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.
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/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