Although the Star Trek franchise is lauded for its optimism and inclusive messaging, the backstory for this so-called utopian future is ridiculously bleak. Hinted at in The Original Series — and made clear in The Next Generation, First Contact, and the debut episode of Strange New Worlds — a massive global conflict decimated a huge portion of Earth’s population before humanity rose from the ashes and reached for the stars. Chillingly, all the it-gets-worse-before-it-gets-better moments in Star Trek’s timeline are still in our future — with one notable exception.
On January 8, 1995, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine began a two-part time travel episode called “Past Tense,” that sent Sisko, Bashir, and Dax back in time to the year 2024. And what they found is, sadly, not too different from the 2024 of today.
Deep Space Nine’s depiction of a fictional social upheaval called The Bell Riots begins on August 31, 2024 (aka, last Saturday) with the movement’s leader, Gabriel Bell, murdered several days later on September 3, 2024 (aka, today). Of course, none of this actually happened in the real world, but with The Bell Riots, Star Trek presents a microcosm of how social science fiction doesn’t have to be perfectly predictive to be still eerily accurate.
Deep Space Nine’s 2024
Here’s a recap of the Star Trek episode in question...
Thanks to a transporter accident, Sisko (Avery Brooks), Bashir (Alexander Siddig), and Dax (Terry Farrell) don’t beam down to 24th Century San Francisco for a cozy time at Starfleet Headquarters, but instead end up in 2024. Sisko and Bashir are quickly identified as homeless people and stuck in a state-run Sanctuary District; essentially an open-air prison for the unhoused. Socioeconomic gulfs have caused these places to exist throughout North America, while the rich live without having to witness homelessness on the streets.
“Past Tense” was barely science fiction in 1995, and it’s essentially real life today. Huge wage gaps and a crumbling economy have caused homelessness to skyrocket in recent years. In real life, from 2019 to 2023, homelessness increased by 23% in the US alone. In essence, the spike in economic despair that Deep Space Nine predicted has happened, and then some. Penned by core DS9 writers Ira Steven Behr, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, and René Echevarria, this two-parter drew inspiration not just from the writers’ own experiences with homelessness in California, but also the Attica Prison riot in 1971 when prisoners tried to advocate for better living conditions.
Watching “Past Tense” today makes any of its 1990s or 1970s inspirations feel irrelevant. Sure, the details about phones and computers in 2024 are off, but everything about society’s feeble response to homelessness is essentially the exact world in which we live.
What are the Bell Riots?
When conditions in a San Francisco Sanctuary District get too unbearable, several people living there storm the city’s offices and take several workers hostage. In the original timeline — which we never see — Sisko explains to Bashir that one man, Gabriel Bell (John Lendale Bennett), ensured that the hostages weren’t hurt, which helped turn public opinion in favor of more social activism. In essence, the Bell Riots resulted in a nonviolent solution to a massive social movement. However, in the altered timeline, plenty of people perish, which results in one of Star Trek’s grimmer endings: Bashir and Sisko watching as the bodies are tallied and promises are made to never let it happen again.
The overwhelmingly nonviolent Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 are interesting real-world parallel here, which, it should be noted, is a movement Star Trek fans largely supported and organized around. But in the DS9 situation, there’s a time travel wrinkle: Gabriel Bell is slain early, before he can protect the hostages, which means Star Trek history, is, briefly, changed. To set things right, Sisko has to adopt the identity of Gabriel Bell and, in essence, paradoxically bootstrap the entirety of Star Trek's future history by pretending to be a man from 2024.
A Glimmer of Hope in the Darkness
The paradoxical nature of “Past Tense” isn’t as extreme as other Star Trek time travel jaunts. Essentially, Sisko fixes the timeline by pretending to be a historical figure. The episode doesn’t bother to make us wonder if this was a predestination paradox or not mostly because we saw the real Gabriel Bell in the first part of the story. Bashir notes that the historical database now has an image of Sisko as Bell, to which Sisko rolls eyes and grumbles about not wanting to “explain this to Starfleet Command.” Bottomline, for nerdy purists, the Star Trek timeline hasn’t been altered enough for us to worry about it
Instead, Sisko assuming the identity of a slain 21st-century civil rights leader is more impactful as an analogy. At the start of the story, Bashir is appalled that 21st-century humans “don’t give a damn” what happens to their neighbors. Sisko counters with nuance, saying, “It’s not that they don’t give a damn. They’ve just given up. The social problems they face seem too enormous to deal with.”
But in the story of “Past Tense” we’re still made to understand that without the intercession of Sisko — a man from an idealistic future — the broken past can’t be fixed. The episode takes some aspirational swings by its conclusion too: a guard who was coded as a racist becomes the first guy who has the revelation that society is broken.
And yet, by the end of the episode, Sisko faces the same question that launched the episode: How could we let things get so bad? At the time, this felt like an edgy cautionary tale. Today, it serves as a reminder that without serious change in the next few decades, we might end up crumbling into the dark wasteland of Star Trek’s backstory, without hope for living to see the rebirth.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine streams on Paramount+.
Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the World
