“I don’t know if there was anything wrong with the stew or not. When I went back later to check, she’d already put it into the disposal. But all I could think of as I looked at her… was that this was not my Keiko.”

I must admit I did not see this one coming, except that when we get to the thirty-five-minute mark, we do start to wonder how this will all end. Or are we looking at the lead-in for an intense two-parter about body-snatching? Or maybe that alien conspiracy from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first season? That’s what I was thinking when the Starfleet admiral ordered O’ Brien to go back to the station. O’Brien returns from an important security conference with Paradans from the Gamma Quadrant who are in the middle of a civil war and want to establish relations with the Federation.

Wouldn’t this be a job more suited to Odo, or a Starfleet security officer? I know Miles is a jack-of-all-trades, but security isn’t his specialty. Everybody’s acting cool toward him. Keiko won’t give him the time of day. He’s being separated from his oddly rude daughter. Sisko is giving him busywork. His security clearance is removed. Only Jake seems to be behaving normally around him. In typical, relentless O’Brien fashion, he goes through the station logs until he hits a brick wall put into the system after he returned. The story is told to us by O’Brien (via personal log) in flashback as he escapes from Deep Space Nine and sets course for the wormhole.

He knows he’s being followed by another runabout with three officers, presumably Sisko, Kira, and Bashir. There’s nothing remarkable about O’Brien, nothing out of the ordinary. He’s just Sarah Plain and Tall right up to the moment of his death, and because we have a switcheroo scenario, from his point-of-view, everybody else is acting suspicious and not like themselves, but it’s so well-written, we’d never suspect anything was wrong with him. O’Brien still likes his Jamaican blend coffee (double strong, double sweet). He’s still an ill-mannered work-a-holic.

There’ve been other, “Hey! You’re not you!” episodes; “Datalore” and “The Schizoid Man” spring to mind, but those episodes required over-the-top performances and the uncharacteristic stupidity of ancillary characters to work, but what if you create an identical copy of a man yet retain all of his personality quirks and behaviors? I wonder why the senior officers don’t simply arrest O’Brien upon his return to the station rather than give him chores and cut off his security access. Things get pretty damned intense in short order. After Odo returns from Bajor (ostensibly the reason he wasn’t involved in Paradan security issues), O’Brien tells him of his suspicions. Odo promises to check it out, but later he is revealed to be one of them, and Sisko and Kira converge on O’Brien, phasers drawn.

O’Brien is pretty sharp and anticipates this circumstance. He sets off a smoke bomb and escapes. They try to cut him off at the pass, but he’s one step ahead of them. He makes them turn off all the forcefields after they try to block his entry to a runabout. He sets course for the Gamma Quadrant and the Paradan star system, and here we are — right where the episode started. He plays cat-and-mouse with the pursuing runabout and spies where they set down: the second planet in the system. He follows them down to what looks like a secret meeting place where he is injured by phaser fire.

This is where we find out … oh, crap! It’s not Miles O’Brien! The real O’Brien looks to have been roughed up pretty badly by the Paradan rebels, and they made an exact duplicate, a replicant (they go out of their way to avoid calling him an android) version of O’Brien. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I first saw this episode. It’s a stunning reversal to the story we expect to see, as well as a sad ending for a replicant who thought he was real, so perfectly imbued with O’Brien’s personality, he (and we) never had a clue. His final thoughts before he dies are for Keiko. It goes to show you can take the replicant out of O’Brien, but you can’t take O’Brien out of the replicant.

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