I don't post in the show forums that much anymore, and when I do post in them it's usually in the TNG one since that's "my" series. But for some reason last night the two-parter DS9 episode "Past Tense" entered my mind and I got a "need" to watch it. So, this morning I did via DVD. It's been a while since I've watched any of DS9 and it's just the sort of episodes from DS9 I liked, I really didn't care much for the "war stuff" the show got deeper and deeper into. I may have to give all of DS9 a rewatch sometime soon, but it's always fun to me to sit down and watch episodes of his now 20-year-old show.
The thing that always gets me about this episode was that bit when O'Brien and Kira are bouncing around through time and they end up in 2048 of the alternate timeline (the one where the Bell Riots never happen). We never actually see what they saw, but later O'Brien describes it like "Earth's had its rough patches, but never THAT rough." Since O'Brien is a reasonably educated man, and surely knows all about World War III - I'm forced to wonder, what in the hell could possibly have been WORSE than a global thermonuclear war?
The sanctuary districts were not for criminals. People who were assaulting others were not put there, at least not at the beginning. They were for people unable to find work or unable to work.
...The point supposedly being that cages is where the USA today puts those unable to find work, plus their kids (who go in separate cages thousands of kilometers away from their parents). Or at least this is the public image abroad. It is pretty darn difficult to write dystopias that would stand the test of time, rather than be declared ridiculously optimistic. OTOH, utopias fare pretty well in the long run, so there is always hope. And won't be until 2025 or so. But OTOH very much past tense in headlines, AKA yesterweek's news. AKA the new normal. I guess we can safely say O'Brien never saw WWIII. We know his standards of cruel and horrid from "The Wounded", sort of - accidentally killing an enemy soldier and so forth. And all this was far away from Earth anyway. Plus, wars make for fairly orderly ruins where survival trumps greed; the 2050s may on fact have been a rather quiet time. Timo Saloniemi
Right, and in the real world, nobody would make the distinction. They'd be all like, get those loser parasites away from me, they're all criminals anyway.
Past Tense could have been a TOS or TNG episode easily. Some of the attempts at social commentary fall flat and the clothing and hairstyles of the 21st century reek of the 90s, especially Jadzia's friend, who has a 90's JFK jr haircut. But its a great two parter; ambitious and big in scope. I remember enjoying Part II more than Part I.
Whenever I see "Past Tense" lately, I think how happy I would be to exchange this "dystopian" vision of 2024 for our actual 2018 reality. The conditions in the Sanctuary District were much better than they are on Skid Row in LA today.
Or rather the left-wing American image of the public image abroad (at least and hopefully for the time being) I suspect that seeing something for oneself will very often trump knowledge of how conditions actually were, and combat in Trek, i.e. the stuff he has first-hand experience of, are very sterile. dJE
Could we be seeing our own version of the Sanctuary Districts in the near future? That is the question.
Past Tense is the closest thing we got to City On The Edge of Forever during the Berman era, so that alone makes it a cool twoparter.
August 30, 2024. I'm getting shivers up my spine. As I type this I'm listening to the news of the president putting immigrants seeking asylum into the sanctuary cities, rather than any federal effort to house them, hire more immigration judges, etc.
We won't be seeing poor people down on their luck in sanctuary districts (Or rather, not ones with walls). But it's close to what's already happening with immigrants, just have to re-message the detention centers.
Well he wanted the sanctuary cities to stop doing what they were doing, and places, like San Francisco, said "No". So instead he's going to dump excessive amounts of people on them and see if they still want to be sanctuary cities when they have to fend for themselves. (Its spite mostly I think from the White House).
It's the ultimate inhumane response by the government (just like in "Past Tense") to a human rights issue that transcends geographical boundaries & borders.
Are there governments in alternate 2048? If the world economy never recovered, then the governments corrode and disconnect from the people... No nuclear exchange in 2053 is good, but no warp flight in 2063 is bad. In all likely hood there is a settlement of humans in a Romulan Zoo some where out in space.
I got to thinking how Cochrane was able to make his warp flight to begin with without government or company aid. He likely was told no from the government for aid and no company backed him, either. Ironically, with so few governments left and really no one to tell him what he can or can't do, WWIII very likely HAD to happen for him to be able make his warp flight. Conditions were much easier for him make it so.
When Lily talked about how difficult it was to find all the titanium for the Phoenix... She didn't request it, or buy it. They just went out in the bombed out cities and stripped what they needed amid the ocean of rotting corpses... I'm imagining that they are on bicycles pulling little wagons, picking up scrap, to carry back to home base. Of course, it's also possible that they started building the ship before the nuclear exchange in 2053, so they started with support from a government, and then that government collapsed, but Zephram and Lily kept plugging along like the little engine that could. It's possible, they continued inventing warp travel without oversight, for structure, but after they licked ftl, they all had no reason left to live on in the post apocalypse. UM? Warp is not that tough a nut to crack. Everyone does it. Collecting the resources to get a capsule into space, without a global economy, is hard, so maybe Zeph and Lily solved Warp in 2055? Kept a bunch of people alive with hope, going through the motions of inventing warp, and sending a bath tub into space, and after they did that, they walked a hundred miles east and opened shop again with a new group of rubes and mutants to staff their community with the promise of warp, and getting the #### off Earth. Live theater.