A 1995 ‘Star Trek’ Episode About Homeless Camps Feels Shockingly Relevant Today
A 'Star Trek' two-parter saw a future of walled-off homeless camps—and eerily predicted our times
“The vagrants have to move out, immediately. We will give you a place to stay, but far from the city center—in designated Sanctuary Districts. The criminals? You don’t have to move out; we’re going to put you in detention where you belong. We want our streets back. The Federation will take decisive action to restore order and we will not be ‘Mr. Nice Guy.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Sound like something pulled from the news? It isn’t. It’s the premise of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story from nearly 30 years ago. In the two-part “Past Tense,” the year is 2024 and San Francisco has turned over sections of the city to walled-off “Sanctuary Districts,” where the homeless and unemployed are forcibly relocated in the name of public safety and “urban renewal.”
The rest of the episode is pure DS9 — time travel, moral dilemmas, and a chilling look at a future that, when it aired in 1995, seemed extreme but now is proving itself unsettlingly plausible.
From its inception, Star Trek has done an amazingly accurate job of predicting the future, from the crew’s communicators of the original series predating the cell phone (particularly flip-phones) or Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s PADDs paving the way for the iPad. Its storytelling has a pretty good record as well, evident in “Past Tense,” which feels like it was pulled from the headlines—three decades early.
Remembering ‘Past Tense’
The story begins when a transporter mishap sends Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks), Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig), and Lieutenant Dax (Terry Farrell) back in time to 2024 San Francisco. They arrive at a critical moment in history: the days leading up to the Bell Riots, a pivotal event that will shape humanity’s future. When Gabriel Bell, the man destined to lead the uprising, is killed while trying to save Sisko and Bashir, Sisko must take his place or the future they know will be lost forever.
Executive producer Ira Steven Behr recalled soon after the episodes aired in 1995, “‘Past Tense’ was a real highlight of the season. I’ve always said I don’t like issue-oriented shows, because it’s tough to say something worthwhile in an hour without oversimplifying. But [producer] Robert Hewitt Wolfe wanted to do a show about the homeless, and he came up with ways to make it work.”
Producer René Echevarria added, “We didn’t want to do a Martin Luther King story with Sisko leading a march. That would have been too obvious. Ira came up with the idea that these events weren’t supposed to happen—but once they did, Sisko had to step into history. You don’t know how it will play out until you cut back to the future and see that history has changed.”
To build the story, Behr drew from one of the most formative events of his own life: the 1970 Kent State shootings. “Once they started shooting down American college students, everyone I knew who was still pro-war said, ‘Maybe we should just end this damn thing.’ And many counterculture kids, ironically, said, ‘If they’re going to shoot us, screw the revolution. Let’s become accountants.’ It had a big impact on me. I thought of combining Kent State with an Attica prison-style siege, starting with the question: What if the government began putting people in camps? How would society justify it? How would the homeless respond?”
The show wasn’t without its detractors. “I suppose we could have shown the ‘positive’ aspects of concentration camps,” Behr said dryly. “But I hope we presented a lot of different attitudes. For a two-hour TV story that also had to talk about chroniton particles and all the usual Star Trek elements, I thought we did a pretty good job. We’re not going to solve anything in two hours. The homeless are still there. The problem hasn’t gone away. But maybe one person watched and started to see the issue differently.”
What truly unsettled Behr was how close fiction came to reality during filming. “When we were shooting in Los Angeles, then-Mayor Richard Riordan said something like, ‘We want to take part of the factory district and throw people into camps.’ That was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, and everyone on the show went insane when they saw it. Here we are shooting this thing, and it might actually happen. I don’t think we showed anything in that episode that isn’t a very possible future for this country.”
It may have taken 30 years, but it seems that he was right.
All of Star Trek is streaming on Paramount+
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