DS9 writer Robert Hewett Wolfe has suggested folks who are able make donations "in memory of Gabriel Bell" to local charities that help hungry or unhoused people. Thought I'd pass along the idea, I think it's a good one.
So here in San Francisco, a group of us like minded Star Trek fans met at Levi Plaza to commemorate Sisko, I mean Gabriel Bell and his message. We collected support bags for unhouse people.
... You know it's based on the bloody Chinese Communist Revolution and it's many genocides following? It's Communism in Space... That's all Start Trek is. Chronologically, this episode came out in the "golden era" of CCP foreign influence campaigns, producers are NOW talking about it openly so you can hear them talk about it from various lenses But it's essentially airbrushing bloody revolutions as being necessary for a communist utopia, and don't worry that the Utopia only exists on TV 😂😂
It does sting that the ending of "Past Tense" is Bashir asking, "SIr, there's one thing I don't understand. How could they let things get so bad?" and Sisko answering. "That's a good question, I wish I had an answer..." He may has well as looked at the camera and said, "Wake up people, you got time to prevent this!" And now here we are, and in some ways, the world is (arguably) worse than the one presented in the show... and unfortunately, I doubt there will be any "Bell riots" to help fix it.
@mikejankowski6321 Trombone is the symptom of the larger problems. the old world is dying, the new world cannot be born. we have nothing but to live in the time of monsters
There could in theory be "Bell Riots" but they wouldn't fix anything in this current timeline. The idealism of Star-Trek does not pan out in the real world. Most people don't care about the plight of the poor and never have. In 135BC the poor and enslaved people rose up against the Roman elites. That was 2159 years ago. They rioted for 3 years straight and were eventually put down. They rose up again under Sparticus in 73BC and that too was put down. It didn't lead to a larger revolution against the system because the majority of the population sided with the rich. This same process was repeated again and again throughout history. There was a huge peasant revolt in 1381 that almost toppled the King of Medieval England. The people rallied around the King and put down the peasant revolt.
The only real difference between Trek and reality in this context is that we aren't out burning shit down. All the societal failures that led to the riots exist.
same here like it was always a what if that ran parallel to the story made by people in the 60s and later 80s and 90s about a what if, something I feel like people miss, the big strokes could still happened or line up to events, but that was also the point, the classic trek's events were mostly made around the point of people seeing patterns and potential things that could happen and classic scifi tropes. The series man purpose after a while was to call out things and get you to ask questions
The major thing Star Trek DS9 writers didn't count on was: cell phones. Nothing intense like the Bell Riots in real life (yet) because everyone is staring into their cell phones pacified by the never-ending scroll.
Star Trek 4 went a long way towards saving the humpbacks from extinction, with amazing real world results of increasing public knowledge of their plight. Wouldn't it be amazing if Star Trek guilted the Irish into finally resolving their differences with the Crown? Or if Charles stopped being a putz with a 19th-century colonialist attitude and released Northern Ireland from the crowns control? Imagine that Charles III. Balls in your court...
I am born and raised in San Francisco and it's so eerie how similar those episodes of DS9 are to the San Francisco of today. Having a district solely for low-income and homeless folks is how SF is currently designed. The entire lower east side, the places I grew up in, and some areas in downtown are filled with low-income folk yet our government and "regular folk" seem to either turn a blind eye or at worst villainize us. Especially right now in the 2020s when the pandemic saw us have a surge of low-income and homeless folk in addition to the George Floyd protests the Bell Riots episodes is just super eerie to me in both a good and a bad way.
San Francisco isn't the only city with a stark contrast of haves and have-nots. Unfortunately, San Francisco is often a microcosm of our very broken system of allowing the super-wealthy to exist. I have no problem with some accumulation of wealth, but the fact of billionaires at all is an affront to reasonable taxation and care for those less able to accumulate such obscene wealth. Society has no need for billionaires, but we do need equitable taxation and aid to those in need of assistance. You know, just like present-day Europe. If only there was some system that existed, like Europe, that we could point to, like Europe, or we could use as an example, like Europe. Oh well. One day we'll have a template we can follow.
That really resonates with me because I was thinking the riots still happened just the names changed. I grew up in Baltimore City it's annexed and isolated from the surrounding county. We pay 2.25 times the property tax , while the county exports their "problem" people to us. They will NIMBY the heck out of alcohol and drug treatment centers and we don't. I really hope we will have a Federation future🖖🏾
That is actually one of the freaky things about the episode. Right after shooting for that episode wrapped SF announced their plans to do that and the writers/cast/crew were all WTF.
@@nobodyimportant2470 Despite some progressive policies and practices, the Gold Rush cemented San Francisco as being primarily about money, money, and more money. Money often encourages corruption and San Francisco spanned down the peninsula a great distance. Finally, in an attempt to reign in corruption, the City & County of San Francisco was condensed to its current boundaries. Unfortunately, like many major cities, San Francisco suffers from incestuous politics. Just like the U.S., San Francisco also has one of the best governments money can buy.
Just had a watch party with some Trekkies of this episode and we had a two-hour long discussion about homelessness and social inequalities. I shared my own experience of being homeless. This episode really hits home for me now.
I believe in interviews they'd said they'd hoped it'd be remembered as ridiculously pessimistic, so they're kind of sad they're being called prophetic for simply mirroring the situation of the early-90s.
And considering it took a good few years for that one TNG episode that dealt with the legitimacy of terrorism or guerilla warfare to a means of liberation, to not be banned in the UK, I have a feeling they knew they were touching something
I prefer the Conan O'Brien solution to this problem. Back in the 90s, on his show, they did a segment called "In the Year 2000" where everyone wore weird futuristic collars and shone flashlights under their chins, and then made ridiculous predictions about what would happen in the far-off year 2000. Then came the 21st century, and rather than modify their shtick to be, say, the year 3000, they kept prognosticating what amazing technological wizardry they thought might happen in the year 2000 even though it was already several years in the past. Because it's just more hilarious that way. Mr. T trying not to bust out laughing is proof that this is the correct approach.
This could be Mandela effect, but I seem to remember them _breifly_ changing it to "In the Year 3000" before reverting to "2000" when they realized it was funnier that way.
@@zorilla0 Pretty sure they continued with 2000 for the whole of the Late Night run, but when Conan briefly had the Tonight Show, they switched it to 3000. So not until 2009 did they change it. The thinking probably was, there's gonna be a whole new audience for Conan in the Tonight Show, and they're not gonna get the long running joke without context, so gotta change it.
I think one reason the Bell riots seem relevant to new star trek is that the commentary Past Tense is making is actually more relevant today than it was in 1995. I think it's a theme of "we need to fix this shit to create a future we can be proud of" that should be revisited. When they happened is less important.
"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all." -Asimov
Hey Steve, I'm checking in on the ground here in San Francisco. I walked over to Sanctuary District today and the only thing noticeably different were a bunch of confused-looking nerds milling about dejectedly. I'll keep you posted.
On the ground update: The nerds were starting to become increasingly agitated and nonviolent, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. Jumping up and down and gesturing down the street, I shouted "Hey!, It's Gary 7! And he's with Guinan! Go get him!" The nerds took the bait. With a mighty roar they rushed toward Van Ness Avenue. Sadly, as the thundering herd washed over the busy thoroughfare, one of the nerds was struck by a truck. As he lay dying, he forced his mangled fingers into a Vulcan salute, sputtered, "I do not have, and have never had, an IRL friend", and promptly died. I personally figure this is an "Edith Keeler Must Die!" situation, so I don't have to feel guilty about my responsibility for this. I'm just preserving the timeline, yo. Don't all thank me at once.
