this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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The characters in DS9 went on lots of Treks. Like the time Miles lived out decades in an alien prison only for it to really happen in his head. Or the time Miles was replaced by an alien who didn't realize he was the impostor. Or that time Miles was kidnapped and put on trial by the Cardassians. Or that time...
You would think with how hard it is to get into the Academy, how many qualified people they have to turn away, and with the fact that they don't have to pay for pensions in a post-scarcity utopia, that the Federation would have a more rigorous mandatory early retirement policy. Like, how many times do they let an officer be "Inner Lighted" before they tell them, "sorry, we know this isn't fair. This isn't on you. But at this point, your brain has been hijacked and influenced by alien technologies on multiple occasions. We frankly have no idea what those machines did to you. This isn't meant to be a punishment to you, but we simply cannot have someone so potentially compromised working such a dangerous position."
I'm sorry, but from a purely HR and risk perspective, after going through a fraction of what he did, Miles O'Brien should not be working as the Chief Engineer of one of the most strategically important defense facilities in the Quadrant. He could be compromised and not even know it. How do they know that time in the mind prison didn't also condition him into a sleeper agent of some sort?
After a certain amount of trauma, you would think they would just start mandating officers take early medical retirement. Not a judgment, just risk management. Hell, I would think after a single instance of an officer having their mind hijacked by an alien device, that at a minimum the victim would be transferred out of a front-line role, to somewhere where less sensitive.
Your point is well made but for the record O’Brian wasn't an officer and never went to the academy. He even jokes about having to call Nog ‘sir’ when he becomes an ensign.
You're right. But assumedly it's just as hard to become an enlisted member of Starfleet than it is an officer. When you have hundreds of worlds and trillions of citizens, you're never going to have a shortage of potential applicants for your fleet. Unless you're fielding millions of ships, there will never be a shortage. Even if only rare societal oddballs found the idea of serving appealing? Well 1% of a trillion is still 10 billion. The point is, that for every one person we see on screen, there have to be thousands of potential replacements, each just as qualified and driven.
And that's also why they likely wouldn't mind asking compromised people to resign. After all, getting in in the first place is essentially just an act of extreme luck. Everyone there knows they beat a bunch of folks just as qualified as themselves to get their seat. If you view your position as largely due to chance, then if fate hands you a curve ball and also takes that away from you due to chance? Well that seems reasonable.
I get the point you are making and I mostly agree with it. My one main argument is to ask if the other people really are just as qualified though? Just taking O’Brien again, he is 45 when his son is born in DS9 having at that point been in Starfleet for over 20 years and served in over 200 combat engagements. That’s not an amount of, especially hands on, experience that the average anyone is going to have at enlistment time.
On the other hand at the end of the series he goes to teach at the academy so I suppose you could argue that what you are positing is exactly what is being done to him there. Being rotated off the front line and put in a place where he will have access to mental health resources. It’s also mentioned in Voyager where they have crew that they talk about wouldn’t have made it on a starship and would have been turfed to a star base or similar had they not been stranded in the delta quadrant so it may be that what you are describing happens to everybody who isn’t a main character anyway.
Yeah, it seems almost like a perverse point of pride that the weirdos who join Starfleet don't really participate fully in planetside culture, and getting retired from it would almost like a kind of death or imprisonment. Now, why Picard and O'Brien don't get assigned to a cushy Starbase gig in Sol is beyond me. Those two are, mentally, hundreds of (very traumatic) years old each.
Oh look, another episode of the suffering of Miles O’Brien
At least we missed the suffering of that time Miles O’Brien (and Defiant Crew) got trapped back in time on a planet unable to return to their families
There is a line you see quoted from time to time the ST:TMP novelization, which I understand Gene Roddenberry had a real hand in crafting.:
He seems to have struggled with what his vision for a future society would be, versus the realities of making a sellable media property in the late 20th century. He posits that our Starfleet friends are actually socially conservative space cowboys by the standards of the UFP, which makes it easier for the audience to identify with them without compromising the rest of his post-scarcity utopian vision (e.g. that same passage indicates that James Kirk was partially named after his mother's first "love instructor"). However, it also means we're seeing a bizarre subculture of quasi-exiled psychological luddites who take on the eldritch horrors of service in Starfleet in return for not being slapped down into conformity.
It's clearly not a guiding principle for how Starfleet is generally portrayed in ST media, but it's interesting to think of them in terms of being distinctly apart from the rest of humanity while dedicating themselves to protecting it and expanding its understanding of the universe.