching it.

We recently slid back down to the first row of the game, didn't we? Yes, we are currently on square eight. We have a cocoa no no and a fuck it, we'll do it live, close into the runabout. Those are the squares we could hit potentially. All right. You're required to learn as you play. Roll. Oh, man. And I have in fact hit a fuck it will do it live. What? Which I think is the first time we've done this. This is one where it requires us to live stream

the recording of the show. Wow. But yeah, that will be the next episode, one way or another, and I guess you'll have the option to watch us record it live in some way via the internet. Hey gang quick production note. We already did the live broadcast of season 4 episode 19. We did a live YouTube the other day and it was really fun but you know in the spirit of it being live and kind of as we record,

it was just available while we were doing it. If you missed it and are super intensely curious to see what we look like while we're casting pod for some reason, we do have the video saved and we're thinking about dropping it on the MaximumFund.org DonorsOnly page, sometime after the episode in question drops. So sometime next week, check back there and that'll probably be where it winds up living. Looking forward to it in whatever form that takes. Just as I look forward to wrapping up the show

in, I'm thanking our Legion of supporters and viewers. It is because of your generous support that we are able to do this show the folks that had to maximum fund that or slash donate and contribute on a monthly basis make this show possible and it's not It's not for nothing. They get access to all of our bonus content of which there's quite a lot and there's quite a lot. And there's even when it's not the max fund drive, there are prizes for becoming a monthly contributor. So head to maximfund.org slash donate if you've been thinking about it and get it done right now. Yeah, don't even think about it. And by that, I mean, think about it and go do it.

Yeah, think about it while you're doing it. It's a statement of immediacy as is what I'm trying to say. Right. We should also thank all the folks who have left a nice review for the program on their pod catcher of choice or recommended the show to a friend. If you'd like to check out some of the great artwork that is created surrounding the show, including the trading cards that Bill Tilly makes every week, or the poster that JJ Lendel makes every week.

Search the hashtag greatestgen on Twitter, Adam's on their at cut for time, I'm on their at Benjamin AHR. Don't use Facebook, there's also a subreddit, and the wakia, where all the jokes are gone into in great detail. My pod catcher of choices overcast and it allows you to make and share clips of the shows you like. If you like a part of the show or any of the other shows that we've made, share a clip. That helps get people interested in the show.

They can dig that. It will function. Yeah. We should thank the great Adam Ragusia, who made all of the custom theme music for the show, and Dark Materia, who made the original theme song for the show, which you can hear. Potted down, but below my voice right now. Unclear whether or not Dark Materia

is a great home cook, but we know that about Adam Ragusia and we will soon Know that even better after we make a delicious dinner of beef That's gonna be a special that right? Yeah, he's probably gonna like take our voice over and throw it right in the garbage and do his own. Yeah he's love those vocal stylings. Can't beat it. With that we'll be back at you next time with another great episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9 and an episode of the greatest generation Deep Space 9 which is clearly purple corn. It's the Wahakan style corn, right? Yeah. Wahakan case of the, maybe the blue corn tortilla.

You know, if this mirror universe episode is confusing, you could call it a kind of a maze, couldn't you? So a purple corn maze, but maybe maze like the Native Americans called it Yeah That's what I think That's what I think they could call it Right well nobody's gonna hear that episode because they will hear this and realize what a fucking waste of time this show You reach for the weapons locker grab the dust buster from inside, place it into your mouth. Make it sound.

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