Another update from San Francisco. After the unfortunate, but necessary, Edith Keeler incident, the nerds have been herded into the Civic Center. Things were beginning to calm down and it appeared that the nerds were about to begin to disperse, when someone (and I'm not saying it was me) shouted "Justice for Tuvix!". Well, that certainly riled the crowd, and now the nerds have assembled into factions, shouting taunts and preparing for pitched battle. Isolated fist-fights are breaking out as erstwhile allies fracture into sub-factions: treckies against treckers, alternative timeline Discovery vesus prime timeliners, TAS canon versus non-canon... Oh the Humanity!
A new dawn rises in the City By The Bay. Although the Civic Center Plaza is stained red with the blood of trekies and treckers alike, life must go on. The Monday Farmer's Market vendors have cleared the plaza of the bodies, loading the living and dead alike onto their trucks to unceremoniously dump them a few blocks away in the Tenderloin. Mayor London Breed is expected to give a press conference later today. Not about the Nerd Riot; that kind of shit happens all the time around here. No biggie. Just being thorough, in case you give a shit about Mayor London Breed press conferences. I certainly don't. Signing off.
It's quite simple Star Trek became a completely alternate timeline after Kirk stole a whale in 1986. I mean if accidentally killing a butterfly can cause history to change what do you think whalenapping would do to it. Whales are much bigger then butterflies.
@@jjohnson796 He did fix things though. I mean think about what the divergence is, he prevented the eugenics wars in our timeline, by stealing that whale. Sure he only delayed them in his own but we at least should be grateful for surviving the 90s.
“Dude, do you know how worried I was? You disappeared in a vortex while I was in charge. For all I knew, you were dead or stuck in a dystopian San Francisco in the middle of a riot!”
@@MotherOfOwlbears Why do that when there are a whole bunch of MST3K episodes available for free on RUclips? I saw "Mitchell" Just the other day. Also the show kinda lives on in the form of Rifftrax! The only way I got through all of the Twilight movies was with Rifftrax commentary lol. Turn that dumpster fire into a comedy!
We know for a fact that the timeline of Discovery differs greatly from our own, because in Discovery Musk is (still) revered on the same level as the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane.
But, Steve... my neighbor's last name is "Bell", and the family got stinking drunk last night and are at each other's throats today over things said in a drunken stupor. Trust me, it's a riot over there... a Bell riot. I don't expect it to resolve itself for at least a day or two. Star Trek is good to go!
I took your advice and watched those two episodes, and realized we are now standing at the very crossroads that could lead to the situations they depicted. With November in mind, all I could think as the second episode ended was, "Please don't be prophetic. Please by all that's holy, don't be prophetic."
I'm eagerly awaiting the appearance of Kellyanne Conway on Fox to talk about the Democratic-run slaughter of the peaceful protesters in the Bell Riots.
I am a story driven canon fan; I love the way the Trek "history" has evolved and I'm not a fan of how some things have been changed. However, I never believed for a second that Trek was OUR history, that we are simply looking at how our world was going to turn out. Because if you believe that Trek is the future of our world, then you must believe: dinosaurs escaped Earth 65 millions years ago and are currently exploring the galaxy; some Phoenician soldier has been just about every famous person you've ever heard of; the Ancient Greeks, the Egyptians and the various Mesoamerican cultures were all founded by space aliens; and several Vulcans are currently living on the planet.
Having interacted with my neighbors only a handful of times despite trying to be nice, I’m convinced there are indeed several Vulcans on this planet, and they live in the house next to me. Those joyless creatures have an in ground pool they keep empty because “there is no way to justify the expense in maintaining it”
What should we, the audience, do when life catches up to Star Trek? Huh... I dunno... *lights molotov cocktail* I guess we'll have to figure something out. *winds up to throw*
“Star Trek is fiction.” This is a bold statement that will piss alot of fans off. Too many fans treat Star Trek the same way people treat religious text, my dad (rip) being one of them.
When this came out, it was a cautionary tale in the optimism of the 90s. I could watch it comfortably and think but not worry. Even in light of the LA Riots, I felt like we were already doing better and moving in a better direction. Then after 2008, it became a bit more uncomfortable. American society wasn't as stable as I thought, and 911 had turned us a lot more authoritarian than I hoped. Then when the term 'sanctuary cities' became a GOP talking point and Trump was literally saying he'd cut them off from federal aid and ship the 'illegals' there, I couldn't watch the episodes anymore because it was no longer an escape from my real life as a disabled person. We came scarily close to seeing those conditions become real if he'd gotten a second term. Even after Trump has left office, I tried to watch again and could only do it if it played while I was doing other chores more or less in another room. Goes to show how sometimes writers get things right in ways they never wanted to.
I just started watching Star trek with my girlfriend (she never grew up with Star Trek) and we just watched space seed and we kind of laughed at them saying the 1990s. We joked that the boy band wars of the 90s got blown out of proportion in recorded history
Oh God, this just makes too much sense. Imagine records of the time are destroyed, save for _Weird,_ the Al Yankovic "biopic," and Madonna goes down in history as one of the great warlords of our era.
Excellent commentary. I rewatched that episode and was telling myself the same thing. The Bell Riots arent happening now but many of the things it represents are indeed happening. Its eerie to see the parallels but also makes me somewhat hopeful that society can get its act together, like it did in the world of Star Trek, and make a better future for itself.
Right. In Trek, Earth had Mars missions since the 90s. And even Star Trek Picard (in continuing a ship from the Enterprise credits) outright said (through the mouth of Renee Picard) that NASA had never cancelled that very-real aerospike SSTO shuttle programme from the early-00s. (Which, if it had followed-through, would have been reusable just like SpaceX's vehicles... but also massively-more fuel efficient!)
The fact that Star Trek is so real and meaningful to quite a lot of people that they can't think of it as fiction is annoying, but it's also heartwarming AF.
This episode is one of my DS9 Favorites. Like so many of the best episodes its extremely thought provoking. I find ur take on addressing series continuity conflicts completely acceptable. My take is just as simple. I can sum it up in one word... "Multiverse"
In one of the novels, it goes into the Eugenics Wars. It said that the Eugenics Wars started off as a series of shadow conflicts that grew in intensity until they were full-on global wars. With the Bell Riots, they could stick with the original timeline, but have the time traveling people wind up in another part of the country that was far enough away from the riots to not be directly affected. They could intersperse clips from the episode "Past Tense" playing on TVs in the background, along with talking heads condemning the rioters as violent thugs and praising the police who carried out the slaughter of the rioters as champions of law, order and justice.
We’re lucky. We have the opportunity of learning from the terrible things that lead to the Federation without having to live through them. Hopefully we do.
My cousin, Sarah, guest starred in "Future's End". It was the last episode of Star Trek that I watched with my grandmother before she died. She was so proud of Sarah.
That's my headcanon, too. Trek has some of our history and some unique to it because of a timeline split around WWII: There was a difference in the scientific research into genetics (funding, staffing, equipment, etc.) back when certain people who were into eugenics were in positions of power. Khan and co. were the long term results of that work.
@@myrabeth77The problem is that Trek has a tendency to time travel to "today" and it looks like our timeline rather than an alternate one. You could argue they jumped timelines, but then there's also no consequences if they make changes.
