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PAST TENSE, PART I > Behind the Scenes
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The working title of this episode was "Cold and Distant Stars". The original teleplay, written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, involved Sisko going back in time and ending up homeless. His claims that he was actually from the future and was the commander of a space station prompted those around him to think he was insane, and he is eventually given thorazine. This script was written by Wolfe as a commentary on the apathy of the people of the 20th Century towards the homeless. However, nobody was very happy with the script, including Wolfe himself, until Behr came up with the idea of the Sanctuary Districts and the Bell Riots. |
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Ira Behr's inspiration to create the Bell Riots was the 1971 riot in New York's Attica Prison, which was caused primarily by inmates' demands for more humane living conditions being continually ignored by the authorities. |
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Ira Behr's inspiration for the Sanctuary Districts very much came from real life in the 20th century; "I was down in Santa Monica one day, and there [were] all these homeless people there, and it was a beautiful day, the ocean, sky, sun, and homeless people everywhere. And all these tourists, and people up and about, and they were walking past these homeless people as if they were part of the scenery. It was like some artist had done some interesting rendition of juxtaposition between nature and urban decay right there in front of me. And the fact was that nobody seemed to care, at all. And I said, 'There has to be something about that, where does that go? How far do you take that?' And that evolved into the idea for concentration camps essentially for the homeless." |
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What is interesting about Behr's use of the theory of concentration camps is that the term "concentration camp" does not mean the same thing today as it originally did. Today, concentration camps are known as barbaric places of horror, suffering and mass death, mainly due to the Nazi employment of them during World War II, but this is not how they began. Concentration camps were 'invented' by the British army during the 2nd Boer War and were conceived as enclosed areas which could be used as humanitarian centers to help people who had lost their land due to the fighting. The interesting thing is that in reality, these places of aid quickly became places of confinement and punishment, as the British employed a Scorched Earth policy. This is exactly the same way the Sanctuary Districts developed; they were set up to help the needy, but ultimately become places of control and coercion. |
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While the episode was filming, an article in The Los Angeles Times described a proposal by the Mayor that the homeless people of that city could be moved to fenced-in areas so as to contain them, in an effort to "make downtown Los Angeles friendlier to business." Alexander Siddig has commented on the amazing coincidence: "The episode was almost a cinematic version of that statement by the LA council." |
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As Ira Behr comments the plan was "to put aside part of downtown Los Angeles as a haven, nice word, a haven for the homeless." Similarly, as Robert Wolfe says, "That was what the Sanctuary Districts were, places where the homeless could just be so no-one had to see them, and literally there it was in the newspaper. We were a little freaked out." |
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Chris Brynner, Vin, Lee and Bernardo Calvera are all named after characters from the classic 1960 film The Magnificent Seven. Brynner also takes his name from Oscar-winning actor Yul Brynner who plays Chris Adams in the film. B.C. was named after first assistant director B.C. Cameron. |
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Bashir's rhetorical question to Sisko, of whether mankind would revert if faced with a real crisis, is addressed again in "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost". He expresses similar thoughts after learning of Section 31's existence at the end of "Inquisition". |
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Ira Steven Behr has said that this episode continues the investigation into the heart of Gene Roddenberry's universe which he began in "The Maquis, Part II". He points out that for society to reach the utopia envisioned by Roddenberry, it had to go through Hell first, and this episode is part of an examination of that Hell. |
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As Robert Hewitt Wolfe elaborates, "How did we get from where we are today to the Federation? Was it a nice easy smooth ride? Well we know it wasn't. Gene Roddenberry mentioned the Eugenics War and World War III and all sorts of bad things from here to there, so what was the spark, what was the thing that made people think, 'We've got to do better.' And that's what we tried to portray. The whole idea was that the Bell Riots were a formative thing in the history of the Federation because it was what made people feel really bad enough to try to make the Federation." |
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Ira Behr also states that there is a subtle examination of racism in this episode. When Dax is discovered, she is treated like royalty, but when Sisko and Bashir are found, they are treated like criminals. Of this situation, Behr says "the simple fact is that a beautiful white woman is always going to get much better treatment than two brown-skinned men." |
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Starfleet's temporal displacement policy is mentioned for the first time in this episode. This policy, and the officers who enforce it, would return in the fifth season episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". |
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This is one of composer Dennis McCarthy's favorite episodes due to, ironically, the amount of silence in it. According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, there are only seven minutes of music for this entire episode. |
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This episode is also a favorite of Colm Meaney's; "I just thought it was a superb episode in that it captured the, you know, it dealt with the social issue and the social situation that we're familiar with today, but it kind of looked into the future and said if this continues, if this trend continues, what we could end up with, you know, the serious situation we could end up with. And I just thought it was a superb use of the idiom of the genre of science of fiction, to take a contemporary situation that we're all kind of familiar with and aware of as a problem, and to just sort of let's see this as this develops a little bit into the future, and only that much into the future, thirty or forty years, whatever it was, and we don't do something about this, then we have it very serious, and the way the situation was portrayed with almost concentration camps and ghettos being cordoned off from the rest of society, it was very powerful." |
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This episode was the last to air before the premiere of Star Trek: Voyager on 16 January 1995. |
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This is the last of eleven DS9 episodes, the first being "The Search, Part I", that premiered without another Star Trek series also on the air. All episodes of DS9 before The Search, Part I and after this premiered while another Star Trek series was also running (Before The Search, Part I, The Next Generation; after this episode, Voyager). |
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Cirroc Lofton (Jake Sisko) does not appear in this episode. |
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This is also the first of three episodes not to feature any scenes on Deep Space 9, or show the station in any scenes (save for the opening credits), although Quark does appear briefly on the Defiant's viewscreen in his bar's backroom. |
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Dick Miller (Vin) also appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Big Goodbye" as the newspaper vendor. |
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Christopher Brynner's apartment set was later reused as Harry Kim and Libby's apartment in VOY: "Non Sequitur". |
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