“On the next episode of Deep Space Nine! Tensions rise when Miles O’Brien’s wife is possessed by a sadistic, emasculating space demon, and he can’t tell the difference.”
Notice how in this episode, Miles reacts with concern for his wife. He goes along with things while desperately trying to to save the woman he loves. He constantly believes she’s in there and wants her to fight it.
Now compare this with how Keiko acted on the episode of TNG when Miles was possessed by an alien entity. Abject fear. Disgust. Even when a part of O’Brien seems to surface when he recognizes her and is clearly struggling, she does nothing but cower and scream at him to get away from her.
In short, more evidence that Keiko is an awful wife to O’Brien and seems to despise him.
In all fairness, she also had infant Molly with her. The instinct to protect her child kinda overrides. She was still written rather coldly overall and there is no apparent chemistry when things are going relatively well. As a couple, they are great at arguing and proper credit to that aspect of both actors.
The lack of chemistry is the real problem. Colm Meany and Rosalind Chao are both good actors, but for some reason they just didn’t feel like a truly loving couple. They just were never able to pull it off, which was probably fine for the single TNG episode they expected this to be relevant in when they cast Chao.
It’s not like Molly isn’t also O’Brien’s child. The only difference between the episodes is that she’s older, but still needs protection.
Rewatching DS9 I don’t find her that bad. She’s left the luxury of the enterprise to go with her husband to the arse end of the galaxy, didn’t really have a purpose to be there. She wasn’t really that pissy about it all things considered. She encouraged her husband to have close friends adventuring with in the holodeck. When she knew that needed it set up a man date for him and said friend.
It’s also pretty lenient of her considering that friend is super horny all the time.
And then there’s this conversation that likely happened because of it:
“Sorry, what!? You want to go into the holodeck every week and be Julian’s wing man?!”
“It’s not like that, honey! We’re playing World War II allied pilots!”
“You’re fighting Japan?!?”
Maybe Keiko is more understanding than we thought.
Edit: updated text for more accurate characterization
I think the relationship reflects us, the audience and our attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes and ideas more than anything.
We’re all conditioned to see the hard nosed Asian Dragon lady wife.
We’re also conditioned to see the stereotypical Irishman who continually tries to do good but good seldom happens to him.
The relationship of the two just reinforce all our ingrained attitudes about all that … and often, that is all we see or want to see.
The difficulty arises when we are forced or force ourselves to see them both in a different way. It makes us uncomfortable because it makes us wonder if there is nothing wrong with the characters but maybe there is something wrong with us and how we see them. We … and that includes me … find it easier to see something wrong with the world, rather in considering there may be something wrong with us.
I’m watching DS9 from beginning to end right now and the more I watch, the more it makes me think about the world and how I see it … and I think that was one of the biggest impacts that this couple was trying to gain from the audience.
Thoroughly loving DS9 and I just love jumping in here to talk to you all about it.
better than when she was a 12 year old
Obligatory chiefobrienatwork.com
This is what you get when you marry a cryptography company.