@RadzPrower honestly I'm fond of the whole thing of timeline alterations delaying events. Doesn't even have to be the alterations done on purpose. There are enough small time travel accidents to make the timeline constantly shift and have to self correct.
@@RadzPrower You're actually reinforcing my argument. If the timelines split in the recent past, there's going to be a ton of similarities between the two. And let's be honest, every time Trek visits "today," it always feels just a little off, not quite like our present reality.
THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL. powerful ending. This is what star trek, is never about the setting always about the story. I truly apreciate that you made this, i truly do.
The Eugenics Wars in STAR TREK are not just a one-off thing from Space Seed that again got brought up once more in THE WRATH OF KHAN, but is a very _central_ part of STAR TREK lore. It was mentioned also in an episode of The Original Animated Series (calling it “The _Original_ Animated Series” because now there are two more animated series). It also is key to an episode of ENTERPRISE. Oh - and let’s not forget -- it is very central to Dr. Julian Bashir’s backstory. It is something that came up over and over and over again even in the classic production era -- so no, the Eugenics Wars are _not_ something that we can just never mention again.
Yes, Sophia, that is true _now_ , but Steve's advice is to be taken for *future* historical references. (And if this advice had been taken regarding the story of Khan long ago, it _could_ have been a one-off thing.)
Given the way the homeless are treated in the US and the disparity between rich and poor, "Past Tense" minus the Bell Riots is eerily profectic. You made some really good points, such as I think it's important to realize Star Trek is fiction. When this episode was written then current events shaped it's story. This was also set 30 years into the future. Far enough to seem dream-like, and surely in 30 years no one will be over-analysing this episode!
There's also the point of... Star Trek's history changes all the time, usually through time travel shenanigans. But there's _no reason why the protagonists of whatever series have to be involved in the time travel shenanigans that changed the timeline._ Star Trek is meant to be a galaxy of stories in which we only get to see some. If there are stories happening that we don't see, but that we see the consequences of... that just adds mystery.
I certainly want more people to remember that all the stories we see are just few cubes chipped off and iceberg but in an ice cream float with a tiny umbrella
There are infinite timelines. The most prominent ones we know: The Kelvin Timeline vs The Prime Timeline vs the Mirror Timeline vs vs vs vs THe Timeline we are in.
In universe I like to imagine we're getting highlights from a set of closely related multiverse timelines, which is why something exciting happens every single week unlike boring routine life. In reality, I think basically the same thing, that the premise and characters are archetypes that the writers are exploring with many stories, not all of them consistent with each other
We kind did have our Bell riots with stuff like the Seattle protests and the Chaz, so my ready of reconciling that one is "they happened a bit earlier than we remember"
The 2020 Seattle protests were a disappointment. My friend called it from the outset: "First the BLM people will rightfully protest, but then well meaning white people will take over and try to solve all the problems for BLM". I'm as liberal as they come but white Seattle liberals sometimes can be so painfully clueless.
In Star Trek there is no Star Trek on TV. No one mentions Star Trek if they see Star Trek stuff going on when they go back in time. Thus if you need an in universe explanation, if you really need one, it's a parallel universe to ours that split of some time in 1964 when Gene first came up with the concept.
Similarly, you can tell that the past depicted in Star Trek takes place in an alternate universe because there are no toilets to be found anywhere. Well, there is one, but Riker's transporter-accident 5th cousin is using it and the burrito Chakotay had for lunch is not sitting well right now.
This is always the most obvious way to illustrate the problem. Their world was NEVER our world. No reason to make it line up after the fact. I do like when stories try to take this into account and the “fiction” does appear in the history. They just figure out ways it’s secretly not fiction. (The Interview With a Vampire and Xanth books both do this for examples.) Not vouching for quality, but I still like the concept.
Thanks! Ugh what happens when history catches up with starfleet? I’m glad you’ll give a succinct explanation as opposed to a rattled cage of continuity. Love the work. Wish I could go monthly but my finances are day to day. “Take this please. I believe in you Steve!”
I've been "over" this issue since the first time I've heard Steve express this philosophical approach to the "dilemma", and I've been much happier as a result. This was a nice, more complete, reiteration of this way of thinking.
Thank you indeed. I love Star Trek's message (not just Trek mnay sci-fi series that also warn to dystopian worlds and problems steeming from related to. The issue I have at the moment is that sometimes it seems like people look at dystopian sci-fi and rather than think 'we should avoid that' actually look at like a road map of what they should be doing.
Part of that is class dynamics, that is, the people for whom those dystopian futures are good aren’t us, they are the 1% and 0.1%, but they also have the institutional power. The other part is that, much like how worrying about the nearby ditch when riding your bike often leads to turning into the ditch because that’s where you were looking, if the rest of us only have dystopia to look at we won’t see the other options and just figure it’s the only option and passively accept it
I'm with you, Steve. Star Trek, and science fiction in general, are meant to let us look at current issues through the lens of fiction with a shiny coat of the fantastic! Which reminds me, I need to get make to rewatching DS9. So many great stories about how what it's like to be human. Even if the character is an alien.
While I agree with the general premise that since it's just fiction, we can just let it just be fiction, I think the reason why this is problematic for many fans is because science fiction is meant to be speculative fiction, something that could happen to us if our technology and social trajectory continued (this, by the way, is why Star Wars is fantasy and not science fiction). It breaks the illusion and consequently breaks the hope a little that we could become like society in Star Trek. Overall, though, Steve is right here that it ultimately doesn't matter. Fiction can be inspiring without it needing to be a future possibility in our world. It still even keeps the science fiction element of it. A good example is the book 1984, which is still incredibly meaningful even though the world didn't become what the book described by 1984 or even 40 years later in 2024. Star Trek is no different.
Yeah, _Trek_ especially is supposed to be a model of *our* future if we get our 💩 together. That said, our understanding of science contradicts so much of _Trek_ canon (starting with the galactic barrier) that I think trying to keep the canon as a *literal* prediction / aspiration for our future is just going to generate confusion.
Parts of the world definitely are whats described in 1984. North Korea and Kazakhstan come to mind immediately. But let’s be frank, the US is moving there at an alarming pace as are many other “democracies”
Personally, the difference is that _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ is not a living franchise which continued to establish its history matching ours long after that stopped making sense.
A bunch of times over the last decade I've found myself reacting to certain news stories with "Nineteen Eighty-Four was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual, you lunatics"
This video touches on something for which there are similar ideas: in Star Trek’s in-universe history, was there ever a man born in the 20th century named William Shatner? Would Federation records have any information about a science fiction franchise owned by a defunct earth company called Paramount Pictures? Could a Starfleet officer possibly find an antique Captain Janeway plastic action figure toy from 1997?
Fan service is a menace. People just want memberberries. "Member the Bell Riots?" "Yeah, i love the Bell Riots." "Member Tribbles?" "I member Tribbles." ...
what would need to happen so our timeline goes towards a future where earth is able to form a federation of stars? what could we do to nudge the world in that direction?
Regarding the second question: So many people treat sci-fi in the same bucket as fantasy, but most of the best sci-fi is EXPLICITLY social commentary. Especially Star Trek. They feel as real as they do because the writers take actual issues and set up parallels to allow people to analyze them and look at it without the baggage of who the viewer associates with and allow an outside view on a parallel world to re-evaluate how that moral issue really is. And sometimes, when people have made that realization for themselves and can bring it back home it starts that seed of change where people who have now changed their mind where they felt they had permission to now can see what's happening around them in new light.
