DS9 – Past Tense Part II

 

Plot – This is a scathing commentary on the near future where the social structure of America sees the rich dining out and enjoying themselves and the poor locked into homeless areas where they can be quietly abandoned and forgotten. Where a lack of jobs is fundamentally tearing the class system into two and the lower classes simply can’t find a way of pulling their lives together no matter how badly they might not want to. This was made 20 years ago but it could just as easily be talking about America today. It’s frightening how much of this bleak prediction of the future has come true.

Character – This is a hostage drama where both the prisoners and the ones who have kidnapped them are equally well characterised and given an appropriate amount of depth. What I love about this scenario is that you have characters that are acting out violently because they have been herded like animals (BC), characters who are behaving uncharacteristically because they are desperate to be heard (Webb), characters who are part of the system and have completely forgotten how to care (Vin), characters that try and help out when they can but are too scared to act out in case they lose their jobs and end up in the same situation (Lee) and characters that just want to get home to their family and don’t want to get caught up in things either way (Bernado). Add in Sisko and Bashir who have been caught in the web of history and need to make sure that things turn out the way they are written in the history books whilst trying not to have any record of their presence and you have a huge cast of awesome defined, well-motivated characters. Your standard Star Trek episode will have one or two interesting guest stars if you are lucky, but Past Tense strikes gold with a double length episode that can afford the time and the luxury of casting to really get this aspect spot on. What is especially good is that everybody in this story agrees that the Sanctuary District is a bad idea and society trying to hide away its social problems and by the end of the story everybody is working together to try and bring it down, albeit after having lost some characters along the way.

It’s often considered that Sisko really comes to life in the third season and whilst I wouldn’t entirely agree with that I would have to say this is the season where Avery Brooks really starts bringing some passion and vitality to the role. Past Tense sees Sisko at his absolute best; commanding, terrifying, humane and improvising. Sisko holding the saw off shotgun on BC and threatening him into submission with a deathly serious look and then throwing Vin against the wall and railing against the injustice that he has helped perpetuate are by far Avery Brooks’ best scenes to date. He’s powerful in a way that William Shatner, Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew could only dream of being.

Even more important is the characterisation of Bashir, who has really started to come into his own. Gone is the pantomime jock of season one and the comedy buffoon of series two and in steps a mature, confident, sweet man who desperately wants to ace his work as a Doctor. Bashir is a much-underrated character and in episodes like Past Tense you can see precisely why he took the path of being a healer; he brings a sense of calm to proceedings; he steps in to help people who are struggling and he is wonderfully warm and gentle with both Dax and Sisko. You can feel Siddig sighing with relief to be handed material this good after being the butt of the joke for so many episodes in the previous two seasons. He would go on to enjoy some of the best episodes of DS9’s entire run (Cardassians, The Wire, Our Man Bashir, Inquisition, Dr Bashir, I Presume, Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges).

Great Dialogue – ‘Why do they sound so surprised? I mean if you’re going to treat people like animals, you’re going to get bit.’

Production – Dax looks hotter than ever dressed up in a trouser suit. She always the most gender fluid and sexually ambiguous of Star Trek characters and somehow dressing her up like a man really suits her. Her relationship with Chris is one of the few things that is a little undeveloped in this episode but I am perfectly convinced that he is completely besotted with her so when he opens his channel to the homeless it isn’t such a stretch to discover his motive.

The show is building up to the attack by the soldiers on the processing centre throughout. They try and avoid it through any means necessary and a great deal of the suspense of the episode is how it finally becomes inevitable. And Frakes directs it as a swift, brutal and bloody attack so it doesn’t disappoint. Even Sisko gets shot.

Worst moment – Sweetly, Frakes has to try and turn the Paramount lot into different periods of history and so doesn’t even disguise the fact that he is doing it on the cheap and sets up the camera in the same place each time Kira and O’Brien arrive but just changes the set dressing a little. Frakes’ direction elsewhere is so filmic and stylish and so this has to be a deliberate choice. It adds an element of humour to the story (‘oh gee the money has run out’) and means that we can see just how relaxed the crew are at creating a time period with a car or a hippy van or some snappy music.

A reason to watch this episode again – A unique episode that feels very little like Star Trek as a whole and more like a movie in its own right and the episode that scored Jonathan Frakes the right to start directing Trek movies. The truth is this is better than all but one of the movies that he went on to direct, and I would question whether even First Contact is as powerful and as affecting as Past Tense. It’s a riveting character drama, a commentary on homelessness that has become practically a prediction of the future and an episode with enough action, suspense and conflict to power most seasons. This isn’t hyperbole, and the DS9 crew were justifiably proud when this episode was released and baffled when nobody seemed to be paying it any attention (everybody was too busy looking at shiny old Voyager that had just debuted). There are a handful of DS9 episodes that you could essentially rip out of the show and hold up as exceptional drama in their own right (Far Beyond the Stars, The Visitor, The Siege of AR-558) and Past Tense most definitely belongs on that list. It’s a two parter which uses its time to build a vivid picture of the near future, that populates its cast with strong, memorable characters, that tackles hard-hitting dialogue and ideas and that saves some money for frightening action sequences. I’m in awe at how well this has stood up and at just how prescient it was 20 years ago.

***** out of *****