Colm Meaney always was, and still is, one of the most successful Star Trek actors at getting roles outside the franchise. Hell, the guy was in John Huston's last movie (The Dead, based on the James Joyce story, currently streaming on The Criterion Channel). The makers of Deep Space Nine certainly seemed to know what they had and I just finished watching three unrelated episodes starring his character, Miles O'Brien. The most lauded of the three is "Whispers", a second season episode from February 1994 in which O'Brien returns home to the space station to find everyone's behaving very strangely around him, even fearful or hateful. It is brilliantly grim, a paranoid, existential tale worthy of a film noir.
O'Brien wakes up to find his wife, Keiko, and daughter, Molly, are rushing out the door at 5:30 in the morning. Molly doesn't seem to want to go near him and Keiko's excuses are rushed and oddly weak. Later, he finds Commander Sisko has been giving orders to a man on O'Brien's crew instead of going to O'Brien first, the standard procedure between Commander and Chief of Operations. Small things get bigger and stranger as the story progresses. There are some odd turns of logic once you find out what's going on but it mostly holds together, especially since the performances are so good, particular from Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix here in Japan.
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