6:32 I do love how the creative team of Voyager took an actual ufo sighting of a ufo flying fast across the sky. The VFX team took that footage from the News outlet and color graded it, and placed a cgi model of the USS Voyager flying across the sky
That explains why the subtitles don't match the voiceover, I bet the home-media release didn't have the same rights for all aspects of the broadcast so redubbed the voiceover with similar meaning
I kind of like when SF leans into its... failed futurism, I guess you could call it? Like how Blade Runner 2049 elected to maintain Atari and Pan Am still being big brands as they were in Blade Runner, or how Alien: Isolation used the archaic computer interface from the 70's. I think the problem Trek faces is they've already acknowledged that discrepancy and attempted to justify it, which makes it awkward for writers going forward.
Hmm, that's a good point. You can maintain stylistic/historical divergences that 'date' the origin of a sci-fi universe without making the universe seem less 'plausible'. It may create a sort of feeling of 'quaintness' in the audience if it goes on long enough (50s or earlier sci-fi tends to suffer this most of all, with society being almost unrecognizable outside 'period piece' tropes of a bygone time), but generally it just feels... kind of honest, at least in less severe instances. Battletech has unreasonably heavy, clunky electronics and questionable 80s fashion going with its advanced energy sources and giant robots. Information tech is somehow never that much of a big deal, everything seems focused on the macro-scale technologies rather than the micro-scale ones. The periods of technological regression tend to help gloss over that, though. Most of the 'interesting' periods of the timeline are either in a decline or clawing their way back up out of one. There's still an overarching 'style' that's kind of 'retro', though. Alien and its many imitators actually DRAW SUSPENSE and enhance their feeling of dread from their primitive, somehow mysterious and off-putting 70s-style computer technology and other period inconveniences (and other ways of deliberately avoiding making anything feel effortless for human characters). The world itself is constructed in a way as to feel hostile, mysterious, and difficult, mirroring both the airless harshness of space and the ceaseless uncaring hunger of Big Business, forces this subggenre tends to compare/contrast and personify through its monsters. A good demonstration of this would be to look at or play the video game Duskers (even though the interface there is slightly more advanced). It's not a traditional in-your-face monster horror game, exactly, rather a salvage management game of sorts, but it pulls the same interface/technology tricks to create suspense in a similar setting; nervously fumbling over commands as the situation goes bad, watching the slow-updating blips move on the monitor, hearing the distant bangs, turret gunfire, and alarms, holding your breath awaiting the result as unseen horrible things shuffle about at the edges of your detection and desperate last stands are pitched somewhere else to decide your eventual fate. There seems to be a tension within cyberpunk fiction whether or not to redesign a universe around wireless connectivity being a ubiquitous thing, or ignore it and continue as the classics of the genre (and often previous installments of the franchise, if applicable). There's a certain 'honesty' to finding what works in your aesthetic and accepting it, not abandoning it even when it makes your universe no longer plausible as an evolution of our own. Though both methods can be made to work, of course.
In the early days of the internet, I had read that Star Trek takes place in a universe that closely paralleled our universe. The only difference is that the Trek universe (and it’s parallel universes) became more technologically advanced than us (being shaped by the events that happen in their universe). We are inspired to create a world like in the Trek universe buy creating identical technology and possibly becoming more of a society brought like that in Trek. We may never meet Klingons or Vulcans, but the exploration spurred by the love of a tv show, will advance mankind further past our currently know galaxy. But I agree, it’s just a story and we should not get hung up on the details and just enjoy the story.
In some ways, we are seeing the problems with mental health that Dr Bashir mentioned in this 2 part episode. We are in a mental health crisis and we are dealing with an economic inequality. I sometimes think this is a warning just like books from Ray Bradbury and George Orwell and many other authors. That said, i also feel that people are struggling to differentiate fiction and non-fiction or perception vs reality. We also have people confusing opinions as facts. Great video Steve.
I remember that Voyager episode and what I found slightly distracting was the fact that they did not see a war ravaged world in the aftermath of Khan and his people because, as you said, this was the world of Star Trek, not reality except metaphorically in what the shows tried to say to us. The Strange New Worlds episode was very good even if switching the time of Khan was unnecessary. The best was "Past Tense". Of course it really happened in the sense that it was a metaphor, a substitute, for things that did really happen and are still happening. I think one of the best lines in the history of Star Trek is when Bashir tells a woman of the year 2024 that its not her fault that the world is the way it is and she says, "Yeah. That's what everybody tells themselves, and nothing ever changes." That's a writer and a story telling us we should not be okay with these kinds of injustices and should be fighting to change the world. That's what Star Trek really is.
Star Trek should be considered an aspirational future, not predictive of the *real* future. The whole point of the franchise is about the great things we'll accomplish when we finally get our shit together. No, we didn't have the Bell Riots, but we had something arguably similar in 2020. And, unfortunately, the 2020 riots did not lead to the reforms we desperately needed. They kind of got swept under the rug when Trump lost and Biden pulled out all stops to pretend that Trump never happened. This is actually a great opportunity for future writers of Star Trek to talk about the present via the future. When something similar to the Bell Riots happened in real life, the powers that be did nothing, and we all just kind of moved on. When there was an attempted coup and civil war shortly after, we didn't fix ourselves, we did everything we could to forget. We aggressively refuse to learn in real life. Very different from how things went in Star Trek.
The British sci-fi series "Doctor Who" sorted this out, at least in their second phase (2005 onwards), by making clear that the show takes place on a slightly alternate timeline, similar but not identical to actual history. For instance, it mixes historical British Prime Ministers (Winston Churchill, who actually appears on the show, and Margaret Thatcher, who IIRC doesn't appear -- but is mentioned) with completely fictional ones (Harriet Jones, Harold Saxon -- the latter actually a front for one of the show's main villains). It seems like, the closer we get to the present day (when the show is aired), the further it drifts from history. When the time-travelling Doctor goes to Earth's past, it usually lines up with known history; when he/she travels to the present-day, the general state of society and technology are similar to what we know, but some very important details, names and events are entirely different. And when s/he travels to the future, it's obviously a future that stems from the *show's* version of 2024, rather than the historical version of 2024
Especially when you mix-in past-close-futures such as the 2005 season's visit to 2012, or the classic show's Moon Base, it really becomes a guddle! I like that they just vibe with it all though.
@@BS-vx8dg I mean I don't expect people to maintain lore over decades, but just within their own shows isn't a big ask. Like in TOS they could use the ship to stun entire city blocks, something no-one has ever used again, that's fine. But if you make up a rule for your fictional world and make a big deal about it you don't just get to ignore it three episodes later (beaming through shields).
@@tekkaoz Well, on that matter we can agree. Having a mushroom drive for two seasons and then having that groundbreaking technology disappear from the history books is pretty stupid. But technology is one thing that I don't think Steve was addressing here. He was talking about one issue: What to do when history catches up with the fiction, and I think his prescription was the only way to go.
I think that even more so than other sci fi franchises, many Star Trek fans are invested in the fantasy of Trek being *our* future, and probably because it’s such a good one. You don’t see Mad Max fans worrying about this.
