Not to take anything away from the episode's point but 15°C in late August honestly sounds really nice for the SF bay area though Trek is, after all, utopian scifi.
Rewatched these two episodes and gosh, I simultaneously think the writers deserve a lot of credit for the swings they took, and that they're a great example of the limits inherent in Trek as an ongoing examination of the liberal political imagination. Ultimately, it's heartbreaking how optimistic Past Tense (parts 1 and 2) were: the 2024 they imagined, versus the one we're living through today.
At the heart of the premise is the very common flawed liberal theory of change: one day, something so bad happens that everyone is collectively shocked into finally Doing the Right Thing. In the case of the Bell Riots, it's "hundreds of homeless people are killed by police / the national guard during an uprising" (these casualties are barely shown on camera, but I'll forgive them not having the budget for literal heaps of extras). Whereas today we know that if something like this happened, there would be untold numbers of people whose immediate reaction to the tragedy would be to side with the cops and justify the slaughter. And we know the mainstream news media, whose bread and butter is keeping people terrified of crime and the possibility of their own poverty, would echo that position.
The episodes spend a lot of their dialogue - much of it between Sisko and Bashir, our POV and moral center for the episodes - about how much of an outrageous injustice the sanctuary districts are, and how addressable the social problems seem from their 24th century perspective. But at the same time, after a few scenes of them exchanging platitudes - gosh, society "just stopped caring" - you get the feeling you're watching a horror movie where everyone is strangely unable to name the actual monster. The people in the districts are without jobs because "the economy went bad", but it doesn't really unpack how they went from that to being homeless: as in our real 2024, housing is a market not a human right. Sometime between 2024 and 2371, we know the Federation did away with this market, but narratively we're not heading to and through that moment, it's not the final boss here. The final boss is... an edgy gen X white dude in a hat with an axe to grind, I guess.
But even in depicting the districts' desperation, DS9's writers imagine ration cards, free to anyone who says they're looking for work, that guarantee them food and water at distribution points. Overall, the level of organization and systemic care taken with the sanctuary districts most closely resembles a conservative fantasy of "the nanny state", heavy-handed and administratively complex and resource-intensive, yet accountable to its people, image-conscious, with some good apples who are occasionally able to bend the rules to save a few people.
The San Francisco of actual-2024, on the other hand, doesn't bother with any of that. The real Tenderloin has no walls around it, no distribution centers or ration cards. Plenty of $200k+/year tech bros live in high rises in the area, stepping over the dying to get to their fucking Waymos. It's just much cheaper and easier, as capital's reasoning goes, to let people starve, offer them shelter that won't actually accomodate their needs, trash their possessions and arrest them. Our tough-talkin' governor in his dark sunglasses talks about the problem of "encampments" in the most dehumanizing way possible, never naming the people who live in them, before joining the cops in stealing their belongings, including wheelchairs and walkers they need to live.
"Please stop talking about me as if I’m not here or not human"
So it's really hard to watch this 1995 scifi try to depict the most gruesome poverty and social dysfunction it can imagine, and come up well short of the reality capitalism and its human instruments have created today. And its denouement - a sudden outbreak of violence we're told is shocking and transformative - is equally naive. I think we need a radically different consciousness today, but I've repeated myself too much already.
Some random notes from the rewatch:
- Tech mogul Chris Brynner mentions he had his Māori tattoo removed, implying tattoos are stigmatized in his 2024 in ways they definitely aren't in ours.
- Points to the writers for mentioning how the information infrastructure for the districts has been privatized by Brynner's own company - "your government discount has been applied", a console says to one of the guards. "I have friends in the police department", Brynner later says - it's more accurate to say they're his customers, but that's exactly how a tech guy would spin it!
- Mention of a "Pan-Carribean government" at Brynner's party of rich folks - we are, after all, in the year of the Irish Unification of 2024!
- Lotsa classic ass urban-apocalyptic fire barrels in the districts, Sisko has a hilarious (for August in SF) tic of acting like his hands are cold.
- Obligatory future slang describing the different underclasses: "gimmes, dims, and ghosts".
- One of the district residents' concrete demands is "the reinstatement of the Federal Employment Act".
- "We want to stop having to depend on handouts" - they're so virtuous, these poors! Not like the bad ones!
- Once Dax convinces Brynner to give the hostage takers internet access, ordinary people living in the district are able to tell their stories to the world, and this is later said to have a huge effect on what happens after the massacre - another moment of "if only the world knew the truth, they would do something!"
- The second ep closes with the line, "How could they have let things get so bad?", and this really is the befuddled liberal consternation at the heart of it - golly, we let it get bad! If only we hadn't let it get so bad!! Sigh.
