Of Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While we stand by the fact that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek series, its first season was as rough in places as season one of The next generation. That’s especially true of the episode “If Wishes Were Horses,” which features the imaginations of the station’s crew running wild and bringing some of the weirdest fantasies to life.
As it turns out, this episode was effectively ruined by not one but two fantasy creatures. It was the offensive troll in the original Deep Space Nine script and his try-to-be-less-offensive replacement, Rumpelstiltskin. The replaced character came with its own major problems; his scenes with Chief O’Brien were too challenging to film.
It started with an idea so bad that Colm Meaney refused to do it
When the writers wrote “If Wishes Were Horses,” they loved the idea of a troll coming to life because O’Brien was reading a fairy tale to his young daughter (because aliensof course). They had no idea this could be offensive until their very Irish actor Colm Meaney, who played Miles O’Brien, summed up his problem with the troll plot for them this way: “It’s really racist, and I don’t want to do it. .”
Colm Meaney was offended on several levels by the trolls in the original script. As the actor told producer Rick Berman at the time, “Every Irish actor I know has worked their whole life to overcome the stereotype of Irishmen and trolls.”
After Meaney clearly told Berman that this was racist, the writers and producers scrambled to find a replacement fantasy creature to replace the troll. Meaney later reflected on how the original idea was as potentially offensive to franchise fans as it was to him: “Using caricatures or clichés of any nation is not something Star Trek is or should be in.”
As for then-showrunner Michael Piller, he recalled: “We had no idea there was any sensitivity to trolls in Irish culture, and we certainly didn’t want to force Colm Meaney to act with a troll, but what the hell do you do after you have an entire story structured around a troll who steals a child?” It was an understandable dilemma since the script was mostly finished when Meaney saw it, Piller and his team had to figure out how to make the necessary changes to keep Meaney happy while not changing things so dramatically that it would require extensive rewriting.
Accusations of racism from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Star force them in a strange direction
The ultimate solution to this dilemma came from writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who suggested replacing the troll with Rumpelstiltskin, another fantasy character that Chief O’Brien could reasonably read about to his young daughter. Piller admitted that this was not a perfectly elegant solution because “Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t exactly the same and wouldn’t work in the structure we had.”
Piller was responsible for rewriting the script to incorporate the new creature and later admitted that “I had no idea how I was going to solve it or where it was going to go” and “I wrote every scene to see if it worked and had fun with it.”
Once the replacement was made, Colm Meaney was happy that the troll plot had been removed, but he revealed that Rumpelstiltskin presented his own problems when it came to shooting as the character “had the ability to appear and disappear”. This meant they had to do “very complicated” reverse photography, which sometimes involved him speaking up to an actor behind him. Still, Meaney felt the episode “came out well.”
Not all fans agree with that assessment, especially since Rumpelstiltskin still visually reads like a troll. Meaney himself seemed reassured by the switch, but some fans still think this was an oddly misplaced bit of racism in the middle of an otherwise fun Star Trek episode. Maybe if you have a few rounds at Quark’s bar first, you might find a pot of gold (or the bottom of some bottles) in this hot mess of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode.
