This was an interesting episode told mostly in flashback; the chief is aboard a runabout and is being pursued by other officers from DS9 for reasons not immediately apparent. As he makes a log entry we see what happened before to lead up to this strange situation. When the chief gets back to the station after arranging the security details for a peace treaty between two warring factions from the Gamma quadrant he finds that nobody is behaving normally. At first it is just little things; his daughter does not want a kiss, Sisko has got another officer working on the security details for the peace conference without telling him and he can't access all the files he should be able to. As things progress he becomes convinced that someone or something is effecting the crew. Soon he realises that he must get off the station if he is to find out just what is going on. Stealing a runabout he heads back to the Gamma Quadrant and makes a shocking discovery: it wasn't the rest of the crew of DS9 that had been changed, it was him. The Chief O'Brien we'd been watching was a replica, identical in every way but programmed to carry out unspecified orders at a given time.
Colm Meaney did a great job as Chief O'Brien getting more and more paranoid as those he considers friends shut him out from doing his job and giving him manufactured tasks to keep him out of the way. It was a shame that the replacement died at the end although it did add extra poignancy to the story.
Colm Meaney did a great job as Chief O'Brien getting more and more paranoid as those he considers friends shut him out from doing his job and giving him manufactured tasks to keep him out of the way. It was a shame that the replacement died at the end although it did add extra poignancy to the story.