NJC+ SF Film Club: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 3 Episodes 11 and 12: "Past Tense"
Where will you be when the Bell Riots start in September 2024?
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Choosing the subject of the first official post of the NJC+ Film and TV Club seemed easy at first. Since it is now 2024, and I’m a fan of the Star Trek film and TV universe, choosing “Past Tense, from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seemed a good fit.
The episodes first aired in 1995, and foretold a dysfunctional 21st century set in San Francisco 2024. This would a cinch to write up, grab a few screenshots from the streaming service, and it’d be done. It’s Star Trek! It’s set in 2024! In San Francisco! Perfect way to start a new newsletter!
I hadn’t seen these episodes in quite some time, so while I remembered the basics of the episode, the rewatch was a bit more painful than I expected. Seeing this in 1995, against the backdrop of current events in the 1990s gave the episode the kind of emotional and political punch many classic Star Trek episodes have, a sort of “hmm, maybe try and tweak things now so this doesn’t happen” kind of thing.
Rewatching it in 2024, I started to realize that while this would be a discussion of a TV show set in the City, I also realized that you really can’t talk about it without talking about a lot of history and current events, the latter of which I was hoping to avoid with this newsletter.
I seriously considered not writing it at all, or at least putting it off, rather than hit readers with a big heavy post that might make people not want to read anymore. Then I remembered I’d already said I’d write about it in the previous post, so there was no real way to avoid it. Plus, WWCSD (What would Captain Sisko do)? He’d publish, darnit!
I’m going to offer readers the chance to make up their own mind: If talking about Star Trek, economic and political upheaval, and the like isn’t what you want to read today, maybe put this one aside for now.
With that out of the way, hopefully you’ve had a chance to see the episode yourself, as was my suggestion in the inaugural post of this new substack (sub-substack?). If not, then this article from The Atlantic has a decent recap, and has a nice, smart sounding analysis worth reading.
If you don’t want to click the link, then here’s the shortest recap ever:
Three members of the crew beam down to San Francisco, home of Starfleet Headquarters. San Francisco has always been the home of Starfleet, and is also the home to Starfleet Academy, and Captain Sisko’s dad’s restaurant. So if nothing else it’s nice to know Our Fair City still exists in the 24th century. Yay!
Thanks to an interstellar macguffin, they beam instead to San Francisco in 2024. Captain Sisko and Doctor Bashir wake up disoriented, and find themselves being shuffled off at gunpoint to a “Sanctuary District”, a place where people who are poor, unhoused, or have mental or physical health issues are put into a walled off part of town, complete with armed security forces and guard towers “for their protection.”
They’re not criminals, Captain Sisko points out - they’re just poor, but the City has decided they’d rather wall them up to keep them away from the wealthy, and ignore them because it’s a bother. They don’t get any help to find a job or health care-just penned in to keep them out of sight and out of mind. That’d make anyone want to start a riot.
Lt. Dax, their Trill crewmate, has the fortune to wake up a few meters away in the “Transbay Tube 2” of the “TransFrancisco” Transit System. Dax has the good luck to get help from a wealthy tech executive who takes public transit (!) so she avoids getting sent off to the Sanctuary District like the others.
Since she’s given the benefit of the doubt, in no small part due to her appearance, is given a chance to use her superior 24th century computer skills to get cash, and ID, she gets to spend some time with the wealthy elite of San Francisco.
The 24th century crew’s presence, however, creates a situation that causes history to take a different course - in this case the “Bell Riots” of 2024 in San Francisco don’t happen. While this sounds great (yay! no riots!) , their interruption of historical events has devastating consequences. Because the Bell Riots don’t happen, this prevents the real solutions from ever happening - ones that end up making the 24th century our heroes know possible.
The remaining crew on the starship Defiant are suddenly in a galaxy with NO Federation, NO Starfleet, and an Earth that’s the center of nothing but it’s own bullsh*t. Somehow the crews in both centuries have to find a way to fix the timeline, and off we go.
As stated earlier, this is the slimmest of recaps, which doesn’t capture the many of the story’s details, so go see it if you haven’t already.
To begin, I’d like to start this post they way I’d like to start all Club posts and look at how much (if any) of this was filmed in Actual San Francisco.
