Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Miles O'Brien

10. We Encountered Him, Unnamed, At Farpoint

Colm Meaney has the honour of being one of only two actors to appear in both the pilots and finales of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, with Michael Dorn being the other. In Encounter At Farpoint, he was an unnamed Conn officer, one who mercifully didn't have to deal with Q's courtroom along with the rest of his Battle Bridge crew.

Though O'Brien, as he would later be named, would predominantly appear in Gold, he appears in Red here. By the time ...All Good Things came around, it was jarring to see him back in the Red again, as by then he had been on DS9 for two seasons, clad in operations colours.

Meaney told StarTrek.com in 2014 that he honestly couldn't remember if this appearance in the pilot was supposed to be a one-off, or if the brief called for a recurring character. As he recalled, they simply kept asking him to come back in, with O'Brien finally receiving his surname in Unnatural Selection, and his first name in Family.