Thread by @MsKellyMHayes

DS9 time. Tonight, I'm watching two of the most politically radical episodes in Trek history: Past Tense parts I and II. Mostly set in 2024, Past Tense centers on "The Bell Riots" — an Attica-style rebellion that makes the future depicted in Star Trek possible. #StarTrekDay

While beaming down to Earth, Sisko, Bashir & Dax experience a transporter accident (it's always a fucking transporter accident) that thrusts them back in time to 2024. Sisko & Bashir quickly encounter cops who arrest them for having no ID & deposit them in a "sanctuary district."

The "sanctuary district" is an assemblage of city blocks where Sisko and Bashir are told, upon being "processed," that they can stay where ever they like in the district, but of course, there aren't enough places to sleep and scarcity drives violence.

Dax is discovered unconscious by a rich dude who offers to help her, most likely bc she's hot, and she quickly plays along with his assumption that she's been mugged, because that bitch is smart and not about to wind up in jail for not having any ID in our fucked up century.

So basically, a sanctuary district is a concentration camp for poor people. It's important to understand this storyline had two primary inspirations: the Attica uprising of 1971 and the real-time treatment of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. in the 90's.

Based on the treatment of unhoused people in 1995, DS9's co-executive producer Ira Steven Behr believed that concentration camps for the poor were probably going to be real by 2024. I think it's important to understand that when processing the story.

The police uniforms look nothing like the uniforms police wear today, which makes me wonder if they felt the need to make them look different, so the story could be cast as some dystopian future, and not anti-cop (even tho it's pretty anti-cop).

Jadzia (a white woman) being so easily rescued while Bashir and Sisko wind up in jail was also a nod to the racist nature of policing, and who is always assumed to be a victim, and who is always assumed to be a criminal.

When Bashir complains about how long they've been detained without being processed, the cop says he gets "plenty of overtime" — this shit is so accurate it's painful.

Sisko notices the date. They have arrived just prior to the Bell Riots. He explains the history to Bashir: The sanctuary district residents will rebel, hostages will be taken, and troops will ultimately storm the district & hundreds of sanctuary district residents will be killed.

Bashir is upset, but Sisko explains that they cannot do anything to alter the situation. The rules say they don't fuck with the timeline, and as Sisko, "The riots will be one of the watershed events of the 21st century," shifting the course of human history for the better.

Sisko explains that a man named Gabriel Bell will die protecting the hostages, as troops storm the district, and that his death, as well as the deaths of the other residents, will lead to a moral awakening & people will finally begin to constructively address issues like poverty.

Bashir: "Causing people to suffer because you hate them is terrible, but causing people to suffer because you have forgotten how to care? That's really hard to understand."

Ugh, those lines gets me every time.

Bashir also asks a question that comes up later in the series: Are humans in his own time any better than Cardassians, or other brutal alien races? If "something disastrous happens" what would they be capable of? This idea is explored later in Pale Moonlight, quite unpleasantly.

Sorry for the typos. Drugs may be involved.

Sisko and Bashir meet an organizer who tries to recruit them to join a resistance movement. They react the way people usually react to such efforts, but in their case, it's because they don't want to do anything to interfere with the very important riot that's about to happen.

Dax is hanging out with rich people who are complaining about mass protests derailing their European vacations. The rich guy who's crushing on her tells the story of Dax being mugged & someone says she's lucky she's not in a sanctuary district. She realizes her friends prob are.

Bashir is accosted by some violent sanctuary residents who want his ration card. Bashir & Sisko wind up getting in a fist fight with the group. Someone pulls a knife. A man who tries to defend Sisko & Bashir is stabbed to death. That man is, you guessed it, Gabriel fucking Bell.

In the future, while the rest of the crew tries to figure out how to retrieve Dax, Sisko & Bashir, all signs of Starfleet, outside of their ship, vanish completely. Bell's death rewrote the timeline & their ship, buffered by the temporal anomaly, is all that's left of Starfleet.

A peaceful protest is planned within the district, and Bashir and Sisko now feel they must engage with the situation, but a riot breaks out instead. They join the hostage-taking rioters in the sanctuary HQ and Sisko introduces himself as Gabriel Bell. And with that part I wraps.

I know what happens and I'm still on edge. I need to roll a joint.

Joint rolled. Now watching part II. Sisko is tangling with B.C., a lovable, murderous scamp who really wants to harm some hostages. He's a problem but he's funny and he has a cool hat.

Fun fact: If you look at US intelligence projections for political developments over the next 20 yrs, their scenario that projects a bottom-up movement for change reordering society also involves unrest in a major city, only in their scenario, thousands rather than hundreds die.