In this case, the answer in this case is a resounding “no.” A TV production in the 1990s would not likely have the money and time filming outside the Thirty Mile Zone (TMZ) in Southern California. Although the characters take pains to mention seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, the only real hint we get is a scene at the tech exec’s offices, which have a view of the Transamerica Pyramid.
There isn’t even a token Victorian house or a gratuitous shot of a cable car. Even Star Trek: Into Darkness had a cable car in 24th century San Francisco!
However, the show does score some geography points when Chief O’Brien notes he’s at the corner of California and Polk, which is an actual place, even if they’re on the lot that looks like New York City. We don’t get to see anything from the Real San Francisco of the early 1990s, which was when the first Dot Com bubble cycle was beginning.
So, while we miss out on seeing our favorite streets and places in the 1990s, at least they know something about the City, and even make a reference to the Marina.
However, if we take a look at the context the episode was created (the early 1990s) I’d suggest that maybe we did get a look at the San Francisco of the 1990s (and the San Francisco of Actual 2024) in “Past Tense,” despite the extensive use of the Paramount studio lot.
Now, as stated earlier, I don’t want this to devolve into a Big P “Political” Discussion, but the political and social climate of the 1990s would have been the kind of thing Star Trek’s writers would draw upon for inspiration for Star Trek stories. This has been a thing with Star Trek, going back to the Original Series back in the 1960s. (Space hippies, anyone?)
Many cities in America were dealing with the effects of a significant recession in the early 1990s, coupled with a realignment in the economy due to the end of the Cold War. The fallout from both caused significant economic displacement. There was also a serious health crisis with the AIDS epidemic running rampant, and the sense that the government was content to do nothing and let people die of a deadly disease. A corresponding militant political movement rose up in San Francisco and other cities, demanding it be addressed.
U.S. cities, including San Francisco, were alarmed at the sudden changes and disruption. The response of voters in San Francisco was to elect a center-right, former police chief as mayor, who vowed to “get tough” on the homeless, and all the assorted urban ills San Francisco faced. This included policies, such as jailing people who fed poor people on the street, and hiring a police chief who trashed newspaper distribution for a media outlet that dared suggest the Mayor and Chief didn’t walk on water. All in hippie dippie “liberal” San Francisco!
It was said at the time that if Jesus Christ came back to do the loaves and fishes routine mentioned in the Bible, San Francisco would have bonked Him on the head and hauled Him off. Things were bad enough under the mayor’s mishandling of city affairs that people thought electing Willie Brown was an improvement. (ouch!)
Other cities followed suit, as Rudy Giuliani would run on a similar platform in New York City around this time, and plenty of other politicians would copy these types of policies in urban areas around the country.
The economic recession of the early 1990s was bad enough that people thought electing Democrat governor Bill Clinton as president was an improvement (ouch!). Democrat Clinton would run on a platform ending many aspects of social spending, and to increase incarceration rate. He would work with new leadership in Congress to advance these, and other policies in order to limit, or end, many of the programs his own party supported, in order to court suburban votes.
Science fiction allows the creator to address current events in a way that can reach an audience in ways a news story, or a politician’s speech cannot. So for Star Trek to take on these kinds of issues in the 1990s would be a way to provoke a discussion about the kind of society one wants to live in, without realizing you’re doing it. It even reaches people who live in suburbs who like science fiction TV shows. Yay, sci fi!
At the end of the story, Dr. Bashir asks Captain Sisko reflect on their time in the early 21st century, and Dr. Bashir asks, “How could they have let things get so bad?” to which Sisko responds “That’s a good question. I wish I had an answer.”
Flash forward to when I sat down to rewatch “Past Tense”, and my initial reaction, sitting in Actual San Francisco, in Actual 2024 was that the fictional dysfunctional SF was better than the actual dysfunctional San Francisco. (Well, aside from those awful 1990s-derived fashions. I mean, what was Dax even wearing?)
I’ve never liked it when people suggest a media property such as book, TV show, or film “predicts” the future, because that’s not the point.
