Since a majority of us would acknowledge the O'Brien's relationship didn't exactly work out well (she's quite a pill) do you think Data is at fault for basically forcing the marriage to happen?
What? I don't agree with that. They don't always agree and sometimes they get mad at each other. But when that happens they work it out. They love each other very much. They're just not all over each other like a couple who've been dating for 6 weeks.
O'Brien seems happy with Keiko. Data's role in their wedding was basically just trying to figure out what was expected of him.
On TNG the O'Brien/Keiko relationship seems miserable, but (wisely) I don't think this is carried to DS9. What we see of them on this show probably qualifies them as the healthiest romantic relationship in all of Trek. They really got to cover every angle of the various Trek tropes. O'Brien possessed by an evil alien, Keiko possessed by an evil alien, O'Brien replaced by an alien duplicate who didn't know he was an alien duplicate. Plus Keiko getting turned into a child, Molly getting aged into an adult, O'Brien mentally being aged into an old convict... I always liked how real the marriage felt, through all these outrageous sci-fi shenanigans.
I think Miles and Keiko's relationship is just fine. She seems very human, which is a nice change from some of the characters we see in TNG trek.
I tend to disagree with how healthy their relationship was. It always seemed like she was finding a reason to snark at him. He never did such a thing. Maybe it's the old "wives will be wives" but he definitely got the short end of the relationship stick on several occasions (maybe it's the disparity of acting chops). Think back to the TNG when they were married. She got "cold feet" when in reality it really seemed like she didn't love him like he loved her. Data goes off and has an exercise in humanity and it magically works out. If it were me, I would've left her at the nearest transporter pad.
She merely did what thousands of couples do on their wedding day, she got cold feet. That doesn't mean she didn't love Miles, just that the life changing event in front of her overwhelmed her for a little while. Why would she marry a man she didn't love? This is supposed to be the 24th century, so there's no need to marry someone for food or shelter, nor class or status. Keiko was a beautiful, intelligent woman, who could have gone anywhere, and fallen in love with anyone. She fell in love with Miles. The reason Miles didn't snark so much at Keiko is because Miles was more laid back than she was. Clearly, Keiko's personality tend to be more assertive. In this case, that's the type of person Miles clearly likes. There's nothing wrong with their relationship.
I felt they had the most realistic romance in all of trek because they focused more on the details of married life and less on romance movie nonsense. If O'Brien was the eveyman this was the everymarriage IMO. PLus Keiko I can see being upset at not being able to pursure her career on the station but also wanting to support her husband when he gets a promotion. I actually wish Keiko would have been used more in the later seasons because with her gone it actually hurt the O'brien character because he didn't have much to do when he wasn't hanging out with Bashir. Jason
On my rewatch this year I was pleasantly surprised by how much I appreciated their marriage on DS9 compared to earlier viewings. When I saw it at first air, I was single, but now I'm a happily married husband and father. I sympathized a lot with the compromises they made to overall come out on the positive side of marriage. They bickered a "lot", but IMO it's more because NOT seeing them bicker would be pretty boring. History's best on-screen couples are best defined by how they fight AND how they make up, not how they get along the other 99% of the time. I thought the O'Briens had great stories and chemistry as characters and actors. My criticism is more about how O'Brien got pigeonholed into playign the always-suffering guy in most of his stories. The writers are on record as being fans of how Colm Meaney plays that sort of story, so they kept writing them. IMO this was to the detriment of having stories as a couple, to the point where they were almost looking for excuses for Keiko to be shipped off to Bajor or Earth or wherever for months at a time. Mark
Yeah, everyone just seemed to love making Miles suffer one way or another. But I agree, their relationship was so wonderfully normal in DS9. I really loved them together.
I agree Keiko was more allowed to criticize Miles than Miles was to criticize Keiko but I think that came from the PC culture of the 90s where TV women were expected to emasculate their men but TV men doing the same would come off as abusive. I mean, that's just the formula for 1990s romances. Man: (Does something manly) Man: Aren't I cool for doing that manly thing? Woman: (Sarcastic put down) Man: I'm going to go do something even more cool and manly but also insensitive to your needs! Woman: (Gets offended by this thing) Man: I have grown now and I realize why I was wrong, I am sorry. I'm just a big dumb man with a heart of gold but no head. Woman: I forgive you. Don't blame Keiko. It's in her nature as a 1990s TV married woman.
I never was under the impression that they had a dysfunctional marriage. We just saw relatively many instances of them quibbling a bit about something, but underneath that I usually felt the love they had for each other.
Exactly. The O'Brien's marriage is one of my favorite things in Deep Space Nine. Before going on the internet I would never have thought anyone could view their marriage as anything but normal, healthy and loving. The weirdest thing is some folks' perception of Keiko as constantly nagging and constraining Miles. Have you watched the same show? Or experienced a relationship with a real person, for that matter?
Did you expect Keiko to be a total doormat, with no needs of her own, being the perfect Stepford wife?
I'm pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that the writers considered O'Brien to be the best character to put through tough situations, becuse as a family man he would be the most relatable to the audience in terms of how whichever suffering also affected Keiko, the kids, and his relationship with them?
I think if you've got exciting sci-fi, depicting a functional marriage and all the little petit-disputes that surround that, it inevitably comes across as underwhelming. It's hard to make that exciting. Not to say there isn't good episodes involving their relationship to one degree or another but you gotta work that bit extra harder to extract a good storyline from those kind of domestic relationships. And I think every relationship is a asymmetrical to one degree or another. Particularly if one partner has a prominent career and the other doesn't. But I'm glad they depicted a long term relationship on there given the singleton stranglehold that normally marks Trek.