In our watchalong together, I/we spent a fair bit of time comparing aspects of the episode to today (there is a lot of similarity) because though the details themselves aren't important, what it tells us about how we treat people, _is_. There are two very strong messages in the episode that comparing the episode to today show we as a society still have not learned from and need to bear in mind.
Well, if the Bell’s riot not happening startles you, I hope you are preparing yourself for 2063… Because the invention of Warp Drive and first contact with the Vulcans are pretty unlikely to happen. And maybe you should check all the Cocharanes living in Montana and make them having a boy named Zefram, without him, you will be very disappointed in less than 40 years.
I'm good at suspending all disbelief, and just enjoying a good story, and even picking out the moral of a particular story. What I'm not so good at is equating it to real world..and for that I thank you. I never thought of this in terms of the LA riots, and the rest of your video contents here. Thank you for helping me see deeper meanings in the stories I enjoy about Star Trek.
All fiction takes place in parallel universes, as I explained to my kids why the present hasn't turned out like '1984'....who's that at the door? Oh no, it's the Thought Police!
Forever I think of that line from the first issue of "Kingdom Come", the 90s comic by Mark Waid and Alex Ross "My God, the bystanders! They'll be killed! Someone should do something!" 'Indeed." Good video
Honestly, I think it's fine for fiction to not be like real life, as long as it's at least somewhat internally consistent or if you can at least make sense of why it's not.
I honestly always just assumed that there are historical gaps in the time between First Contact and when we are. When people are struggling to survive fallout and everything, records can get lost, destroyed or the like incidentally. They could still have the date of their present known thanks to astronomical observations and positions while still having spotty records from the 20th and 21st century in their timeline.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING IT OUT LOUD!! FINALLY!! LOL.... Spider Man happens in our current time period and no one bats an eye they open their windows and do not see spandex clad people flying around... Star Trek is fiction... and a hopeful fiction... and not an exercise in precognition. Despite the fact reality is unsettlingly creating factors that make us remember pieces of fiction that reflect on those things. And like any good fiction, help us somehow, find the ways to handle them and move society towards a better path. If we dream of a fair future similar in some aspects to what happens in Star Trek, it is not because our lives follow a fictional path, but because we built it.
Oh MAN I need to watch this two-part episode again!!! I'm sure that I'll see MUCH MORE than what I saw, when I last watched it, still as an adult, nearly twenty years ago.
Enterprise was in it's own altered timeline as it was technical before Kirk, but it's timeline started after the First Contact movie as the Borg shpere that crashed in that movie was discovered in Enterprise.
A note about the Bell Riots as depicted in the episode - the DS9 writers didn't anticipate the *smartphone*! Remember the people in the District had no access to the "global communications network", access was mediated by the office overseeing the district, and nobody could tell their stories or look for work even...and the outside really had no idea what was going on inside of the districts. I remember communications/internet access was one of Bell's demands. But no days, a lot of the people INSIDE of the District would have had cheap "Obamaphones" - though a lot of people just LOST access to highspeed internet and cell service, though they could still use their devices for wifi...and I could activist groups dropping in cell phones and setting up wifi networks just over the districts borders. I suppose we could retcon things to say that the districts had cellphone and wifi jamming...for some reason.
I couldn't agree more with you Steve. Let your fiction be just that, fiction. The people who created Star Trek, in the 1960's, never dreamed that Star Trek would still be around 30 years later in the 1990's; or that Star Trek would still be making content over 50 years later in the 2000's or the 2020's. Star Trek has always been an ongoing commentary of we the people in whatever decade these shows are being made. Star Trek has always used its science fiction premise to comment on today's problems. It is up to us now, here in the present, to make the future a better one to live in.
You mention Holly Hunter’s character bringing up historical things in Trek, actually that’s the one character and show where bringing up past events in Trek does make sense given it is a story about young cadets who are learning things about themselves and their world.
Personally, I think an episode where one of the characters in Starfleet Academy is doing a report on the Bell Riots could be interesting. Like, I kinda want to see how someone in the 24th century sees them and such, and how they compare the Bell Riots to the Rodney King riots and other similar events in history. There's no need to change the timeline of them, like you said, but I do believe that having the occasional reference to them can be a good thing.
my own personal head If there is already 3 universes in star trek known original alternate And Kelvin so why can't our own universe Just be one in the multiverse that coincidentally enough Has some influence over the others
I'm with you here. and if someone INSISTS on this kind of thing? I like Futurama's solution - "well we don't really know much about that time period, the date was probably only a guess anyway"
Quick correction, the DS9 crew didn't prevent the Bell riots- but with Bell's premature death, there was no convenient martyr for society to coalesce around and make the needed changes to pave way for the Federation. Instead, it was just another burst of violence that amounted to nothing.
I didn't realize this was a thing people worried about...of course it's fiction. It's not our timeline. It's Star Trek's. *I'm so confused as to why this is a thing.* "Multiverse did it" has been explaining this stuff forever.
Considering one of the reasons the Bell Riots occurred was due to lack of good paying jobs and adequate and affordable housing, we are closer to that destiny in 2024 than we were to the Eugenics Wars in the 90's. But one of the biggest issues with NuTrek is most of it is prequels looking back, while OG Trek was about looking forward and advancing the time line with almost each new series.
DS9 writer Robert Hewett Wolfe has suggested folks who are able make donations "in memory of Gabriel Bell" to local charities that help hungry or unhoused people. Thought I'd pass along the idea, I think it's a good one.
This merits more attention!
Pin this comment!
@@Robert_Douglass Yes, Steve, please pin this comment!
Become the change you wish to see in the world
I love this! Make it so!
So here in San Francisco, a group of us like minded Star Trek fans met at Levi Plaza to commemorate Sisko, I mean Gabriel Bell and his message. We collected support bags for unhouse people.
That's actually pretty neat.
if u real good job bro
Just realised I don't know Sisko's first name.
@@nataschavisser573 Benjamin!
I live in SF! Where can I learn about these events?
The real Bell Riots are the indignant rage that festers within us along the way.
😂❤
Dont let your dreams be dreams
... You know it's based on the bloody Chinese Communist Revolution and it's many genocides following?
It's Communism in Space... That's all Start Trek is.
Chronologically, this episode came out in the "golden era" of CCP foreign influence campaigns, producers are NOW talking about it openly so you can hear them talk about it from various lenses
But it's essentially airbrushing bloody revolutions as being necessary for a communist utopia, and don't worry that the Utopia only exists on TV 😂😂
It does sting that the ending of "Past Tense" is Bashir asking, "SIr, there's one thing I don't understand. How could they let things get so bad?" and Sisko answering. "That's a good question, I wish I had an answer..." He may has well as looked at the camera and said, "Wake up people, you got time to prevent this!"
And now here we are, and in some ways, the world is (arguably) worse than the one presented in the show... and unfortunately, I doubt there will be any "Bell riots" to help fix it.
I recently binged old Trek and I answered back to Sisko “We elected Trump.”
@mikejankowski6321
Trombone is the symptom of the larger problems.
the old world is dying, the new world cannot be born.
we have nothing but to live in the time of monsters
Or if they _do_ happen the consequences will be mixed at best
On the bright side we don't have walled off sanctuary districts... yet.
