By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While we stand by the fact that Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek series, its first season was as rough in some places as season one of The Next Generation. That’s especially true of the episode “If Wishes Were Horses,” which features the imaginations of the station’s crew running rampant and bringing some of the weirdest fantasies to life.
As it turns out, this episode was effectively ruined by not one but two fantasy creatures. Those were the offensive leprechaun in the original Deep Space Nine script and his attempt-to-be-less-offensive replacement, Rumpelstiltskin. The swapped-in character came with his own big problems; his scenes with Chief O’Brien were overly challenging to shoot.
It Started With An Idea So Bad Colm Meaney Refused To Do It
When the writers penned “If Wishes Were Horses,” they loved the idea of a leprechaun coming to life because O’Brien read a fairytale to his young daughter (because aliens, of course). They had no idea this might be offensive until their very Irish actor Colm Meaney, who played Miles O’Brien, summed up his problem with the leprechaun plot to them this way: “It’s really racist, and I don’t want to do it.”
Colm Meaney was offended on several different levels by the leprechaun in the original script. As the actor told producer Rick Berman at the time, “Every Irish actor I know has worked his entire life to overcome the stereotype of Irish people and leprechauns.”
After Meaney told Berman point-blank that this was racist, the writers and producers scrambled to find a substitute fantasy creature that could replace the leprechaun. Later, Meaney reflected on how the initial idea was just as potentially offensive to franchise fans as it was to him: “Using caricatures or cliches of any nation is not something Star Trek is or should be into.”
As for then-showrunner Michael Piller recalled, “We had no idea there was any sensitivity to leprechauns in the Irish culture, and certainly we did not want to force Colm Meaney to act with a leprechaun, but what the h*ll do you do after you’ve got a whole story structured around a leprechaun stealing a child?” It was an understandable dilemma because the script was mostly finished by the time Meaney got to see it. Piller and his team had to figure out how to make the necessary changes to keep Meaney happy while not changing things up so dramatically that it would require an extensive rewrite.
Racism Accusations From Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Star Force Them In A Strange Direction
The ultimate solution to this dilemma came from writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who suggested replacing the leprechaun with Rumpelstiltskin, another fantasy character that Chief O’Brien could reasonably be reading about to his young daughter. Piller admitted that this wasn’t a perfectly elegant solution because “Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t exactly the same thing and wouldn’t work in the structure we had.”
Piller was in charge of rewriting the script to incorporate the new creature and later admitted that, “I had no idea how to resolve it or where it was going to go” and “I wrote each scene to see if it worked and had fun with it.”
Once the replacement was made, Colm Meaney was happy that the leprechaun plot had been removed, but he revealed that Rumpelstiltskin presented his own problems when it came to shooting because the character “had the appearing and the disappearing” ability. This meant they had to do “very complicated” reverse shooting, which sometimes involved him speaking forward to an actor behind him. Still, Meaney felt that the episode “came out well.”
Not all fans agree with that assessment, especially because Rumpelstiltskin still visually reads as a leprechaun. Meaney himself seemed placated by the substitution, but some fans still feel like this was some strangely out-of-place racism in the midst of an otherwise fun Star Trek episode. Maybe if you have a few rounds at Quark’s bar first, you might find a pot of gold (or the bottom of some bottles) in this hot mess of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode.