Uncanny Accuracy

This 1995 ‘Star Trek’ episode predicted a 2024 San Francisco crisis with uncanny accuracy

By Peter Hartlaub,Culture CriticAug 28, 2024Originally published at:https://www.sfchronicle.com/totalsf/article/star-trek-predicted-sf-2024-crisis-19722416.php?

In a “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” episode called “Past Tense,” commanding officer Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) and chief medical officer Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) are detained by authorities in 2024 San Francisco. Paramount Domestic Television

The date is Aug. 30, 2024, in San Francisco, and city leaders have decided it’s time to show tough love.

Unhoused residents are forced into shelters, setting up “Sanctuary Districts” where they’re told they can find a room and apply for jobs. The city’s wealthiest citizens are driving political decisions, supporting police sweeps that clear tents from city streets. And with fewer visible homeless, officials declare the mission accomplished.

What sounds like rhetoric from a recent mayoral debate, or one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s euphemism-filled plans to tackle poverty, is actually a 29-year-old dystopian plot from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” In early 1995 the series released a two-part episode called “Past Tense,” predicting what San Francisco would look like … this coming weekend. 

They got it eerily, and alarmingly, correct.

“Star Trek” since its inception in 1966 has used time travel to aid its social commentary, whether it’s Captain Kirk and Spock visiting Depression-era New York City to explore the moral dilemmas of love and duty, or a jaunt to 1986 to save two Bay Area whales and spread a message about environmentalism (while showing punks the right and wrong way to act on a Muni bus).

“Past Tense” was written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr, operating with a micro budget compared to modern “Trek.” Both parts of the episode were filmed entirely in Hollywood, with a studio back lot built to resemble New York standing in for S.F. But the ideas age incredibly well, as if Wolfe and Behr had time travel powers of their own. 

“Past Tense” begins on space station Deep Space Nine about 350 years from now. Earth is part of the United Federation of Planets, which has built a post-currency society, wiping out poverty and most illness and crime.

A transporter accident — the form of “Star Trek” time travel least expensive to film — sends three crew members back to San Francisco on Aug. 30, 2024. 

Commanding officer Benjamin Sisko and chief medical officer Julian Bashir, played by actors of color (Avery Brooks and Alexander Siddig), are discovered by police, labeled as destitute “dims” and sent to a walled in Sanctuary District. Science officer Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), a space alien who appears as a white woman, is found by a tech entrepreneur who takes her to his high-rise.

In a “Deep Space Nine” episode called “Past Tense,” science officer Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) sits on a 

subway station stairway with tech entrepreneur Chris Brynner (Jim Metzler).

Paramount Domestic Television
San Francisco geographical references are sparse. Sisko declares, “I caught a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge a few blocks back.” Dax enters aBART-like station called “TransFrancisco” thatadvertises a Transbay Tube. 

But the themes are oddly prescient, strongly reflecting the city’s challenges in 2024. Sisko, a student of 21st century history, provides exposition to Bashir, who is increasingly frustrated by the lack of adequate mental health resources and medical care in the Sanctuary District.

Bashir: Why are these people in here? Are they criminals?

Sisko: (They’re) just people without jobs or places to live.

Bashir: So they get put in here?

Sisko: Welcome to the 21st century, Doctor.

There are wild parallels to 2024 and the past decade throughout. 

The forced relocation of unhoused residents in “Past Tense” mirrors the homeless sweeps ahead of the 2016 Super Bowl and 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The containment zones evoke the state of the Tenderloin District during and immediately after the pandemic shutdown.

And the episode’s dialogue echoes many San Francisco politicians of the past 30 years, advocating for more police, working to make unsightly problems less visible to wealthy residents, and then declaring the tenuous results a political victory. 

(In the episode, a police officer references “Buck Bokai,” an Asian professional baseball player who is setting records. Did Wolfe and Behr predict Shohei Ohtani?)

On the ground in past/present San Francisco, Sisko and Bashir quickly discover they’re one day away from the Bell Riots, “one of the watershed events of the 21st century,” where hundreds of innocent Sanctuary District citizens are slaughtered by authorities, exposing the system’s flaws and hypocrisy.

As the plot thickens, the writers’ predictive abilities show their limitations. Computers are chunky and require a stylus to operate. Dax’s wealthy benefactor is too nice and emotionally stable for an Elon Musk comparison. And perhaps most strangely, the poor people who make up the armed resistance wear fedoras, like out-of-work men in a 1920s soup kitchen. 

But as the story strays into bombast and overacting, it still gets many subtleties right.

Bashir rages when he sees an unhoused citizen having a mental health breakdown, pointing out that effective treatments for schizophrenia exist in a fictional 2024. (“They could cure that man now, today, if they gave a damn.”) Wealthy partygoers in “Past Tense” express self-satisfaction that the poor are being cared for compassionately. In reality, they’re not getting anything close to the housing or services they’ve been promised.

Wolfe in a 2020 interview with Vox suggested the episodes weren’t predictive, but reflective of scenes that existed in 1995. Indeed, housing struggles and wealth disparity were issues in San Francisco 30 years ago; it didn’t take supernatural foresight to assume things might get worse. 

“Past Tense” tries clumsily for moments of lightness and comedy. Some woefully stereotypical 1960s hippies are the worst addition. But the screenwriters manage to land the spaceship in the closing moments.

Society’s apathy toward human suffering leads to armed conflict, misunderstandings and hundreds dead. One of the last things Sisko, Bashir and Dax see before transporting back to their present is a San Francisco street strewn with bodies, as Bashir questions how citizens could let things get so bad. 

“Eventually,” Sisko says, “people in this century will remember how to care."