I used to love binge-watching ST. Nothing greater than long nights spent watching DS9/Voyager/Next Generation through entirety after the comedy shows :love:. I've probably seen DS9 alone 500+ times in full at this point. Thankfully,
none of it was produced in the era we now live in... DS9 in particular would've been an obvious mess.
Anyway, I am not really for politicizing anymore of our media. I think Star Trek has healthy amounts of social issues in it, but what's great is re-watching and noticing something new and special each time... always makes me rethink... the level of politics we have now in our mainstream discourse is the US is far from healthy doses and much of it is very careless. Frankly, I want less politics in our entertainment media from this point... not that I have an issue with political commentary in general, but we're very political by nature in just by the way our culture is "designed", and so it's unnecessary for us to have it in regurgitated/regenerated in
all of our entertainment media as well...
Another irony, sort of off-topic... a common quote thought-process here is that Republicans are more likely to be nationalistic. Except it's left-sided media now filling media up with fear-mongering and doom predictions about America and how we must together (and over vague sentiments) as a nation to take back the democracy/narrative/whatevs... I just thought that was interesting. It is all being drowned out anyway, the actual meaning behing it since as I say, our culture by design makes us more "politically aware" just by virtue of being American... I think most folk are already convinced wherever they stand on particular issues and the rest just ends up being noise/rhetoric.
Anyway... If you really want a thoughtful and socially-conscious ST, then watch DS9. Nothing compares to it now. Themes about slavery/holocaust, a black captain who ends up being a prophet/religious icon/icon of an alien race of former slaves set far in the future... but sign of the times (the 90's), the DVD version took out the more racier dialogue about "wrinkled broken noses"... and yes, racy dialogue is now back in vogue (:hee:), but what is beneath most of it is adventitious dribble...
Such great acting and a powerful narrative :love:
In 1995 Star Trek Predicted the San Francisco Homeless Crisis With Uncanny Accuracy
https://www.barstoolsports.com/bosto...canny-accuracy
Quote:
SFGate – Someone on Reddit posted a screen grab from an old episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” depicting a San Francisco street in 2024, and people can’t believe it wasn’t photographed in a South of Market alley yesterday.
The image from the prescient 1995 two-part “Deep Space Nine” episode “Past Tense” shows a homeless encampment pouring into a street. Tents and large cardboard boxes share space on the asphalt with oil drum fires as a couple dozen street people mill about.
In “Past Tense,” Commander Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Jadzia Dax beam down from the Defiant to Earth, but due to an accident, materialize in San Francisco in the year 2024. Two of them are marched to a “Sanctuary District,” a walled-off ghetto that the city has built to contain the poor, sick and mentally disabled. Subsequent events create a butterfly effect in the timeline that the Defiant crew must counter in order to return to the ship.
The similarity of a fictional dystopian San Francisco in 2024 to the real San Francisco of today was not missed by the Reddit crowd, which was inspired to post more than 175 comments.
“They were not really too far off the mark,” wrote one commenter.
“Yeah, don’t remove any of it, but just shove the tents and s— to the sidewalk, and you’ve got a picture of SoMa here,” another replied.
I’m a huge Star Trek guy but I missed this because DS9 is a blind spot for me. I just didn’t watch it. It seemed like an odd choice for a franchise that is supposed to be about exploring the deepest reaches of the unchartered galaxy to be set in a space station. It just sounded like an adventure set in a Greyhound terminal so I gave it a pass. And even though this “Past Tense” just sounds like a rehash of “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the best episode ever from Star Trek: The Original Series when Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel back to the Great Depression and change history so they have to set it right, you still have to give credit where credit is due. The DS9 producers got the future right. This is San Francisco right now:
https://i.imgur.com/P4MSRUZ.gif
It’s eerily the same, minus a couple of barrel fires. Tragically so. It’s stuff like this that is what makes great science fiction. Being able to predict a future with uncanny preciseness. The way Jules Verne came up with the first idea for a submarine and one of the first motion pictures ever was about a rocketship going to the moon. Unfortunately Star Trek, a show that Gene Roddenberry created during the height of the Cold War and civil unrest, mostly predicted a future of peace and racial harmony. But the only things the franchise has really nailed with dead balls accuracy is that we all carry around communicators, and we haven’t figured out jack **** about how to keep “the poor, sick and mentally disabled” from living in squalor on city streets.
If anything, it’s worse than they predicted in 1995. In the same way Detroit is even more of an abandoned hellscape than the original Robocop portrayed it. Or the way our culture is dumber than Mike Judge predicted it would be in Idiocracy. It’s enough to make you wish there was more actual fiction in your science fiction, because all too often the facts turn out to be pretty grim.
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Quote:
"Europe is falling apart. Well at least we don't have to worry about that kind of thing here." "Don't count on it."
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I think the article is overplaying the "similarities" between that episode's plot and the actual crisis in SF, but it is an very intriguing example of cross-section between modern media and the way the SF homelessness has been graphically documented in the public...
