Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Julian Bashir

Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes. Or, perhaps in this case, the best of friendships are, in fact, built on an undercurrent of loathing. Much like a lot of the audience, Miles O'Brien couldn't bear to be around Bashir at first. In The Storyteller, the Chief had to be practically ordered to sit in the same shuttle as the Doctor. It was then the multitude of life and death — mostly death — situations thrust upon them which solidified, and at times tested, the duo's most unique, most endearing relationship.

The bromance might never have begun, however. According to producer Ira Steven Behr in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, the studio returned with all kinds of suggestions after season one, one of which was that they "put rockets on the station so it could go off and have adventures," and another was that they say goodbye to Bashir. Whilst Behr never knew the studio's exact reasoning, he notes that, "I just felt that they felt the character was an irritant in some way. Which I guess is another way of saying he got on O'Brien's nerves". Everyone was unanimous in refusing both ideas: "The space station was no and getting rid of Bashir was no," concluded Behr.

It was O'Brien's near demise in Armageddon Game, an episode originally slated to feature Dax over the Chief, that truly marked the beginnings of the "bond that can never be broken" between the two men, for the writers and the actors alike. Alexander Siddig regularly cites the episode as a pivotal moment for the pair, the "crux of the relationship" as he put it in Crew Dossier — Julian Bashir.

Of course, Bashir and O'Brien went on to be known for their legions of holosuite adventures, but they also notably played darts — a game introduced for them in Prophet Motive. According to Robert Hewitt Wolfe in the DVD extra Crew Dossier — Miles O'Brien, the pair could have ended up playing pool instead, until writers found out that they wanted to do that on Star Trek: Voyager.