DS9 Flashback: Past Tense, Part I

From the very beginning, Star Trek was always presenting allegorical episodes that looked at present-day issues through a futuristic science fiction lens. Sometimes, the allegory would lose the remove of being set on an "alien world," as our heroes time traveled back to earlier periods in Earth's history. So it was with Deep Space Nine's two part episode, "Past Tense."

While the Defiant is visiting Earth, a transporter accident sends Sisko, Dax, and Bashir back into the past. They become separated in 2024 San Francisco, the men winding up in a "Santuary District" -- a concentration camp for the homeless -- just days before a formative historical event known as the Bell Riots.

This episode had been in the works since early in the season, when staff writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe pitched the idea of sending Sisko back in time to wind up homeless and diagnosed insane for his rantings about being from the future. Wolfe himself thought his script wasn't quite right (though it sounds like it may have been inspiration for the later episode "Far Beyond the Stars"); still, the writers wanted to do something that commented on homelessness.

Show runner Ira Steven Behr came up with the angle to make the story work: the idea of "Sancutary Disticts," concentration camps into which people would be callously rounded up -- out of sight and out of mind for the rest of society. He also took inspiration from the 1971 prison riot at Attica, which was driven largely by inhumane living conditions. Behr thought he was presenting a fictional cautionary tale, yet as the staff was crafting the story, the L.A. Times ran an article describing a proposal by the mayor to move homeless people into fenced-in areas to "make downtown Los Angeles friendlier to business." As Wolfe put it: "literally there it was in the newspaper. We were a little freaked out." But also, of course, determined to tell the story.

It's quite a different experience to view "Past Tense" today than it was when it first aired in 1995. What was theoretical then is closer to reality today. This isn't an off-the-mark, 1960s prediction of interstellar travel in sleeper ships by the 1990s; this story is set in 2024, just five years from now. And while there isn't a "Sanctuary District" in every major U.S. city, people are being rounded and penned in like cattle. It's not about homelessness or class, as this episode posited -- it's about nationality and race.

This episode isn't blind to the racial angle, though. It's quite telling that when Sisko, Bashir, and Dax all find themselves trapped in the past, the two dark-skinned men are essentially incarcerated, while the white woman is ushered into the lap of luxury. Sisko and Bashir sleep outside in an alley; Dax gets a ritzy party and a swanky hotel room.

Of course, the writers of this episode weren't trying to predict the future, they were merely trying to depict that you don't get to utopia without some troubles along the way. Yet there are some interesting details they get surprisingly close: the ubiquity of advertisements online, the way society can backslide on its ideals when the going gets tough, and more. Really, the least plausible detail in the episode is that people in 2024 San Francisco are measuring the temperature in Celsius.

Well... except for one truly disheartening aspect. What the episode really gets most "wrong" is in what it would take to awaken society from a complacent torpor. The description we get here of the Bell Riots (which will be dramatized more in Part II) is that of a linchpin, eye-opening event in which online videos and tragic deaths alter the course of history. Sadly, similar events in the real world -- over not just the past few years, but decades -- suggest it will take a lot more than that. "Past Tense," sadly, feels a bit dated even as it feels eerily prescient.

At the time, these episodes were criticized by some as being too preachy, though I think if anything, they spend a lot of time they could be moralizing on technobabble to explain the time travel. There's a lot of overworked explanation of how three crew members were sent back, how the Defiant remained insulated from the timeline, stuff that just isn't as important as the message being delivered. (And it's an especially weak explanation anyway. If transporting from ship with a cloaking device runs any risk of causing time travel, you'd think that would be something Klingons or Romulans would have weaponized by now.)

In the inexorable grind of making a season of television, the production staff at Deep Space Nine may not have felt they were making a "Very Important Episode" here. But it feels like they did give it special consideration. By expanding the story into two parts, they were able to absorb the costs of extensive new sets, outdoor filming, dozens of extras and several guest stars (including classic "that guy"s Dick Miller and Bill Smitrovich). There's plenty of money spent here that all appears on the screen.

Other observations:

• Sisko mentions that he has a sister who lives in Portland. We never get to meet her, though.

• In a discussion of Earth's blue oceans, we learn that the water on the Trill and Bajoran homeworlds is purple and green. I'm not sure that actually matches with what we've seen before, but it sounds beautiful and exotic.

• Quark gets a small scene at the top of this episode, to make up for him not being in the rest of this two-parter.

• Dax is pretty smooth, keeping her wits about her and playing along with the man who finds her until she can figure out what's going on.

• That man, by the way, is supposed to be the CEO of a huge company that owns a cable station. Why is he taking the subway? (Was the assumption that public transportation would be more of a thing in the U.S. by 2024? Another optimistic prediction.)

• Several of the characters in this episode -- Brynner, Vin, Lee, Calvera, and Britt -- all take their names from characters or actors in The Magnificent Seven.

• During a fist fight in this episode, we get to see a classic Kirk-style double-fisted hammer punch.

The message and morality of "Past Tense, Part I" is excellent. But the episode is dragged down a bit by too much technobabble... and by how it underestimates the power of entrenched indifference. I give the episode a B+. (But maybe I should be docking the score of reality rather than this episode.)