Past Tense, Or: What Is the Bell Riots Review?

"It was one of the most violent disturbances in American history, and it happened right here. Sanctuary District A. The first week of September, 2024."

Past Tense, Or: What Is the Bell Riots Review?

This blog’s mission is to look at what I think will be the “long crisis of the 2020s,” through the lens of a prediction in a Star Trek episode which aired in 1995: Deep Space Nine’s two-parter, “Past Tense.”

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_I_(episode)

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_II_(episode)

The Bell Riots Review is not a “trekkie” blog—its areas of focus will be, among other things, urban unrest, the environment, academia, fights over freedom of inquiry, and intellectual evolutions (or lack thereof) on the right and left—so, I won’t go into much detail summarizing the episode or getting into the context of Deep Space Nine or of the other Star Trek shows during the 90s such as Star Trek: The Next Generation or Voyager.

Readers who want a thorough plot synopsis of “Past Tense” can look at the memory-alpha links above.

The real usefulness of “Past Tense” from my point of view is that it’s a narrative about three humanoid time-travelers from a technologically superior, and in many ways vastly more enlightened 24th century, who through some kind of space-time accident, have wound up in the 21st century, specifically in an American city, San Francisco, in the year 2024.  The 2024 this time-traveling trio wake up in is an awful place: far worse than their super-enlightened 2371, certainly—but also noticeably worse than the air-date show-audience’s likely experience of the year 1995, if they were in the U.S. (so, this is leaving aside that, yes, some of the show fans might have been living in, say, Kigali or Sarajevo that year).

In this 2024, every single American city has become split between a small, well-off white-collar managerial workforce, and a growing population of the unemployed, who are made to live in “Sanctuary Districts”: brutally crowded, dangerous slums where the only presence from the “state” seems to be battalions of overmilitarized police whose objective is constant crowd control and ID-checking. These are cities which don’t look particularly “futuristic” compared to the cities of the 1990s. There’s a bit more computer technology, and a lot more poverty and violence. America, and presumably the whole world (though, we’re not told what’s going on in, say, China), has badly stagnated.

The leader of the time traveling trio, Sisko (Avery Brooks), is something of a 21st century history buff—perhaps like a certain kind of history buff today who has a special fascination with the 1848 revolutions. He realizes that they’ve arrived in S.F. just days before the eruption of the “Bell Riots.”

Here is Sisko explaining this past/future event to his fellow time traveler, Dr. Bashir:

Sisko: You ever hear of the Bell Riots?

Bashir: Vaguely.

Sisko: It was one of the most violent disturbances in American history, and it happened right here. San Francisco. Sanctuary District A, the first week of September, 2024.

Bashir: That's only a few days from now.

Sisko: The Riots will be one of the watershed events of the 21st century. Gabriel Bell will see to that.

Bashir: Bell?

Sisko: The man they named the Riots after. He is one of the Sanctuary residents who will be guarding the hostages [many of whom are Sanctuary police]. The government troops will storm this place based on rumors that the hostages have been killed. It turns out that the hostages were never harmed, because of Gabriel Bell. In the end, Bell sacrifices his own life to save them. He'll become a national hero. Outrage over his death, and the death of other residents, will change public opinion about the Sanctuaries. They’ll be torn down and the United States will finally begin correcting the social problems it has struggled with for over a hundred years.

The plot-tension in “Past Tense” stems from Sisko and Bashir accidentally getting the real Gabriel Bell killed before he can intervene in the hostage standoff. Sisko grasps that without Bell’s heroism, the future which he and his fellow time-travelers hail from will never come to be. Just so the audience gets the point, the episode cuts intermittently to other show characters who are back in 2371, but are now inhabiting a degraded version of that year (some plot device like a temporal bubble is written in to explain how these characters exist at all in such a dramatically altered timeline). This is now a 24th century where humanity never progressed to the stars, never encountered and learned from alien worlds—all because Gabriel Bell wasn’t there in September of 2024 to save a group of police-hostages from a furious Sanctuary crowd uprising.

Hoping to recover the true past and set the future right, Sisko assumes Bell’s identity. The two resemble each other enough to make the switch effective.

Benjamin Sisko (above) assuming the identity of Gabriel Bell. Below: the real Gabriel Bell.

For history to be reconstructed perfectly, Sisko will have to die in Bell’s place. However, at the climax of “Past Tense,” once Sisko and his friends save the police-hostages during the raid, a grateful policeman who has grasped what’s going on offers to put Bell’s ID tag onto one of the dead bodies from the raid, thus allowing Sisko to slip back through a time portal to 2371. Back in their proper time period, Sisko, Bashir, and the third time-traveler (Dax) are relieved to find that this 2371 looks familiar to them, and all is well again: a post-Bell Riots human Super-Enlightenment has actually happened, as it was supposed to. Humanity has been exploring the stars and developing an expansive “Federation of Planets” among alien civilizations throughout the galaxy.

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A few others have mused about possible parallels between the Bell Riots and urban unrest during the year 2020, in particular the George Floyd protests in the United States. The Bell Riots Review does not seek to equate the two. Rather, this blog begins from a premise, one loosely informed by the spirit of “Past Tense”, that various interrelated human crises, pertaining in particular to livelihood, inequality, and basic biological living conditions (in and beyond cities), are coming to a head during the 2020s. Furthermore, the blog begins from an idea that these crises can unfold and resolve in a way that goes right—“right” defined throughout this blog as humanity gaining a more enlightened future, a “Supra-Enlightenment”; “expanding to the stars” in literal or metaphoric terms.  Or, these crises can unfold in a way that goes horribly wrong, in which case that future will slip away.

(Perhaps some other, totally distinct and relaunched civilization will get to a future like that in a thousand years, like it took post-Dark Age Western societies a thousand years to catch up to and surpass where Graeco-Roman societies had been before their unraveling. But, as in Asimov’s Foundation series, though cyclicality is a strong force in history, there is always a way—by using the Asimovian “Seldon Crisis” correctly—of avoiding that thousand year setback.)

The Bell Riots Review has many goals which will become evident (including to myself) over the upcoming posts…perhaps all of the posts will be between now and September of 2024. But one of the Review’s core goals which is appropriate to articulate now, in advance of the upcoming posts, is the subjecting of present-day social-discursive currents which are in effect “counter-Enlightenment”—that is, which are bringing us towards the “wrong” Bell Riots outcome—to unyielding criticism.

Note—as I’m sure an astute reader of this opening post already has—that, through the lens of “Past Tense”, the future “going the right way” depends upon some idea of “the urban rebels” (whoever they may be) and “the police forces” (ditto) arriving at a point of mutual understanding with each other. To many readers in the year 2020, the idea of such a point of mutual understanding may seem implausible, preposterous, naïve, perhaps immoral. But this possibility was a core theme in much of our most celebrated, respected, and widely-valued popular cultural material until not so long ago—for instance, in the 2002-2008 TV series The Wire (which I’ll surely be posting about down the road).

Addendum: Yesterday’s Enterprise

This really isn’t supposed to be a trekkie blog (I swear!), but since I’m in Trek mode anyway for the purposes of this post:

Another time-traveling episode from Star Trek, this one from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is 1990’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” In terms of writing and structure, this is actually a far superior episode to “Past Tense.” In fact, I find “Yesterday’s Enterprise” to be the high-point of the entire Star Trek franchise between the 1960s and today. Apparently, Quintin Tarantino is also a fan. Of all the time-travel episodes in Star Trek, and there are dozens, this is the one which has the most ambitious symbological subtext which pertains to something besides the surface-level brainteaser of moving about in time and playing with paradoxes in causality.

(The original Terminator movie, superficially a movie about time travel, artificial intelligence and technology, has a subtext like this, pertaining to the American soul being torn between Christian and Pagan sensibilities, with the latter presented as evil and anti-human…more on this in some future post.)