There could in theory be "Bell Riots" but they wouldn't fix anything in this current timeline. The idealism of Star-Trek does not pan out in the real world. Most people don't care about the plight of the poor and never have. In 135BC the poor and enslaved people rose up against the Roman elites. That was 2159 years ago. They rioted for 3 years straight and were eventually put down. They rose up again under Sparticus in 73BC and that too was put down. It didn't lead to a larger revolution against the system because the majority of the population sided with the rich. This same process was repeated again and again throughout history. There was a huge peasant revolt in 1381 that almost toppled the King of Medieval England. The people rallied around the King and put down the peasant revolt.
I've never cared about the fact Star Trek is fiction, so doesn't have to match real life.
But they got damn close to the bullseye with the Bell Riots.
The only real difference between Trek and reality in this context is that we aren't out burning shit down. All the societal failures that led to the riots exist.
same here like it was always a what if that ran parallel to the story made by people in the 60s and later 80s and 90s about a what if, something I feel like people miss, the big strokes could still happened or line up to events, but that was also the point, the classic trek's events were mostly made around the point of people seeing patterns and potential things that could happen and classic scifi tropes. The series man purpose after a while was to call out things and get you to ask questions
@@dahlinthefiend I dunno, there was a lot of cities with a lot of fire going on.
The major thing Star Trek DS9 writers didn't count on was: cell phones.
Nothing intense like the Bell Riots in real life (yet) because everyone is staring into their cell phones pacified by the never-ending scroll.
Mirror-Universe Steve is running an alternate history channel asking 'What if the Bell Riots Never Happened?' without a beard and I can't handle that.
.... okay but part of me wants to see that now, or at least read the script XD
He's also a lot hotter in the mirror universe weirdly enough.
I could
Guys we still have time for the Irish reunification of 2024
😂
Guess what there's been talk about in Ireland.
:3 Still hoping.
Star Trek 4 went a long way towards saving the humpbacks from extinction, with amazing real world results of increasing public knowledge of their plight. Wouldn't it be amazing if Star Trek guilted the Irish into finally resolving their differences with the Crown? Or if Charles stopped being a putz with a 19th-century colonialist attitude and released Northern Ireland from the crowns control? Imagine that
Charles III. Balls in your court...
Funny thing is, they're actually kinda talking about it in Ireland...
The riots may not have happened, but the dystopian future of the episode isn't too far off.
They happened just on the wrong continent.
@@Syncrotron9001 but caused by the right one
Yeah, especially if the likes of Donald Trump get their way
I am born and raised in San Francisco and it's so eerie how similar those episodes of DS9 are to the San Francisco of today. Having a district solely for low-income and homeless folks is how SF is currently designed. The entire lower east side, the places I grew up in, and some areas in downtown are filled with low-income folk yet our government and "regular folk" seem to either turn a blind eye or at worst villainize us. Especially right now in the 2020s when the pandemic saw us have a surge of low-income and homeless folk in addition to the George Floyd protests the Bell Riots episodes is just super eerie to me in both a good and a bad way.
San Francisco isn't the only city with a stark contrast of haves and have-nots. Unfortunately, San Francisco is often a microcosm of our very broken system of allowing the super-wealthy to exist. I have no problem with some accumulation of wealth, but the fact of billionaires at all is an affront to reasonable taxation and care for those less able to accumulate such obscene wealth. Society has no need for billionaires, but we do need equitable taxation and aid to those in need of assistance. You know, just like present-day Europe. If only there was some system that existed, like Europe, that we could point to, like Europe, or we could use as an example, like Europe. Oh well. One day we'll have a template we can follow.
That really resonates with me because I was thinking the riots still happened just the names changed. I grew up in Baltimore City it's annexed and isolated from the surrounding county. We pay 2.25 times the property tax , while the county exports their "problem" people to us. They will NIMBY the heck out of alcohol and drug treatment centers and we don't. I really hope we will have a Federation future🖖🏾
@@uvp5000🫡🫡🫡
That is actually one of the freaky things about the episode. Right after shooting for that episode wrapped SF announced their plans to do that and the writers/cast/crew were all WTF.
@@nobodyimportant2470 Despite some progressive policies and practices, the Gold Rush cemented San Francisco as being primarily about money, money, and more money. Money often encourages corruption and San Francisco spanned down the peninsula a great distance. Finally, in an attempt to reign in corruption, the City & County of San Francisco was condensed to its current boundaries. Unfortunately, like many major cities, San Francisco suffers from incestuous politics. Just like the U.S., San Francisco also has one of the best governments money can buy.
Steve, thank-you for continuing to remind us that Trek is about us, here and now, trying to make the world a better place through storytelling.
Well said
Just had a watch party with some Trekkies of this episode and we had a two-hour long discussion about homelessness and social inequalities. I shared my own experience of being homeless. This episode really hits home for me now.
I wonder how, in 1995, the writers and actors involved would feel had they known their episode would be debated and discussed thirty years later.
Since TOS was still being debated and discussed in 1995, I doubt it would have surprised them.
I believe in interviews they'd said they'd hoped it'd be remembered as ridiculously pessimistic, so they're kind of sad they're being called prophetic for simply mirroring the situation of the early-90s.
I wonder how they would have reacted to the Capitol incident in January 6th 2021.
And considering it took a good few years for that one TNG episode that dealt with the legitimacy of terrorism or guerilla warfare to a means of liberation, to not be banned in the UK, I have a feeling they knew they were touching something
I prefer the Conan O'Brien solution to this problem. Back in the 90s, on his show, they did a segment called "In the Year 2000" where everyone wore weird futuristic collars and shone flashlights under their chins, and then made ridiculous predictions about what would happen in the far-off year 2000. Then came the 21st century, and rather than modify their shtick to be, say, the year 3000, they kept prognosticating what amazing technological wizardry they thought might happen in the year 2000 even though it was already several years in the past. Because it's just more hilarious that way. Mr. T trying not to bust out laughing is proof that this is the correct approach.
This could be Mandela effect, but I seem to remember them _breifly_ changing it to "In the Year 3000" before reverting to "2000" when they realized it was funnier that way.
@@zorilla0 Pretty sure they continued with 2000 for the whole of the Late Night run, but when Conan briefly had the Tonight Show, they switched it to 3000. So not until 2009 did they change it. The thinking probably was, there's gonna be a whole new audience for Conan in the Tonight Show, and they're not gonna get the long running joke without context, so gotta change it.
@@mvprime8 Makes you wonder what else from that show may have needed an explanation lol
I think one reason the Bell riots seem relevant to new star trek is that the commentary Past Tense is making is actually more relevant today than it was in 1995. I think it's a theme of "we need to fix this shit to create a future we can be proud of" that should be revisited.
When they happened is less important.
"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction -- its essence -- has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all." -Asimov
Hey Steve, I'm checking in on the ground here in San Francisco.
I walked over to Sanctuary District today and the only thing noticeably different were a bunch of confused-looking nerds milling about dejectedly.
I'll keep you posted.
On the ground update:
The nerds were starting to become increasingly agitated and nonviolent, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
Jumping up and down and gesturing down the street, I shouted "Hey!, It's Gary 7! And he's with Guinan! Go get him!"
The nerds took the bait. With a mighty roar they rushed toward Van Ness Avenue.
Sadly, as the thundering herd washed over the busy thoroughfare, one of the nerds was struck by a truck. As he lay dying, he forced his mangled fingers into a Vulcan salute, sputtered, "I do not have, and have never had, an IRL friend", and promptly died.
I personally figure this is an "Edith Keeler Must Die!" situation, so I don't have to feel guilty about my responsibility for this. I'm just preserving the timeline, yo. Don't all thank me at once.
@@steveng.clinard1766You are truly brave. Thank you for your service!
Another update from San Francisco.
After the unfortunate, but necessary, Edith Keeler incident, the nerds have been herded into the Civic Center. Things were beginning to calm down and it appeared that the nerds were about to begin to disperse, when someone (and I'm not saying it was me) shouted "Justice for Tuvix!". Well, that certainly riled the crowd, and now the nerds have assembled into factions, shouting taunts and preparing for pitched battle.
Isolated fist-fights are breaking out as erstwhile allies fracture into sub-factions: treckies against treckers, alternative timeline Discovery vesus prime timeliners, TAS canon versus non-canon...
Oh the Humanity!
@@steveng.clinard1766 the unfortunate, but necessary, Edith Keeler incident 😂 thank you, I love this
A new dawn rises in the City By The Bay. Although the Civic Center Plaza is stained red with the blood of trekies and treckers alike, life must go on.
The Monday Farmer's Market vendors have cleared the plaza of the bodies, loading the living and dead alike onto their trucks to unceremoniously dump them a few blocks away in the Tenderloin.
Mayor London Breed is expected to give a press conference later today. Not about the Nerd Riot; that kind of shit happens all the time around here. No biggie. Just being thorough, in case you give a shit about Mayor London Breed press conferences. I certainly don't.
Signing off.
It's quite simple Star Trek became a completely alternate timeline after Kirk stole a whale in 1986. I mean if accidentally killing a butterfly can cause history to change what do you think whalenapping would do to it. Whales are much bigger then butterflies.
I always used to fix those problems by thinking “Spock would have figured that out”.
@@jjohnson796 He did fix things though. I mean think about what the divergence is, he prevented the eugenics wars in our timeline, by stealing that whale. Sure he only delayed them in his own but we at least should be grateful for surviving the 90s.
@@FakeSchrodingersCat maybe Spock realized they weren’t time traveling but dimension hopping into diff timelines?
“Dude, do you know how worried I was? You disappeared in a vortex while I was in charge. For all I knew, you were dead or stuck in a dystopian San Francisco in the middle of a riot!”
"If you're wondering how they eat and sleep,
And other science facts,
Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show
I should really just relax'"
This plays over and over in my brain whenever Steve makes videos addressing such things for fans who seem unable to separate certain occurrences.
Why you gotta judge how Trek fans do their fanning? Ya sound like Shatner with his “Get a life!” …I’m just sayin’.
"Oh, Mystery Science Theater Three-Thousaaaaaand!!! Twang!!!!"
Lol, perfectly said. Now I have some DVDs to did out 😂
@@MotherOfOwlbears Why do that when there are a whole bunch of MST3K episodes available for free on RUclips? I saw "Mitchell" Just the other day.
Also the show kinda lives on in the form of Rifftrax! The only way I got through all of the Twilight movies was with Rifftrax commentary lol. Turn that dumpster fire into a comedy!
We know for a fact that the timeline of Discovery differs greatly from our own, because in Discovery Musk is (still) revered on the same level as the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane.
But, Steve... my neighbor's last name is "Bell", and the family got stinking drunk last night and are at each other's throats today over things said in a drunken stupor. Trust me, it's a riot over there... a Bell riot. I don't expect it to resolve itself for at least a day or two. Star Trek is good to go!
Number 1 priority: We need to start making those clocks with the Red numbers that show the date and temperature in Celsius.
Most people have a widget on their phones that does just that, but it would be pretty nice to have one of those clocks for my living room.
Displaying the date in Celsius is *so* hot right now.
@@RhetoricaRhamnusiaWait, is this what everybody means when they talk about the "Kelvin timeline?"
My bedside alarm clock has it already!
How do we know Celsius won't be the default (and therefore assumed) unit in the 24th century, making the "C" redundant?
I took your advice and watched those two episodes, and realized we are now standing at the very crossroads that could lead to the situations they depicted. With November in mind, all I could think as the second episode ended was, "Please don't be prophetic. Please by all that's holy, don't be prophetic."
well, just remember that if you want progress, just voting for the lesser evil is the least you can do.
A third (or fourth) option: we’re all just characters in Riker’s alternate history holo-novel.
(Yeah, I’ll show myself out)
How you gonna do that if you can't summon the Arch? Or are you secretly Moriarty?
slap, slap, slap
It is all a dream (Dallas).
It is a machine-induced reality (Total Recall).
@@mikejankowski6321 It's all Dr. Bob Hartley's dream.
@@mikejankowski6321 We’re actually dead and in purgatory (Lost)
Here before the bell riots get covered by the news
Everyone's talking about it now and its great! Well, except for Europeans, its illegal there now.
I'm eagerly awaiting the appearance of Kellyanne Conway on Fox to talk about the Democratic-run slaughter of the peaceful protesters in the Bell Riots.
@MonkeyJedi99 I mean, democrats are actually evil so that is entirely plausible. Although with Jedi in your name you probably don't think that is so.
I am a story driven canon fan; I love the way the Trek "history" has evolved and I'm not a fan of how some things have been changed.
However, I never believed for a second that Trek was OUR history, that we are simply looking at how our world was going to turn out. Because if you believe that Trek is the future of our world, then you must believe: dinosaurs escaped Earth 65 millions years ago and are currently exploring the galaxy; some Phoenician soldier has been just about every famous person you've ever heard of; the Ancient Greeks, the Egyptians and the various Mesoamerican cultures were all founded by space aliens; and several Vulcans are currently living on the planet.
Yeah. I mostly treat stuff like "the Bell Riots from Star Trek started today" to be fun trivia and an excuse to talk about one of my favorite shows.
I knew it! Aliens are here!!!
What are you talking about, all of that really happened.
Having interacted with my neighbors only a handful of times despite trying to be nice, I’m convinced there are indeed several Vulcans on this planet, and they live in the house next to me.
Those joyless creatures have an in ground pool they keep empty because “there is no way to justify the expense in maintaining it”
@@soulman4292- Indeed, that would not be logical.
What should we, the audience, do when life catches up to Star Trek? Huh... I dunno...
*lights molotov cocktail*
I guess we'll have to figure something out.
*winds up to throw*
😂
Now THAT'S how you resolve a paradox!
“Star Trek is fiction.”
This is a bold statement that will piss alot of fans off.
Too many fans treat Star Trek the same way people treat religious text, my dad (rip) being one of them.
Hey if people get to treat the Bible like that…
Steve’s channel has been doing really well and I’m proud he’s receiving the recognition he deserves. Keep up the good work, Steve
When this came out, it was a cautionary tale in the optimism of the 90s. I could watch it comfortably and think but not worry. Even in light of the LA Riots, I felt like we were already doing better and moving in a better direction.
Then after 2008, it became a bit more uncomfortable. American society wasn't as stable as I thought, and 911 had turned us a lot more authoritarian than I hoped. Then when the term 'sanctuary cities' became a GOP talking point and Trump was literally saying he'd cut them off from federal aid and ship the 'illegals' there, I couldn't watch the episodes anymore because it was no longer an escape from my real life as a disabled person. We came scarily close to seeing those conditions become real if he'd gotten a second term.
Even after Trump has left office, I tried to watch again and could only do it if it played while I was doing other chores more or less in another room.
Goes to show how sometimes writers get things right in ways they never wanted to.
