I just finished watching DS9 Season 5 Episode 5 ‘The Assignment’ and as much as I loved it, I couldn’t believe the treatment they gave Keiko. It was a tense episode and I enjoyed seeing O’Brien getting psychologically tortured and I laughed at first at the treatment of Keiko but by the end of the episode I felt really bad about how she was portrayed.
The whole dragon lady dynamic is fun for a while but it gets old fast and you start feeling bad for the character.
I also loved the part in the episode where it’s O’Brien’s birthday and everyone instead sings ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’ … it’s a whole musical rights issue where someone has to be paid for the performance of the song ‘Happy Birthday’ which is why they didn’t use it … yet another torturous addition to the life of O’Brien.
It seems like Star Trek of the era had a real blind spot for directing actors. If you weren’t an extremely self-assured performer coming in, you would have to be a regular to cobble together enough takes and screen time to develop (or maybe just get the audience to accept your quirks/limits), especially with a setting that requires a little imagination to inhabit. Even then sometimes people never did quite sell their roles, and much like the Star Wars prequels, I think the direction had a lot to do with it. I think some actors just need a type of direction that was not forthcoming at the time, though I put it on the entire braintrust and the expectations of the era, rather than individual directors.
Rosalind Chao never made me believe she was doing anything other than reading lines, and it made it that much easier to dismiss the relationship or focus on the shriller scripts.