![]() ![]() They’re part of a long line of Star Trek time travel episodes, but only a few of those time travel episodes visit an Earth that is in the characters’ distant past but the audience’s near future. “Past Tense, Part I” and “Past Tense, Part II” aired on January 2 and January 9, 1995. ![]() “Past Tense” is all about a world where wealth inequality is out of control Sisko (Avery Brooks, right) finds himself trapped in 2024, in one of San Francisco’s dystopian “sanctuary districts.” Paramount Television It’s remarkable for how it’s been sitting there for nearly 30 years, in plain sight, within one of the most popular TV franchises of all time. The “Past Tense” pair of episodes isn’t just remarkable for how uncannily it reflects the world we live in now. They depict an America where inequality has spun out of control, where homelessness is a problem that no one is particularly interested in tackling compassionately, and where divisions centered on race and income spiral into violence. The episodes are set in 2024, but they were filmed in 1994 and aired in early 1995. Star Trek is not completely devoid of dystopias, but they typically pop up only in the form of one-off planets of the week.Īnd yet one of the pieces of science fiction that has best seemed to herald the 2020s is a two-parter from the third season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But that trend hasn’t always made its way to television - especially not to the Star Trek franchise, which boasts a utopian worldview of a humanity that settled its many conflicts and united to explore the furthest reaches of space. Science fiction has been pointing toward a dystopian America, ruled by prejudice and often outright fascism, for decades now. She was using dystopian fiction to create a lens through which the readers of 1998 (when the book was published) could see the rot that had already taken hold in their own world. Butler wasn’t really writing about an imagined 2030s, when the book is set. A book like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (about a brutally racist, fascist United States, ruled by a president who ran on the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”) doesn’t act as a crystal ball. Science fiction is almost never really about the future, and shouldn’t aim to be - it’s much more effective as a way to make sense of the present. Back to the Future II didn’t nail everything about 2015, but it did get some things right, and isn’t that interesting? And that’s before we consider that film’s portrayal of the villainous Biff Tannen as a megalomaniacal casino magnate whose characterization drew plenty from one Donald Trump, which has made the movie feel even more prescient.īut the idea that a sci-fi story can “predict” the future misrepresents the genre’s strengths. Understandably, when a work of science fiction eerily and accurately seems to predict what happened in the world, there’s an unsettling feeling of magical prophecy to it. ![]() The upgrade included several new phaser and photon torpedo banks.įrom 2373 to 2374, the station was briefly overrun by a Dominion occupation force, which featured Cardassian troops.The idea that science fiction “predicts” the future is a misnomer. In 2372, the station upgraded its weapons and put them to use during an incursion with the Klingons, following the Klingons' removal from the Federation-Klingon alliance. When the Bajoran wormhole was discovered nearby, linking the Bajoran system to the Gamma Quadrant, what had once been a backwater station became a bustling hub of commercial, scientific, and strategic significance, reflecting Bajor's new-found independence and strength within the Alpha Quadrant. Soon after, at the request of the Bajoran provisional government, Starfleet assumed command of Deep Space Nine and gave it a Starfleet designation. Previously called by its original creators "Terok Nor," this old Cardassian mining station orbiting the planet of Bajor was built in 2351 and abandoned 18 years later as the Cardassian occupation of Bajor came to a close and the Cardassian retreated from the system. ![]()
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