But that's only one of five possible futures the agencies have predicted as being possible/likely.

(Most of the scenarios are bad.)

Anyway, Miles and Kira are beaming around through history trying to find Dax, Sisko and Bashir.

Sisko and B.C. debate what their demands should be. B.C. wants amnesty, money and a flight to Tasmania (we don't really know why he wants to go there specifically). Sisko says the demand must be shutting down the sanctuaries and somehow manages to win the argument.

If only it were really this easy to reach consensus on demands.

They try to broadcast their story/demands to the public with Sisko's organizer friend Webb (a white family man) as spokesperson, but the cops shut down their internet feed. And yup, that would definitely happen.

It's important that B.C. is played as a likable guy who can be reasoned w in this episode. In the last episode, he literally murdered Gabriel Bell while trying to rob Bashir, but here, he's funny and can be reasoned with. Why? Bc it was his social position that made him a killer.

You can see the significance of them choosing Attica as the framework for this rebellion. Imprisoned people are often written off the way the script sets us up to write off B.C. — as a monster. But the story zigs instead of zags, and he's just a messed up guy in a messed up world

Bashir, speaking to one of the hostages who is grieving her role in this terrible system: "It's not your fault things are the way they are."

Hostage: "Everyone says that but nothing ever changes."

That moment breaks my heart every time.

As someone has pointed out, the scenes of Kira and O'Brien zipping through time are trite. I actually find the triteness a bit obnoxiously out of place given how fucking dark this episode was, but it's 90's TV and they clearly thought we needed a break from all the pain.

I have drugs for that tho.

Watching this w a massive housing crisis underway extra eerie. What they're up against in this episode will be a defining struggle here & now: fighting the normalization of the mass displacement of people via evictions leading to the mass disposal of people via the carceral state

Dax crawls in through the sewers to rescue Sisko and Bashir only to discover they won't leave because they are committed to the riot. I feel like this is her penance for being pampered by a rich dude while the others were in prisonland.

OK, now the most far-fetched part of the story: Dax convincing the rich tech guy to reestablish the rioters' livestream so they can tell their story. Men will do a lot for a beautiful woman, but this is particularly moral act in the service of the poor and dude is a tech guy.

And yes, I find the rich guy helping the rioters more far-fetched than three people being flung back in time and accidentally preventing a riot, thereby deleting the future they knew. All of that feels more likely than a tech billionaire helping social transformation along.

But I will accept it. They got a lot about the future right here. They had no way of knowing just how evil the average rich tech guy would be.

The raid happens, just like Attica. RIP Webb and B.C. Sisko takes a bullet for the asshole cop who arrested him. The cop surveys the damage and asks, "How did we let this happen?" Ugh I want to believe a cop could be transformed by that experience.

Sisko and Bashir manage to slip away because the cops who arrested them, whose lives they have now saved, let them go and write them up as dead. They are rescued and return to the ship, having re-established the timeline.

Back on the ship, Bashir asks Sisko, "How could they have let things get so bad?"

Sisko says, "That's a good question. I wish I had an answer."

Chills.

And that's Past Tense parts I and II.

I didn't think about how it was going to feel to watch that amid a housing crisis & with people's pandemic unemployment benefits ending. Time to watch something funny. Also, support your local tenants' rights org. If they're offering trainings, avail yourself of that shit. Fight.

Since this thread is still circulating & today is the anniversary of the Attica uprising, I thought I would tag on some reading about prisons, what imprisoned people are up against, and why prisons should be abolished. Wrote this w @prisonculture in 2018. truthout.org/articles/a-jai…

That piece is also featured in @prisonculture's bestselling book, We Do This 'Til We Free Us, which you should also check out. haymarketbooks.org/books/1664-we-…

Also from 2018: This piece was the result of a clandestine call between some journalists and one of the organizers of a prison strike. I also talk about Attica a bit, as this was published 3 yrs ago today. We have so much to learn from prison organizers. truthout.org/articles/priso…

If you want to support the rights of imprisoned people today, on the anniversary of the Attica uprising (and you should), you can answer this urgent call to action from @survivepunishNY.

https://twitter.com/survivepunishNY/status/1435301589577785344?s=20

I don't think DS9 was abolitionist btw, as I don't think there have been any abolitionist TV shows in the US (tho some stuff in the horror genre has def flirted w abolition), but by virtue of its honesty around prisons and policing, some episodes are def abolitionist adjacent.

Also, I published a piece today about the struggle to stop Line 3. Please share it up and support the fight! truthout.org/articles/line-…