Spoilers Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

[bloodtide]

Rewatched Past Tense this evening, the first time in nearly thirty years. And it’s held up very well - and it’s impressively prescient to the point of being depressing about current events. No, we don’t know how we let things get so bad, but we undoubtedly have.

The two main things the story doesn’t get right are basically the same thing - the writers were in the early years of the Internet and so couldn’t understand how universal and infiltrated into everything we do it would become. So the Internet of 2024 in Past Tense is basically a version of a teletext information service like Ceefax, with text and channels, with video phone capacity, rather than what it actually is like in our era.

This also means that if Sanctuary Districts existed now (and honestly they’re rather altruistic compared to what homeless services look like in the US and elsewhere) then we would already all know about them thanks to the Internet and social media. We would already be polarised in our opinions about them, and the Bell Riots would probably therefore not be the wake up moment they were in the Star Trek timeline.

Looking at any fictional future is always hard. It is hard to make that 'amazing' leap. In '95 the Web was a slow clunky place...really a nightmare. You could go to Kmart.com, but it was a single page that said "er...um, stuff is on sale at our store". Yahoo was only a year old...and Google did not even exist yet. And 'social media'...like say MySpace was not until 2003!

And sure 'video calls' have been a fantasy from like 1950....but the idea that like 95% of people would have a supercomputer digital camera video recorder in their pocket 24/7 was really beyond imagination.....95 is a bit more 'pager pre cell phone times'.

So yea....the story is a bit odd there. But then it's not like the 24th century had it either, other then 'cell phones'.

But the story still works. Even if lots of people were posting from the Sanctuary districts......some times people don't see it...or care (see current world events). Plenty of people might 'tune in' and watch 'Sanctuary Sally' on her live stream and she shows the horrible conditions...and just shrug and go about their lives.

 

[Ryujin]

Looking at any fictional future is always hard. It is hard to make that 'amazing' leap. In '95 the Web was a slow clunky place...really a nightmare. You could go to Kmart.com, but it was a single page that said "er...um, stuff is on sale at our store". Yahoo was only a year old...and Google did not even exist yet. And 'social media'...like say MySpace was not until 2003!

And sure 'video calls' have been a fantasy from like 1950....but the idea that like 95% of people would have a supercomputer digital camera video recorder in their pocket 24/7 was really beyond imagination.....95 is a bit more 'pager pre cell phone times'.

So yea....the story is a bit odd there. But then it's not like the 24th century had it either, other then 'cell phones'.

But the story still works. Even if lots of people were posting from the Sanctuary districts......some times people don't see it...or care (see current world events). Plenty of people might 'tune in' and watch 'Sanctuary Sally' on her live stream and she shows the horrible conditions...and just shrug and go about their lives.

And so having a world spanning network that was basically Newsgroups on steroids was completely believable.

 

[trappedslider]

And sure 'video calls' have been a fantasy from like 1950....

History of videotelephony - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Unless oyu mean wide spread usage

 

[jian]

Watching a few selected episodes from Seasons 3 and 4. Some random thoughts:

- The Way of the Warrior two-parter is better than I remember. Worf gets a strong introduction. I hadn’t remembered that it’s also basically made explicit that Kira and Dax (and presumably other people) use holosuites for sex, because of course they do. Not necessarily with each other though that’s also an option. It does make Nog’s previous remarks about how much he hated cleaning the holosuites much clearer in context.

- Talking of Nog, we watched Bar Association, which I think I’ve never seen before, and it’s great in so many ways (yay unions) and because we get continuity from Nog’s character development in Heart of Stone. Rom finally accepts that he’ll never be a good Ferengi and that he doesn’t want Quark to die so he can inherit the bar, and instead goes off to be an exceptional engineer instead. Their relationship is really touching - there were definite elements I recognised from the way my older brother and I are.

 

[jian]

My wife wanted to watch Dr Bashir, I Presume? so we did, and it was also better than I remember, and weirdly relevant to me personally in a way that it wasn’t as much when I first saw it 27 years ago. Fadwa El Guindi (a professor of anthropology at UCLA who’d never acted on screen before and AFAIK never did so again) delivers a wonderful performance as Amsha Bashir.

I also just realised that Lewis Zimmerman (and to some degree therefore the Doctor) is basically Frasier, the other big Paramount property at the time. And in this episode he basically speedruns Cheers season 3.

 

[jian]

This evening’s episode was Business as Usual, which is one of my favourites and it’s aged very well. The main attraction is of course the inestimable Steven Berkoff as the arms dealer Hagath. This is another very strong Quark episode. The scene with dinner with the Regent is very well written - the old psychotic tyrant slurring “You’re a man of honour… you’re all men of honour” is exactly right for the character.

On a slightly modern note, it’s interesting that while Hagath is an amoral and brutal criminal who considers profiting from the murders of 28 million people to be a normal Tuesday (business as usual, even), he also displays much more corporate foresight (taking a loss to build a long term relationship with the Bajoran resistance and government) and ethics (paying off Quark’s debts first so that he won’t be distracted by financial worries) than the average modern CEO.

 

[Necropolitan]

On a slightly modern note, it’s interesting that while Hagath is an amoral and brutal criminal who considers profiting from the murders of 28 million people to be a normal Tuesday (business as usual, even), he also displays much more corporate foresight (taking a loss to build a long term relationship with the Bajoran resistance and government) and ethics (paying off Quark’s debts first so that he won’t be distracted by financial worries) than the average modern CEO.

There aren't the same safeguards doing business with criminals, dictators, rebels, etc. as there are in the corporate world. Unsuccessful and/or stupid arms dealers tend to get themselves imprisoned or killed, and anything affecting their company is most likely going to affect them personally.

Hagath's chosen to be the Costco of arms dealing.

 

[Ryujin]

 

[payn]

View attachment 411369

Honestly, this was set by the OG crew. Kirk and team were always breaking rank and storming off to do whatever they want.

 

[Ryujin]

Honestly, this was set by the OG crew. Kirk and team were always breaking rank and storming off to do whatever they want.

"Here's the Prime Directive. Let's see how many ways we can break it."

Voyager took it to new levels, though. If I was the captain then I would have spaced the entire crew, by the end of season 1.