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The Star Trek Episode that Predicted the Future of Homelessness in the United States
TV that is so prescient it feels textbook
City blocks that are filled with unhoused people. Laws against sleeping on the street. Intense militarization that keeps impoverished people in line so that they don't rebel.
Given the rise in unhoused people we have seen across the United States, this might sound like modern-day America, but I am describing the time-traveling two-parter Past Tense from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which Commander Benjamin 'Ben' Sisko (Avery Brooks) and his compatriots Doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and Lt. Cmdr. Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) find themselves in the "past"—what is to them 2024 America—only to be trapped in a concentration camp for the homeless.
At the time, it was written as a cautionary tale of what could happen if America let militarization and wealth inequality exacerbate, but as we have ignored these lessons, the 2024 of Star Trek and the 2024 of today are starting to look frighteningly similar.
This is America
When Past Tense was being made, this future was already much closer than some suspected. As the episodes were being filmed, showrunner Ira Steven Behr remarked on reading a story from the Los Angeles Times about how the city's then-Riordan Administration was planning to move the unhoused people of the day from the downtown to "an urban campground on a fenced lot in the city's core industrial area."
In many ways, this is unsurprising as the creators were not imagining the future as much as heightening the present reality. Writers Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr were allegedly inspired to co-write this episode based on their interactions with unhoused people. Wolfe telling Vox:
“My wife worked with homeless and mentally ill people as a psychotherapist. Ira [Steven Behr] said what convinced him to do the episodes was walking through Palisades Park in Santa Monica and seeing all the homeless people there. They’re still there. It hasn’t changed. We weren’t being predictive. We were just being observant.”
In Past Tense, it's this struggle with America's long criminalization of homelessness that takes center…