Stories like these aren’t predictions, per se, but more extrapolations of current events. It is easy for me to sit in Actual 2024 and pass judgment on what the story got “right” or “wrong,” but one can’t fault people in 1995 for Not Knowing Exactly How Things Will Turn Out, certainly not writers for network television.
It still hit different than it did when I watched it for the first time when I was in Seattle in the 1990s (ironically because it was where I could get a job and live more affordably than in my hometown of….San Francisco!)
That said, allow me to make a few observations with my 2024 Tinfoil Hat on:
— The idea of one of San Francisco’s wealthy tech elite takes any form of public transit immediately made me laugh.
— The idea that a wealthy tech executive would use their extensive communications network to ensure the truth got out in a violent political and social uprising? Science fiction. Or some other fiction. Fiction, nonetheless.
— Transbay Tube 2 built by 2024? Defintely science fiction. Fantasy, even. We tried to build a subway to Chinatown and it ended up costing a fortune and opened years later than it was supposed to. A transbay tube? Ha!
I could go on, but you get the idea. I’ll take off my 2024 Tinfoil Hat now.
I’m not the only one to comment on this story, and I certainly won’t be the last. Most people tend to focus on the obvious - people living in camps, the harm of street drugs and mental illness. Mass shootings aren’t a thing in Star Trek’s 2024, if only because Columbine hadn’t happened yet in the real world of the early 1990s. (which, all I could think, sitting in Real 2024, was “lucky them, mass shootings aren’t a regular thing yet.”)
Dr. Bashir asks Sisko “How could they let things get so bad?” and while Captain Sisko wishes he had an answer, all I will say, here in Real 2024, is that these kinds problems are more beneficial to some than any real or practical solution.
So long as that remains the case, you’ll be able to recycle these Frank Jordan for Mayor cards in 2024, 2044, and the year 2525, if some get their way. It’s a real world variant of the concept of “sustainable war” and it doesn’t take a visitor from the 24th century to tell you that isn’t going to end well.
However, the story does not end on a down note. The crew fixes the timeline and finds a way back to the 24th century, where things are Much Better. No matter how depressing a Star Trek story can get, the fact it is punctuated with the idea that we don’t have to be screw-ups, and that a better future is always possible makes the viewer feel better, but it’s also true.
So while it was kind of a gut punch to see this, I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, people might choose the “don’t screw up” option on occasion. A TV show meant for entertainment can’t possibly change the planet, but if it gets some people to think differently about how to approach problems, then we might have a chance at getting to a better future.
On that note, I’d say Star Trek: Deep Space Nine manages to do so both in the 1990s and in 2024.
Now, I know this is a lot to throw at you with the first official post of the Film Club, but just as the issues remain the same, so does the opportunity, at any time, for all of us to do Something Not Awful. Sometimes that means doing something in the real world, and sometimes it means watching a well made film or TV show set in San Francisco.
Ok, enough Star Trek and whatnot. I’ll try and pick something a bit lighter, like maybe that goofball James Bond movie “A View to a Kill,” or something simliar.
I haven’t quite decided what movie or TV show to review next, as I’ve realized the hard way you can’t count on streaming services to have all the content they say they have, and even if they do, getting screenshots isn’t as easy as you’d think, mostly due to excessive DRM. It’s enough of an issue that I am looking to buy a DVD player to get around it. (Dysfunctional 2024 indeed!).
Also I want to let you know about something I discovered just the other day - the Vogue Theater has a “Streets of San Francisco Film Series” where they show movies based here in SF!
I have reached out to them asking if they have a schedule planned for 2024 and if they do, I’ll be sure to link to it here. Most recently they showed Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, also known as the “whales” episode, Eventually I will write about that one, because I have some interesting local insight into that one, but it is going to take me a while to pull together. Plus, this isn’t a Star Trek newsletter! Really!
Finally, I wanted to post a link to writer Violet Blue’s Patreon, the source of the graphic at the beginning of the newsletter, and one of those all around cool people online.
I had the pleasure of meeting her during my blog days when she lived here in San Francisco, and she’s one of the nicest and smartest people I know. Her newsletters are well worth a look and deserve your support.
If you’ve read to the end, thanks! If you decide to keep subscribing, then double thanks! I wanted to start this newsletter with something that popped, and well, this one did, more than I had planned. Thanks for reading.