from Chris Snelgrove
| 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. This is especially true of the episode “If Wishes Were Horses,” which features the imaginations of the station’s staff running wild and bringing some of the wildest fantasies to life.
As it turns out, this episode was effectively ruined by not one, but two fantastical creatures. These were the offending leprechauns in the original Deep Space Nine scenario and his attempt to be a less offensive replacement, Rumpelstiltskin. The replaced hero came with his own big problems; his scenes with Chief O’Brien were too challenging to film.
It started with such a bad idea that Colm Meaney refused to do it
When the writers wrote If Wishes Were Horses, they liked the idea of ​​a leprechaun coming to life because O’Brien read a story to his young daughter (because aliensof course). They had no idea it could be offensive until their own Irish actor Colm Meaney, who played Miles O’Brien, summed up his problem with the leprechaun storyline this way: “It’s really racist and I don’t want to do it.”
Colm Meaney was offended on several different levels by the leprechaun 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 the Irish and leprechauns.”
After Meany told Burman outright that it was racist, the writers and producers scrambled to find a replacement fantasy creature to replace the leprechaun. Meaney later reflected on how the original idea was as potentially offensive to fans of the franchise as it was to him: “Using caricatures or clichés of any nation is not a thing Star Trek is or should be in.”
As for then-presenter Michael Peeler, he recalled: “We had no idea there was any leprechaun sensibility in Irish culture and we certainly didn’t want to force Colm Meaney to play a leprechaun, but what the hell are you going to do once you have an entire story structured around a leprechaun who steals a child? It was an understandable dilemma because the script was almost complete by the time Meaney got to see 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 as to 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 leprechaun with Rumpelstiltskin, another fantasy character that Chief O’Brien could reasonably read to his young daughter about. Piller admitted that it wasn’t a perfectly elegant solution because “Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t quite the same thing, and it wasn’t going to work in the structure that we had.”
Piller was responsible for rewriting the script to include the new creature and later admitted that “I had no idea how to resolve it or where it was going to go” and “I wrote every scene to see if it worked and had fun with it.”
After the replacement was made, Colm Meaney was happy that the leprechaun storyline was removed, but he revealed that Rumpelstiltskin presented his own problems when it came to filming because the character “had the ability to appear and disappear”. This meant they had to do a “very complicated” reverse shoot, which sometimes involved him talking forward to an actor behind him. Still, Meaney thinks the episode “came out well.”
Not all fans agree with this assessment, especially because Rumpelstiltskin still visually reads like a leprechaun. Meaney himself seemed relieved by the switch, but some fans still felt it was some oddly inappropriate racism in the midst of an otherwise entertaining episode of Star Trek. Maybe if you do a few rounds of Quark’s bar first, you might find a pot of gold (or the bottom of some bottles) in this hot mess of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode.
