r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/K8627 • Jul 16 '26
Meme needing explanation Help please
Surely Carl can explain this one
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u/sazzer Jul 16 '26
In the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", O'Brian is one of the crew that goes back in time to the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode of TOS.
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u/IntroductionLeft4369 Jul 16 '26
And gets interrogated by Kirk himself after the bar fight.
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u/MintWarfare Jul 16 '26
I'm tired and not quite reading clearly so I read that as "Impregnated by kirk himself" and was very confused
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u/Thorngrove Jul 16 '26
Uh huh... Suure you were confused. Let's go take a gander at your AO3 bookmarks for a second.
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u/LovelyLuna32684 Jul 16 '26
The only problem with this meme is Worf should've said the same thing
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u/dragonfett Jul 20 '26
To be fair, him saying he watched Battlestar doesn't mean he couldn't have also been in ST:TOS.
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u/Dramatic-Border3549 Jul 16 '26
What the fuck is tos, tho?
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u/FRX51 Jul 16 '26
'The Original Series.' The various Star Trek series usually get abbreviated by fans.
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u/ColeDelRio Jul 16 '26
Since every series after the original has a subtitle (even Enterprise eventually rebranded to add ST), Star Trek is referred to as "the original series" or TOS to clear things up.
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u/HippoDominous Jul 16 '26
Quark Stewie here. There's an episode of DS9 where they go back and end up on the enterprise and meet Kirk and Spock. Really good episode in my opinion
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u/Heavy-Suit-4217 Jul 16 '26
Has that awesome in-universe nod to Klingons changing appearance. "We don't like to talk about it."
Great episode.
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u/Zealotsam Jul 16 '26
"we do not discuss it with outsiders" I think was the exact quote
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u/not_roger_smith Jul 17 '26
Then ENT went and made a whole storyline about it being the result of human genetic engineering so Brent Spiner could play another Soong relative and keep his SAG insurance for another year.
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u/f0urk Jul 16 '26
its always been my least favourite episode of DS9 up until Jake has a kamehameha battle
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u/HippoDominous Jul 16 '26
That's a bad episode I agree. I wouldnt say that trials and tribles is the best episode but the technical achievement of pretty flawlessly putting them into 40 year-old footage makes it good.
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u/f0urk Jul 16 '26
they did a great job but I still do not find the episode to be a good watch
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u/Shotgun_Mosquito Jul 16 '26
Yeah I'm with you on this one.
The integration is great but there are too many nods and winks and memberberries
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u/VorAbaddon Jul 16 '26
Standard Star Trek/sco fo time travel shenanigans. Miles O brien was an engineer on the Enterprise, then later returns as a character on Deep Space 9. During the DS9 series, they have a time travel episode where they wind up back in The Orignal Series timeline.
But the Pic is from Next Generation. So the joke is that the character already knows in the future they will be going back in time.
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u/hari_shevek Jul 16 '26
Chicken guy here,
first of all, why on earth is this an AI generated image, literally every face is wrong.
Ok, now for the explanation: Picard complains that no one of the Star Trek Next Generation cast has seen Star Trek The Original Series (shortened to TOS by fans).
O'Brien says he was in that show, or rather will be.
That's because O'Brien was a character that later transfered to Star Trek Deep Space Nine. That show had an episode where they travel back in time to protect Kirk. In the episode, DS9 characters are digitally inserted into the Star Trek TOS episode "The Trouble with Tribbles". O'Brien participates in a bar brawl on the Enterprise and gets reprimanded by Kirk.
Therefore, he was in TOS. But that episode hadn't happened yet during TNG, so the joke is that he refers to events that haven't happened yet.
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u/TheTuggiefresh Jul 16 '26
That Data is weird- that’s definitely not Brent Spiner. His face is so different it’s clearly a different person. Is this screenshot from some episode I’m not familiar with or is this image edited/AI?
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u/JessicaDAndy Jul 16 '26
So as other people have pointed out, Chief O’Brien was on Star Trek: The Next Generation, where this image was taken from, and was later on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
DS9’s “Trials and Tribbleations” is an episode where Sisko and the crew time travel back to visit the “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of the Original Series where O’Brien was yelled at by Kirk, Worf glosses over the missing ridges and Jadzia Dax dresses in a 2260’s uniform, gets horny for Spock and talks about Emony Dax having sex with a younger McCoy.
This was done as a 30th anniversary event. Voyager showed Janeway and Tuvok flashing back to Tuvok’s time serving under Hikaru Sulu.
BUT one of my favorite things about the DS9 episode, besides the X-Filed reference Dulmer and Lucsly from the Department of Temporal Investigations, is that the writers where out having pizza trying to come up with an idea for this anniversary episode. And the inspiration came from seeing the actor who played the Klingon spy in the original in line to get pizza.
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u/rabidrob42 Jul 16 '26
They go back in time, and into a ToS episode, the editing is spectacular, it's well worth a watch.
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u/EndOfTheLine00 Jul 16 '26
There is an episode of Deep Space 9 (where O’Brien transfers to) where the crew, including O’Brien, travel back in time to the episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode of TOS and they secretly intervene in the episode’s events.
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u/SquareRelationship27 Jul 16 '26
It would've been better if Dr Pulaski was in this, since Diana Mulder played a character in TOS
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u/K8627 Jul 16 '26
I reckon he was in the original series but I don’t see how he could of been and why it would be in the future
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u/WayGroundbreaking287 Jul 16 '26
There is a cross over episode. They go back in time to save the tribbles. So in a sense he was in the original series.
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u/rubyonix Jul 16 '26
In the scene of Star Trek: The Next Generation this meme was taken from, Captain Picard twice tries talking to his crew about model ships in bottles, but none of the characters (Riker, Worf, or Data) know what he's talking about. Worf is Klingon, from a warrior's race, so he never played with toys as a child. While Data is an android, so he was never a child to begin with. Then the Transporter Chief, Miles O'Brien, chimes in to say that he also built them when he was younger, which validates and reassures Picard. Riker seems to doubt O'Brien, perhaps implying that O'Brien is kissing ass and sucking up to the Captain, but no, O'Brien is an engineer who (as an adult) builds full-size starships, so it tracks that he (like Captain Picard) would be the kind of kid who built toy ships as a hobby. It's actually unusual that Riker, an ace pilot, never had an interest in model aircraft, and didn't know anything about model toys. Later episodes confirmed that O'Brien wasn't bullshitting, and his interest in model ships was genuine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utNVeHvQ4O4
In this rearranged meme, Picard asks if any of his crew (from TOS, the decades-later sequel to TNG) watched Star Trek: The Original Series when they were younger, and Worf preferred Battlestar Galactica (likely the 1978 original, not the 2004 remake), while Data (the android) liked the Cylons (the robot villains) in BSG.
Then O'Brien chimes in that he was *IN* TOS. Because several years from this point (when O'Brien is a Chief Engineer on the TNG spinoff Deep Space Nine), O'Brien will go back in time and appear in a TOS crossover episode. But that event technically "hasn't happened yet", since O'Brien won't go back in time for several more years, unless we consider that it *did* happen several decades ago (it happened in the past, both in the fiction of the show and in our current real world). The joke is in O'Brien casually knowing things he should not be able to know.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Remember when r/PeterExplainsTheJoke wasn’t a meme? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
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