Written by Chris Snellgrove | Published
While we stand by the fact of that Deep Space Nine It’s the best Star Trek series, and its first season was just as rough in places as the first season The next generation. This is especially true of the episode “If Wishes Were Horses” which features the imagination of the station crew running wild and bringing some of their strangest fantasies to life.
As it turns out, this ring was actually destroyed by not one but two fantastical creatures. That was the originally offensive genie Deep Space Nine The script and its attempt to be less offensive, Rumplestiltskin. The swapped character came with its own major problems. His scenes with President O’Brien were very difficult to film.
It started with a very bad idea that Colm Meaney refused to do
When the writers wrote If Wishes Were Horses, they loved the idea of a genie coming to life because O’Brien read a fairy tale to his little daughter (because aliens, of course). They had no idea this might be offensive until their Irish actor Colm Meaney, who played Miles O’Brien, summed up for them his problem with the leprechaun plot this way: “It’s really racist, and I don’t want to do it.” “.
Colm Meaney was insulted on several different levels by the Genie in the original script. As the actor told producer Rick Berman at the time, “Every Irish actor I know has worked his whole life to overcome the stereotype of Irish people and perpetrators.”
After Minnie told Berman point-blank that this was racist, the writers and producers scrambled to find an alternative fantasy creature who could replace the leprechaun. Later, Meaney reflected on how the initial idea was as offensive to fans of the franchise as it was to him: “Using caricatures or clichés of any nation is not something Star Trek is about or should be about.”
As for Michael Piller, the show’s then presenter, he says: “We had no idea there was any allergy to leprechauns in Irish culture, and we certainly didn’t want to force Colm Meaney to act with a leprechaun, but what the hell are you going to do?” After you have an entire story centered around a genie stealing a child? It was an understandable dilemma because the script was mostly finished by the time Minnie saw it. Peeler and his team had to figure out how to make the changes necessary to keep Meaney happy while not changing things so dramatically that it would require extensive rewriting.
Accusations of racism from Star Trek: Deep Space IX force them to go in a strange direction
The final solution to this dilemma came from writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who suggested replacing the Genie with Rumpelstiltskin, another fictional character that President O’Brien could read about to his young daughter. Beller admitted that this wasn’t an entirely elegant solution because “Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t quite the same thing and wouldn’t work in the structure we had.”
Beller was responsible for rewriting the script to incorporate the new creature and later admitted that “I had no idea how to solve it or where it was going to go” and “I wrote every scene to see if it worked or not and to enjoy it.” “He-she.”
Once the replacement was made, Colm Meaney was happy that the Genie plot was removed, but revealed that Rumplestiltskin presented his own problems when it came to shooting because the character “has the ability to appear and disappear”. This meant they had to do “very complicated” reverse photography, which sometimes involved talking to an actor behind him. However, Minnie felt that the episode “came out well.”
Not all fans agree with this assessment, especially since Rumpelstiltskin still visually reads as a leprechaun. Minnie himself seemed relieved by the substitution, but some fans still felt that this was a weirdly racist out of place in the midst of a fun Star Trek episode. Maybe if you have a few rounds at Quark’s tavern first, you might find a pot of gold (or the bottom of some bottles) in this hot mess in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode.