Rewatcher’s note: Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, there will be no DS9 Rewatch on Friday the 29th of November. We’ll be back on the 3nd of December with “Life Support.”
“Past Tense, Part II”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe & Rene Echevarria
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
Season 3, Episode 12
Production episode 40512-458
Original air date: January 9, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Station log: After a summary of Part 1, we get a nice tense little hostage situation. B.C. is in charge, but Sisko (pretending to be Gabriel Bell) and Bashir make it clear they’re part of this as well, with Sisko insisting that they need the hostages alive as bargaining chips and Bashir suggesting barricading the windows so snipers can’t pick them off. Vin, Bernardo, and Lee are all among the hostages, with Bernardo giving B.C. his access code so he can see what they’re saying about the situation on the net. (That last is against Vin’s orders, but Bernardo says they’re off duty, and he just wants to see his family again.) Sisko and Bashir ask Webb to round up some gimmes he trusts to help guard the hostages so it isn’t just B.C. and his ghosts doing it.
Dax and Brynner watch the news footage, and Dax is determined to get into the Sanctuary District to help her friends. Brynner—with good reason—thinks she’s out of her mind, given the dangers.
Back in the 24th century, O’Brien has narrowed it down to ten possible times the trio got sent back to. He and Kira will go back to as many as they can before they run out of chronitons with which to jimmy the transporter. They wind up in 1930 and 1967 with no luck—but when they arrive in 2048, they realize that it must a year before that, because it looks nothing like the mid-21st century O’Brien studied in school. Of the three pre-2048 dates left on his list, he picks one at random (they only have enough chronitons left for the one) and beam out.
B.C.’s demands are to get a flight to anywhere (he wants to go to Tasmania because Errol Flynn was from there) as well as amnesty and some credit chips. Sisko and Webb opine that maybe he should think of the other 10,000 people, but B.C. thinks they should get their own hostages. However, he does come around to the notion of letting the outside world see what’s going on here and demanding that they shut the districts down. Sisko suggests it be Webb who makes the demands, because he’s not a ghost, he’s an ordinary guy next door with a family. He’s the true face of the district, not a thug like B.C. (Webb points out that “Gabe” would be a better choice, but Sisko needs to keep a low profile.)
Unfortunately, Webb’s attempt to broadcast his demands on the interface are cut off. This prompts Vin to mess with their heads, calling them losers, and reminding them that they won’t even slow down the National Guard once they show up. They’re then contacted by Detective Preston of the SFPD, who’s there to negotiate. B.C. brings Lee to the screen to show that the hostages are okay (she’s obviously terrified). Preston meets in person with Webb and Sisko, at which point they give the demands: closing the district and reinstating the Federal Employment Act.
Bashir figures out that Lee is hypoglycemic. They talk for a bit, and she relates the story of a woman who had a warrant on her for abandoning her child. Lee felt sorry for her and so didn’t log her in, just let her disappear into the district. She has no idea what happened to her, but that almost got Lee fired, so since then she just processes everyone properly and tries not to think about it.
In the middle of the night, Vin tries to sneak out. B.C. is all ready to shoot him, but Sisko and Webb talk him out of that (Sisko a bit more violently), and then Sisko rips Vin a new one for being a douche. The next morning, Preston makes good on a promise to give everyone breakfast. Bashir also digs up some meds for Lee. However, Preston is less helpful on the demands front: the governor promises to reduce the charges to incitement to riot only and will also form a committee to look into the Sanctuary Districts. Webb and Sisko are, to say the least, unimpressed. Later, Sisko and Bashir try and fail to get online, which annoys Sisko as the residents got on the net and told their story—it was an integral part of the Bell Riots.
Showing tremendous intestinal fortitude and likely an ability to hold her breath for long periods of time, Dax gets into the Sanctuary Districit via the sewer system, which really doesn’t bear thinking about, so let’s not. (Seriously, have you ever been in a sewer? It’s gross!) But she gets caught by a couple of dims and is brought to the processing center.
Her rescue is short-circuited by Sisko’s need to stick around and play out the role of Bell. Sisko sends her back out with Bashir to find her combadge (it’s emitting a subspace distress signal and the dims took it when they got her), and then she needs to head to the beam-out site so the Defiant can pick her up if they find them. She also thinks she can convince Brynner to give them the net access they need to let the Sanctuary residents tell their story.
Dax and Bashir find Grady, the guy who stole her combadge, and convince him to give it back, then she goes back out through the sewers. (Seriously, that is one brave-ass Trill…) Then she goes to Brynner and gets him to break a government lockout, lose his license, and probably some other things—but he’ll also get great ratings, so he agrees to let the residents tell their story via his news feed.
At five o’clock the next morning, B.C. interrupts a colloquy on baseball among Vin, Bernardo, and Sisko to say that another National Guard unit has arrived. They’re likely to storm the place. Sisko sends the hostages into another room, with Bashir to help protect them—and just in time, too, as the National Guard does indeed storm the place a minute later, in a manner that would’ve gotten the hostages killed if Sisko hadn’t moved them. B.C. and Webb are both killed, and Sisko is wounded saving Vin, who was almost shot by the very people who were supposed to be rescuing him. The leader tells Vin that they’d heard the hostages were dead (“Do I look dead to you?” Vin asks angrily).
The aftermath of the riots is ugly: dead and wounded bodies everywhere. In return for saving their lives, Vin and Bernardo switch Sisko and Bashir’s ID cards with those of two corpses and lets them leave the district. In exchange, Sisko asks Vin to tell people the truth about what happened, but he bitterly says he would’ve done that anyway.
Kira and O’Brien picked the right date, and they make contact with Dax. Sisko and Bashir meet up with them after Vin and Bernardo let them go, and they beam back to a restored 24th century. The only noticeable change: Bashir finds a picture of Gabriel Bell in the historical archives, and he looks a whole lot like Avery Brooks….
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? There are only enough chronitons in the Defiant hull for a limited number of time-travel transports. Luckily, O’Brien and Kira are on a TV show in which they and the people they’re rescuing are opening-credits regulars, thus enabling them to get it right on their final try.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko spends the episode posing as Gabriel Bell and doing whatever he can to restore the timelines. This also gives Avery Brooks the chance to let his inner Hawk (from Spenser: For Hire) out and cut loose.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: In order to disguise the fact that she’s Bajoran, Kira wears a bandage over her rhinal ridges when she and O’Brien travel to the past. O’Brien suggests she say she broke her nose as a joke, but when she does so in 1930, it creates massive awkwardness.
The slug in your belly: Sisko and Bashir are willing to stay behind in the Sanctuary District to make sure history stays on track, but Dax needs to not be around when the spit hits the spam. As Bashir sagely points out, even a 21st-century doctor would take all of half a second to realize that she’s not human if she winds up hurt or killed and in a hospital.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: B.C. falls instantly for Dax, and is heartbroken when Bashir says hi to her. “Story of my life. All the good ones are taken.” He’s sufficiently taken by her to actually introduce himself to her as Biddle Coleridge (which explains why he goes by B.C.).
Keep your ears open: “It’s not your fault things are the way they are.”
“Everybody tells themselves that. And nothing ever changes.”
Bashir trying to make Lee feel better and failing.
Welcome aboard: Back from Part 1 are Dick Miller as Vin, Frank Military as B.C., Jim Metzler as Brynner, Al Rodrigo as Bernardo, Tina Lifford as Lee, and the great Bill Smitrovich as Webb. We also get Clint Howard, making his first appearance on Trek since revealing himself to be the true face of Balok in “The Corbomite Maneuver” way back in 1966, as Grady (he’ll be back in Enterprise’s “Acquisition”) and Deborah Van Valkenburgh, who also appeared as William Shatner’s sorta-kinda love interest in Free Enterprise, as Preston.
Trivial matters: Originally, Ira Steven Behr wanted Iggy Pop to play Grady, but he was unavailable. Behr eventually got his wish when he cast Pop as a Vorta in “The Magnificent Ferengi.”
During the 1960s scene, “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix is playing in the VW microbus, and there’s a poster for Berman’s Rainbow Dreamers playing at the Behr Theater, a tribute to executive producer Rick Berman and co-exec Behr.
Speaking of posters, during the 1930s scene, there’s a poster advertising a boxing match at Bay Land Garden featuring the same set of boxers whose Madison Square Garden bout was advertised in a poster seen in “The City on the Edge of Forever” on the original series (billed as “their first rematch since Madison Square Garden”).
The baseball conversation is amusing, in that Vin cites the 1999 Yankees as the best team he’d ever seen, which is only one year off from being really prescient, as the 1998 Yankees were indeed one of the greatest single-season teams in baseball history. (Not that the ’99 team was bad either.) Of course, any prescience goes out the window when Bernardo mentions the 2015 London Kings, a team that is never going to happen in the next year-and-a-half. Sisko also name-checks Buck Bokai (2015 was his rookie year), whom we met an image of in “If Wishes Were Horses.” The Kings (and Bokai, though not by name) were first mentioned in TNG’s “The Big Goodbye,” in which Dick Miller also appeared.
It was on the strength of his work directing this episode in particular that led to Jonathan Frakes landing the gig to direct Star Trek: First Contact.
The picture of a Gabriel Bell who really resembles Benjamin Sisko will be seen again in “Little Green Men.”
This is the last episode of DS9 to air before Voyager’s premiere on UPN on 16 January 1995, thus ending a run that began at the top of this season where DS9 was the only Trek show on the air.
Walk with the Prophets: “You get on my nerves, and I don’t like your hat!” An excellent conclusion. We already know the ending, because Sisko told us what it was in Part 1 and his and Bashir’s (and eventually Dax’s) mission is to restore history to what Sisko remembers. But getting there is quite enjoyable, with Avery Brooks getting to cut loose and kick some serious ass and also let the crazy out a little.
Of course, some of the crazy is genuine. He’s absolutely appalled by the Sanctuary Districts. He’s never encountered anything like it in his time, and by this time he’s seen what it’s done to B.C. (turned him into a murdering thug) and to Webb (not enough to break him, but he’s obviously badly beaten down). When he blows up at B.C., he’s at least partly throwing himself into the part of Gabriel Bell hostage taker, but his plea to Vin asking him how he can be so blasé about what he sees every day is heartfelt. And there’s a noticeable change in Brooks’s tone, as voice gets higher pitched—it’s not the basso profundo threatening of B.C., which was mostly for show.
Points also for making Brynner out to be a decent sort when he practically screamed “creepy bastard who’ll betray Dax in Part 2” and instead did the right thing.
All in all, this two-parter really didn’t have enough story for two parts—there was too much filler, including Kira and O’Brien’s excellent adventures and the silly diversion with Clint Howard—but it probably had too much for one. Ultimately, it was done in by the rigid structure of syndicated television, where everything has to be in a particular timeslot with only occasional exceptions. Those boundaries are starting to break down (witness this season of Sons of Anarchy on F/X, where practically every episode of this theoretically one-hour show has been extended to 90 minutes), but in 1995 there was no chance of it. So rather than do a too-short one-hour story, they did a two-hour one with padding.
These episodes were strong enough that I, at least, can live with it. It was a Trek message episode done right.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido has autographed copies of many of the books and comics he’s written for sale. They make dandy gifts. Information, including several new books dug up in the garage recently, can be found here.
no eugenic wars in the 90s… well lets see what 23andme.com becomes..:)
this will always be the most accurate of the “your future” episodes of trek… youll see, just give it a few years more.
I think my biggest problem with this half is the haphazard way O’Brien and Kira search the past. The fastest way would be to pick a time point roughly halfway in the range of possible times. If it’s before the disruption, then pick a time halfway between then and the end of the range; if it’s after the change, pick a time halfway between then and the beginning of the range. Lather, rinse, repeat until you get the right time. Shouldn’t take more than 3 or 4 tries. It’s a method you learn in first semester calculus and O’Brien should have been exposed to it somewhere in his engineering training.
The business with Kira’s nose obviously calls back to the “automatic rice-picker” incident from “City”, but I wonder if it might not also refer to something that happended to Nana Visitor (don’t know if this was prior to this episode or not). Supposedly she went off the lot one day for lunch and obviously left her nose make-up in place. Some little old lady came up to her and said, “Oh, you poor dear. What happened?”
I really loved Brooks’s performance in his confrontation with Dick Miller. Really, really powerful stuff.
It’s interesting how this episode fits with Roddenberry’s idea that the future is likely to get worse before it can get better, that things need to get bad enough to shock people out of their complacency and motivate them to find real solutions. We saw this with “Encounter at Farpoint” and before that Roddenberry’s pilots Genesis II/Planet Earth — the idea that Earth would have to go through a nuclear war before people could dedicate themselves to creating a world without war. People tend to say Roddenberry’s vision was utopian, but it was actually more complex than that. He didn’t believe things would just automatically get better, but that we’d have to go through rough times in order to get a wake-up call that would motivate us to do the hard work of making things better, and that would give us the incentive not to let ourselves backslide again.
But the interesting twist here is that it’s a much more street-level iteration of that theme, and one that hits a lot closer to home.
The 3nd of December is my favorite 3nd! ;-p
Really nice conclusion. I like, in particular, that no one really comes off as terrible even in the midst of a terrible situation. In particular, B.C. gets to be a real person, not a stereotype. And you get a sense that all of the people who have been playing a role in generating the terrible conditions are still good people, just unable to think outside of their circumstances. Given that the first episode laid it on a little bit thick, it’s really nice to see things dealt with more deftly here. It helps to drive home the message better, to see that evil can flourish even if there aren’t really ‘bad guys’ in a traditional sense.
You are absolutely right about the time constraints weakening the episode, though. There’s just not enough to fill out two full episodes. Basically everything with Kira and O’Brien is pointless. It’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not necessary.
@1: Personally, I believe that someone from the Trek ‘verse went back in time and prevented the Eugenics Wars, which is why our current tech level is much higher than the supposed tech level of the “future” in this episode.
I agree that Dax crawling up out of the sewer seemed awfully random. Looks to me like somebody said, “Hey, there’s a working manhole on our set, let’s think of a way to use that in the episode.”
Back when this two-parter first aired, I remember thinking it’d get dated very quickly, but rewatching it now I’m surprised at how well it holds up. Sure, all the details haven’t come to pass, but one could argue that the guards’ apathy and the people’s rage might parallel today’s haves versus have-nots.
And even though it was totally goofball, I loved the bit with the hippies. “The Way To Eden,” anyone?
One nitpick: that would be the *Federal* Employment Act. The Federation is still hundreds of years away.
Nix: D’OH!
It’s fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, embarrassed
I am currently rewatching DS9 on TV, well into Season 5. When they were showing this two-parter couple of months ago I think I gave it a miss, vaguely recalling I didn’t particularly like it before and having to ration TV watching time. Perhaps I should’ve given it a chance.
After all, IMO, DS9 is easily the best Star Trek series. Mind you, having just watched “Children of Time” I wish sometimes they technobabbled everyone with a happy ending more often- ST-TNG style.
I can’t help but worry about Sanctuary Districts or some equivalent when I watch this powerful two-parter. Given the state of many places, its not a far off possibility. The real grittiness of these episodes hits home, especially for someone living in a city like Chicago where, away from the gleaming skyscrapers and manicured sidewalks, there’s high unemployment, crime, and poverty.
Avery Brooks is a tour-de-force, and Siddig El-Fadil magnificently brings home Bashir’s frustration and compassion. You feel like the two, not just the characters, but the actors themselves really feel the pain of people forced into terrible situations through no fault of their own. Terry Farrell also, as Dax has seen how the other half lives and how easy it is to get complacent when you’re in a better situation.
I agree the Kira-O’Brien time transporting is a bit of padding, but for an episode with such heavy subject matter, a necessary diversion (well, at least for me).
A powerful time travel story, one where I was never so glad to see our heroes return to their own time.
Please note that I’ve been suffering from the Dreaded Deadline Doom, so the rewatch for “Life Support” won’t go up until Wednesday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think I might have had a little more sympathy for BC if they hadn’t shown him as such an asshole in the previous episode – he seemed generally very base and cruel and taking advantage of whomever he could, so it was a little bit of a whiplash to see him in this one played somewhat for comic relief.
I’ve always liked time travel episodes in general, and this one in particular. Like Keith in part 1, I’m constantly reminded of how much closer this episode’s date is to when it was filmed. I can only hope that the situation in the real world doesn’t get as bad as this – for example, I can’t see the US government essentially locking people up for being unemployed – but many of the social problems highlighted by the Sisko’s (slightly preachy) explanations are just as topical now as they were back in 1994.
One thing that bugged me is that we don’t really see the riots up close – just some news footage of it happening in the abstract. The streets of the Sanctuary District are virtually empty when Dax arrives, and again when she and Bashir go to find her combadge, when you’d expect to see a great deal more people and probably a police or National Guard presence.
I think this two-parter might’ve been the first DS9 I’d ever actually seen, and this was before I had started watching TNG regularly. I remember liking it quite a bit…if it was when it originally aired I think I might’ve eagerly waited for the next week to see the ending. While it can seem a little over-the-head preachy to us today, and there is some easy made up technobabble for the time travel, I think it really is a very “Trek” episode–and to someone who was young and hadn’t experienced too much Trek yet, it was pretty powerful. I still think I would’ve rather had these episodes on the “Time Travel Fan Collective” DVD than “Little Green Men.”
The broken nose thing is a reference to an incident that happened to Nana Visitor during filming – she slipped (on a wet staircase IIRC) and hurt herself quite badly. Of course, she was rushed to the nearest hospital without waiting to take off her makeup. On arrival, the doctors didn’t seem too concerned about her back, but they were desperate to do something about her horribly broken nose!
I’m watching this episode in light of what we’re now seeing in the news about police violence towards people of color, especially in segregated inner cities. The riots in Baltimore, Ferguson etc give this episode even more relevance today. I do wish they’d skipped the lectures though. One of my favorite Voyager episodes was when The Doctor went to the planet where the poor people had terrible medical care and the rich were getting fancy rejuvenation care on the upper level of the hospital. In that episode they just showed you, and left the viewer to make their own comparisons to present day earth. This made it all the more powerful imo than if the show had harped on it the way “Past Tense” does here.
I’ve noticed after watching the regrettably only season of Bastard Executioner on FX that it seems that the main reason for episodes to be anywhere from 75 to 90 minutes long is so that once it hits DVD they measure out to an hour of show without commercials. Something to ponder.
What bothered me about this one was that there was no reason for these to be the Bell Riots. By the end–and I could have sworn they were setting up for this to be the punch line –everything in the timeline should have been back to normal, except they should have been the Webb Riots. He was the guy on the screen, the diplomat, the dignified face of the Sanctuary. He never appeared on the net broadcast armed like Sisko was. He even got in a “Tell my wife I love her.” And nobody would have had to play dead-guy shell game to procure a handy corpse.
@20/Ndds: But that’s exactly why the riots wouldn’t have been named after Webb. You don’t name an act of violent uprising after the calm, diplomatic guy who helps to resolve it; you name it after the guy perceived to be at the head of the violence. Also, looking at it more cynically, the press in the 2020s would be far more likely to name an act of violence after a black man than a white man.
I don’t see how the public would know the name Bell at all. In the original broadcast where the feed was cut, Webb did all the talking. When they spoke to Preston, Sisko played Menacing Background Man #2 while B. C. — whose gang was apparently behind five out of the six hostages — got to do his little psycho routine, so if footage from that call eventually aired, Bell would not have gotten infamy from it. Once Brynner got them back on the air, Webb would have been MC for the airing of the grievances, and since Sisko wouldn’t have had a story to share, I doubt he would have gotten on camera for that — especially since if he had, we would likely have seen it.
The only way Bell’s name would have gotten out would have been from second-hand word of mouth. If the press was bound and determined to name the event after someone violent, they would have been the Biddle Riots…
@22/Ndds: Why in the world are you assuming that live broadcasts are the only possible source of information about the event? If anything, live news is the worst, most unreliable source of knowledge about an event. There would surely have been investigations and interviews conducted after the fact by both law-enforcement authorities and journalists, not to mention research by historians in later years.
I agree that live news is the worst and most unreliable source of knowledge. It’s also the most influential. These aren’t Starfleet days, remember, this is twenty minutes into the future.
@24/Ndds: Influential in the very, very short term, maybe, but what’s that got to do with it? The only person in the 2-parter who actually used the phrase “Bell Riots” was Ben Sisko. He was using the term by which 24th-century historians referred to the riots. And he explicitly said that the name was based on what was discovered after the fact — namely, that Gabriel Bell had kept the hostages alive and sacrificed his life to save them when the police stormed the building based on the false rumor that the hostages had been killed. Once that truth came out after the riots, Bell became a national hero and the outrage over his unnecessary death led to the shutdown of the Sanctuary Districts. And that’s why the riots were named for him in the history books. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate news coverage or what people knew at the time. It was specifically their failure to know what was really going on, the fact that they acted on prejudice and rumor rather than taking the time to get the truth, that led to Bell’s death and sparked the outrage that led to reform.
Posting in 2018 and we’re closer to the Sanctuary District than ever. I write from Southern California and L.A.’s Skid Row and Anaheim’s tent cities seem like part of the geography. And today dozens of Palestinians killed in a riot in Gaza.
I was confused by the historical record Bashir showed Sisko where it showed Gabriel Bell with a picture of Sisko! I thought Gabriel Bell’s ID or food card was placed on a dead man to make it seem like he sacrificed his life? Why doesn’t it include a picture of that man? Or if there were constant security cameras and that was a screenshot of “Bell”, they would have clearly also recorded him very much alive(but injured) and walking away with Bashir.
Did I miss something?
My wife and I watched this episode today, in April of 2020, and every few minutes we would turn to each other and say, “Trump’s America.” Shudder.
Other than that, and all the usual time-travel and “reverse-the-polarity” business, two things struck me about this episode:
1. Constantly cocking shotguns to indicate menace or readiness-for-action. In real life, every time you pump a pump-action shotgun, you eject a shell, whether it has been fired or not. By consantly racking these weapons, all they would accomplish is ejecting unfired shells onto the floor. And I can’t imagine that they decocked them between scenes. The only way to decock most pump-action shotguns is to pull the trigger. True, there are a few higher-end models that incorporate a decocking feature, but on mass-produced riot guns such as the type that would have been issued to cops? Not likely. And even shotguns that can be decocked will still eject a shell if you rack them. But Hollywood needs that cocking sound to indicate menace, so it’s cock-cock-cock, all the live-long day.
2. This one is not really annoying, but would have made for a more believable character: Chief O’Brien, as an engineer and technician, would have been familiar with a troubleshooting technique called the half-split method. He would have been clever enough to have applied this technique to the puzzle of how to decide which time periods to teleport to, once he realized the timeline had changed. If you know the timeline is different at point 10, you go to point 5. If it’s different there, go to point 2 or 3. If the timline is not changed at point 5, go to point 7 or 8. Continue dividing your choices in half, then check, until there’s just one left. Using this method, with the five teleports available to him, he could have found the right time period among 16 choices, so the 10 he had to search would have been easy-peasy. As it was, he used up some choices bouncing around at random, until at the end he only had one chance in three of choosing correctly. Of course, we knew he would, but I would have liked to see him succeed through cleverness rather than through luck.
@25/CLB:
Reading those words just a few months later feels prescient in a different way, the broad strokes anyway. O.O
If by “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix you mean “Hey Dude” by Generic Stockmusic, you’d be more on point, I think. :D
Unless it’s some rare live recording, which seems very even more unlikely than a Hendrix hit record in a 1990s television show.
Lockdown Rewatch. A very good two parter and it’s hardly aged badly at all considering as I write we are only four years away from where the story was set. Obviously predicting a dystopian future is a staple of Sci Fi and what was fascinating conjecture in 1994 is somewhat chilling now. We don’t have Sanctuary Districts but we have gated communities and ignored and disparaged inner cities. It’s more worrying that the script writers didn’t go as far taking children off their parents and locking them in cages, that would have been seen as too horrific to contemplate when this was written, now it’s public policy. One nagging. plot hole, Star Fleet after stationing the most advanced battle ship in the Quadrant at the worm hole to defend DS9 from the Dominion threat don’t seem to have a problem with then bringing said ship together with the entire station senior staff halfway across the Quadrant to attend a conference, was another starship starship there just on the off chance the Jem Hadar where to come through the Worm Hole.
And on a lighter note it’s good to see from Brynner that the 80s Bowie look is not too far away from returning and also the coming Ghostbusters revival must be a hit as the Sanctuary district guards have clearly modelled their uniforms on them.
No Sanctuary Districts, but the US does have concentration camps.
This time around the person that stuck with me was BC, and I was impressed by the actor. His plain role is to be a menace, but he reveals something more at several moments: he doesn’t like what he’s become. At one point when the DS9 crew reunite, it’s clear that Dax has gone to great lengths to find her friends. The look on his face shows that he’s never experienced that kind of a friend, such natural loyalty. He jokes about her lack of interest in his flirting–but I think he’s genuinely broken-hearted. Not at failing to connect romantically–but at having a good person in his life. I think he was drawn to her for that reason. It may even extend to the others. He doesn’t understand their world, a better world, and he wants to.
@3/CLB:
Agreed. I also loved Dick Miller’s reaction after being scolded for his callousness. He genuinely seems ashamed when Sisko calls him out for it.
“It would be a start”
That conversation and the way its delivered has stuck with me since I watched this episode when it was first on. This is a great episode.
2023 and I don’t know how things are in the US but we’re going great guns in the UK for Bell riots next year.