I was always quite fond of Rosalind Chao's wonderful performance as Keiko Ishikawa - better known by her married name of O'Brien. I thought Keiko and her husband were an interesting mix. I never would've thought to pair them off, but it worked out so well, that their getting together was the destiny of it. And, to my surprise, not very much of a fuss is usually made about her, despite having contributed so much to some of the more memorable storylines of Deep Space Nine, especially.
I've always liked Keiko. Never understood all the hate directed at her. I liked how scenes at home with the O'Brien's showed the normal lives people lived in a sci-fi setting.
... Agreed!!! Keiko was very instrumental in helping to sell O'Brien's "Every Man" image that everybody insists he espouses to the 'nth degree. And what Joe Plumber doesn't have to deal with his old lady nagging at him? Now, I know her bitching did not win a lot of people over. Unfortunately, they sort of remember her more for that than for her other contributions to the fun and the drama of Deep Space Nine. But from Season One, when she took it upon herself to teach children on station and Kai came and bombed the schoolhouse ... wow! It doesn't get more dramatic than that. But Keiko was also part of the fun of Deep Space Nine and she made me laugh ...
Perhaps ... In any case, Keiko most certainly did nag O'Brien and even though it wasn't constantly, it wasn't half-assed. She wasn't above causing a scene in public ... her Persian Flaw. But she was many other - pleasant - things. She could be very affectionate, for example. And Danny, Keiko didn't always torture O'Brien. Indeed, she was very loving towards him, for the most part. I liked how she would playfully tease him, to see what kind of a reaction she'd get ... more to amuse herself, than anything. But it was cute. And it was always nice to see these two have their little moments together, when they had them.
I like that she was there and the few times they found something for her to do it was usually pretty interesting. But realistically, I often got the feeling that the writers were really struggling to come up with material for her, especially as time went on. She was something of a direct carry-over from TNG in the beginning, a link which lost it's relevancy a little, even in terms of O'Brien's character background. Clearly the writers loved doing O'Brien/Julian scenes so much that Keiko came to be something difficult to write around, with Julian often taking what might be Keiko's traditional sphere of influence: the 'off duty' scenes. They even seemed to lampshade this with that amusing scene in Hippocratic Oath, where they discuss Miles' relationship with Keiko and explicitly compares it to his friendship with Julian.
The main problem I had with Keiko is in that first DS9 episode she did, where she basically is just sitting around, bored, and suddenly decides on a whim that she wants to be a teacher. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of teaching careers get started that way. Oh, don't bother with the years of preparation that would surely be necessary.
I must confess that my Suspension of Disbelief was shaken when Keiko - a botonist - took it upon herself to just start teaching school kids. Especially the way it was written and presented. But I likened it, really, to the Old West ... the pioneering days, when something like that was likely to happen. DS9, to start with, at least, kept insisting on treating the station like it was some lone, one horse town. As I recall, Bashir even came onboard making exactly that comparison. Anyway, what kind of surprised me more than Keiko just switching gears like that, out of the blue, was O'Brien's substituting on certain episodes. Or, at least one that I can recall. I was like ... wait ... what? It doesn't seem the kind of thing that he would've just taken on and I would've loved to have seen the conversation Keiko had with him to put him up to it ...