"Past Tense" at 25: What Have We Learned?

Earth looked fine though... it was a great effect when it changed to being fully assimilated for centuries in FC

 

When I watch it isn't Jim Metzler's haircut that bugs. It's that 25 years later Kid Rock still wears the look/hat/hair of the Frank Military character. A trajedty.

 

Sorry about the bad formatting on my above quote and post.

 

The difference between Past Tense and the real time period, besides them not predicting handheld devices, is we haven't put all the poor people together in one place yet.

In the show though I think the districts drew inspiration from the Jewish ghettos pre-WW2, which implies the intent was to get them out of sight and out of mind before doing away with them.

I won't be optimistic about the future as long as Trumpism controls a third of America's and a good deal of Europe's population, and there are dictatorships as powerful as China and Russia.

 

The Eugenics War was considered a world war. And yet, Los Angeles was completely unscathed when Janeway & co. dropped by when the conflict was occurring.

Similarly, maybe 2048 was not that rough at all, aside from fallout from the 2047 earthquake that sank LA and likely rocked the rest of California. Which would have created some unrest, but nothing significant.

 

Did Star Trek really put in that L.A. sank in an earthquake? My mom was a geologist, and that was among her pet peeves: Los Angeles is on the Pacific Plate. The oceanic plates are lighter than the contenental plates. If anything was going to sink, which it isn't, it would be the rest of the country on the North American Plate.

 

The Great Hermosa Quake of 2048 apparently caused some significant damage to Los Angeles per Janeway's dialogue in the episode but I don't think she ever said it sank the whole city.

 

Perhaps just Santa Monica and other coastal towns sank.

 

Drowned in a tsunami, maybe.

 

Rewatching the two-parter right now. It still hits hard even if the civilian computer terminals and men's fashions of 2024 look totally wrong.

 

And it's 2024, but nobody has a cell phone.

 

The representative of the Governor of California might have one but if she does it looks more like a 1990s cell phone than a smartphone.

 

Well, cellphones started getting smaller, but then smartphones came along and reversed the trend...

 

I guess that cellphones and smartphones were forbidden in that ghetto.

 

What I have learned is that a few malcontents in a building with a handful of hostages aren't likely to change anything regardless of who gets killed and when...

 

Even Chris Brynner didn't seem to have one. He took Dax back to his office to use the communicator there instead of loaning her his phone.

 

Maybe he wasn't allowed to have one too.

 

I'm not sure why he wouldn't be allowed. He was a rich media mogul who'd never committed a crime, at least up until he got his network to cover the Bell Riots from the prisoners' point of view.

 

It's the alternate Earth history of Star Trek. In 2024 there just aren't any smartphones like we have them in real life. Hell, in Star Trek we were supposed to have sublight fusion-driven engines for interplanetary spacecraft in 2018.

In real life NASA doesn't have them. In Star Trek we do.

 

Yeah, some guy living in a shantytown will build a faster-than-light spacecraft in a nuclear missile casing in 42 years after a worldwide conflict much deadlier than the first two... Using antimatter which right now is about a million times more expensive than gold!!!

Why do I have a hard time believing that?