In “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” set in the year 2366, the starship Enterprise D, captained by Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart…the facepalm GIF guy) happens upon a space-time anomaly in the nether-regions of the galaxy. As the Enterprise D begins to scan the anomaly, another ship suddenly emerges from the anomaly’s center. At this instant the entire nature of the Enterprise D changes: instead of a scientific ship of peace, the Enterprise D is now a warship…and has been, we soon learn, for the last 22 years!

“Mission of Peace” Picard vs. Warship Picard.

For several purposefully disorienting minutes of the episode, the audience thinks that maybe this military version of the Enterprise D is simply the ship which came out of the center of the anomaly. But it becomes evident that, in fact, the ship which came out of the anomaly is the Enterprise C, an earlier model of the Enterprise, which had mysteriously disappeared 22 years ago. The plot rotates around the interactions of the crew of the warlike Enterprise D—which (along with the rest of the fleet of the Federation of Planets) has been at war with the Klingon Empire for 22 years—and the crew of the Enterprise C which is not in its correct time.

As for the “true” Enterprise D, which is a ship committed to peaceful and scientific exploration? It has disappeared from ever having existed. Nobody knows or remembers that it ever was.

Nobody, except, that is, for a highly intuitive sentient being on board the Enterprise D named Guinan (played by Whoopi Goldberg). She is the ship’s bartender. The moment the Enterprise D becomes warlike, Guinan senses that the nature of reality has become somehow profoundly “off,” though she cannot logically explain this feeling. She says to Picard that she intuits that they are “in the wrong present,” that the Enterprise D isn’t supposed to be a warship, that there isn’t supposed to be a war with the Klingons. She says that the Enterprise C has to go back through the rift in time; that there was something which the Enterprise C was supposed to do 22 years ago which it was never able to do, and this has somehow changed recent history from a peaceful to a warlike epoch.

Guinan: bartender who can intuit her location in the multiverse.

Eventually, through much detective work from the crew—lots of fine scenes with the loveable android, Data—it becomes clear to everybody that Guinan is right. Just before the Enterprise C got sucked through the time rift, it was about to do something heroic and self-sacrificial to save a Klingon colony from annihilation from another warlike civilization, the Romulans. Because they got pulled 22 years into the future before they could complete this heroic act, the Enterprise C crew weren’t there to save the colony. Had they saved the colony, the entire war with the Klingons would have been completely avoided.

Consulting with both Guinan and the captain of Enterprise C (Captain Rachel Garrett), Picard decides to help the Enterprise C go back through the rift to save the Klingon colony 22 years ago—thus annihilating his own reality in favor of what sounds, to him, like a better one.

When the Enterprise C goes back through the rift, the Enterprise D abruptly becomes a ship of peace again: the ship we’ve become familiar with in all other episodes of the show. The crew has no awareness, other than Guinan’s lingering intuitions, of any of the previous events of the episode, as these events had taken place in an alternate, and now rejected, timeline.

What is “Yesterday’s Enterprise” really about?  The meaning-framework of the episode seems to me to be something like:

Some past version of oneself has to be permitted to complete its own honorable self-sacrifice, in order so that a failing, regressive future can be avoided, and a more enlightened future can be won.

In 1990, the looming end of the Cold War may have been on the episode writers’ minds (the end of the Cold War is explicitly the central allegory of the excellent 1991 movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).  The subtext for “Yesterday’s Enterprise” would seem to be an America entering the 1990s and torn between its “traditional” military-conquest identity (identifiable not just in the Cold War but also in WW2, the midcentury welfare-warfare state, US entry into WW1, US westward conquest across the continent during the 19th century, etc.) and some kind of more enlightened and less destructive civilizational identity; an America struggling to find a way of relating to its own past in a way that permits a 90s-era selection of the “correct” future (and, from the standpoint of today, can we say that any of the choices made in the 90s were the right ones?).

Note that, in the story, the Enterprise C has to be “heroic” for the timeline-correction to work. In fact, in the episode, the word that’s used isn’t heroism—it’s “honor.” Because, this is what the Klingons (perhaps an expression of the human condition’s “warrior aspect”) value above all else. In the moral structure of the episode, depriving the past of its honor—or rather, failing to honor the human past—is part of what tracks the present and future into the wrong reality.