DS9 - Hard Time

[CrypticMirror]

Remember when Wesley was going to be executed for stepping on some flowers?

Good times, man, good times.

That was on top of the crime of being Wesley Crusher in the first degree.

(with apologies to Red Dwarf)
That one was his crime, but it was also his punishment.

[turbo_sailor67]

Reset button at its finest.

Rewatching Babylon 5 recently and the difference is night and day: DS9 is Babylon 5 lite. An inferior copy. Mona Lisa with a moustache.

Look at Franklin's drug problem, Garibaldi's brainwashing, G'kar's eye, Londo's dodgy deals. Things happen and they matter in B5. Here, we have a mind raped man, someone who is mentally 20 years older than he should be. A man who frightens his kids.
And it does not matter. Not one damn bit. O'Brien next week is the same man as O'Brien the week before. A real lost opportunity.

You are correct on B5's adherence to not treating problems as something that just happened "last episode". I think what happened with DS9 was after B5's rejection, little bits of what those who had looked at it liked got filtered into DS9, and that DS9 was all the better for it.

So I wouldn't go so far as to say DS9 is an inferior imitation of B5, more that the former was held be a bit more consistent with its characters and their personal attributes and flaws because B5 was there.

Yes, it is a lost opportunity, and there were a number of those but far less I'd say than Enterprise or Voyager. This episode I think came a bit too late in the game to explore how O'Brien would have this experience change him over time. That kind of experience and concept is probably why the Navy discarded its "Accelerate your life!" motto, the implications are "Are you ready to feel like you've just had a lifetime's worth of torment, soul-sucking, and brain probing in just four short years?!" Or more euphemistically "Are you ready to feel like you just experienced life at exponentially greater speeds and grown far older than you'd feel if you'd never joined?!"

Plus it became too much of a running-gag or regular go-to that they must inflict pain upon O'Brien. Ultimately it's a pretty skippable episode to me.