Chief Miles O'Brien

Newly transferred from the Enterprise, O'Brien is DS9's chief of operations, wrestling ancient Cardassian machinery into working order while his wife Keiko struggles to adjust to life on the station. He's a working engineer, not an officer with airs — practical, plainspoken, devoted to his family, and endlessly patient with equipment that seems built to spite him.

He's Star Trek's rare everyman: not a captain or a genius, just a skilled tradesman who married up in rank but never in temperament. Colm Meaney plays him with weary, working-class exasperation and real tenderness, and the writers use him to show what ordinary service costs — a perspective the franchise badly needed and had never quite had before.”