I just started watching Star trek with my girlfriend (she never grew up with Star Trek) and we just watched space seed and we kind of laughed at them saying the 1990s. We joked that the boy band wars of the 90s got blown out of proportion in recorded history
LOL, there's still time to bring Justin Timberlake to trial for his many crimes against humanity
The fun part is reading a report by a student that refers to the movie 'Matrix' as being from the late 1900s.
Oh God, this just makes too much sense. Imagine records of the time are destroyed, save for _Weird,_ the Al Yankovic "biopic," and Madonna goes down in history as one of the great warlords of our era.
@@GSBarlev And the time pre-Madonna is referred to as 'prima donna'?
Excellent commentary. I rewatched that episode and was telling myself the same thing. The Bell Riots arent happening now but many of the things it represents are indeed happening. Its eerie to see the parallels but also makes me somewhat hopeful that society can get its act together, like it did in the world of Star Trek, and make a better future for itself.
For me I assume that Star Trek is set in an alternate universe in which space exploration wasn't largely abandoned after the original Apollo missions.
If they were explicit about that, the discrepancy wouldn’t bother me so much.
Right. In Trek, Earth had Mars missions since the 90s. And even Star Trek Picard (in continuing a ship from the Enterprise credits) outright said (through the mouth of Renee Picard) that NASA had never cancelled that very-real aerospike SSTO shuttle programme from the early-00s.
(Which, if it had followed-through, would have been reusable just like SpaceX's vehicles... but also massively-more fuel efficient!)
The point of Star Trek is that there's hope for a better future, please don't take that away with alternate timelines.
@@Illersvansen nobody is taking that away from you. Its just my own personal head-canon. You believe whatever you want to beiieve.
Star Trek exists in a timeline without Star Trek itself existing, which is why everything gets even worse
i can t wait for "triple tribulation" where pike crew travel in time to when sisko and crew travel to tos era "trouble with tribble".
The fact that Star Trek is so real and meaningful to quite a lot of people that they can't think of it as fiction is annoying, but it's also heartwarming AF.
I guess the social dynamics are not fiction, just the scenery etc.
This episode is one of my DS9 Favorites. Like so many of the best episodes its extremely thought provoking.
I find ur take on addressing series continuity conflicts completely acceptable.
My take is just as simple. I can sum it up in one word... "Multiverse"
In one of the novels, it goes into the Eugenics Wars. It said that the Eugenics Wars started off as a series of shadow conflicts that grew in intensity until they were full-on global wars.
With the Bell Riots, they could stick with the original timeline, but have the time traveling people wind up in another part of the country that was far enough away from the riots to not be directly affected. They could intersperse clips from the episode "Past Tense" playing on TVs in the background, along with talking heads condemning the rioters as violent thugs and praising the police who carried out the slaughter of the rioters as champions of law, order and justice.
We’re lucky. We have the opportunity of learning from the terrible things that lead to the Federation without having to live through them. Hopefully we do.
It is 2024-09-02 at 12:10 am EST as I watch this. I have hope for the future. Faith. Manages.
You've got faith of the heart?
based
My cousin, Sarah, guest starred in "Future's End". It was the last episode of Star Trek that I watched with my grandmother before she died. She was so proud of Sarah.
Diverging timelines. That's how the Fallout series explains being in a version of the world where the atomic age never ended.
That's my headcanon, too. Trek has some of our history and some unique to it because of a timeline split around WWII: There was a difference in the scientific research into genetics (funding, staffing, equipment, etc.) back when certain people who were into eugenics were in positions of power. Khan and co. were the long term results of that work.
@@myrabeth77The problem is that Trek has a tendency to time travel to "today" and it looks like our timeline rather than an alternate one. You could argue they jumped timelines, but then there's also no consequences if they make changes.
@RadzPrower honestly I'm fond of the whole thing of timeline alterations delaying events. Doesn't even have to be the alterations done on purpose. There are enough small time travel accidents to make the timeline constantly shift and have to self correct.
Yes this! The only sane way to deal with all this without time travel shenanigans.
@@RadzPrower You're actually reinforcing my argument. If the timelines split in the recent past, there's going to be a ton of similarities between the two. And let's be honest, every time Trek visits "today," it always feels just a little off, not quite like our present reality.
THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL. powerful ending. This is what star trek, is never about the setting always about the story. I truly apreciate that you made this, i truly do.
I watched the 2 parter tonight. I always loved Star Trek's ability to deal with social issues.
Thanks!
The Eugenics Wars in STAR TREK are not just a one-off thing from Space Seed that again got brought up once more in THE WRATH OF KHAN, but is a very _central_ part of STAR TREK lore. It was mentioned also in an episode of The Original Animated Series (calling it “The _Original_ Animated Series” because now there are two more animated series). It also is key to an episode of ENTERPRISE. Oh - and let’s not forget -- it is very central to Dr. Julian Bashir’s backstory. It is something that came up over and over and over again even in the classic production era -- so no, the Eugenics Wars are _not_ something that we can just never mention again.
Yes, Sophia, that is true _now_ , but Steve's advice is to be taken for *future* historical references. (And if this advice had been taken regarding the story of Khan long ago, it _could_ have been a one-off thing.)
I’m realizing that we’re closer in time to Zephram Cochrane’s Warp flight and First Contact than we are from the Premier of The Original Series
Given the way the homeless are treated in the US and the disparity between rich and poor, "Past Tense" minus the Bell Riots is eerily profectic.
You made some really good points, such as I think it's important to realize Star Trek is fiction. When this episode was written then current events shaped it's story.
This was also set 30 years into the future. Far enough to seem dream-like, and surely in 30 years no one will be over-analysing this episode!
Your last point is very much like what happened with Blade Runner.
There's also the point of... Star Trek's history changes all the time, usually through time travel shenanigans. But there's _no reason why the protagonists of whatever series have to be involved in the time travel shenanigans that changed the timeline._ Star Trek is meant to be a galaxy of stories in which we only get to see some. If there are stories happening that we don't see, but that we see the consequences of... that just adds mystery.
I certainly want more people to remember that all the stories we see are just few cubes chipped off and iceberg but in an ice cream float with a tiny umbrella
Anytime I read, play or watch fictional content an essential component is the suspension of disbelief
There are infinite timelines. The most prominent ones we know: The Kelvin Timeline vs The Prime Timeline vs the Mirror Timeline vs vs vs vs THe Timeline we are in.
The problem is that they keep trying to depict our timeline as being identical to Prime’s, even after it shouldn’t be anymore.
In universe I like to imagine we're getting highlights from a set of closely related multiverse timelines, which is why something exciting happens every single week unlike boring routine life.
In reality, I think basically the same thing, that the premise and characters are archetypes that the writers are exploring with many stories, not all of them consistent with each other
We kind did have our Bell riots with stuff like the Seattle protests and the Chaz, so my ready of reconciling that one is "they happened a bit earlier than we remember"
The 2020 Seattle protests were a disappointment. My friend called it from the outset: "First the BLM people will rightfully protest, but then well meaning white people will take over and try to solve all the problems for BLM". I'm as liberal as they come but white Seattle liberals sometimes can be so painfully clueless.
In Star Trek there is no Star Trek on TV. No one mentions Star Trek if they see Star Trek stuff going on when they go back in time. Thus if you need an in universe explanation, if you really need one, it's a parallel universe to ours that split of some time in 1964 when Gene first came up with the concept.
Similarly, you can tell that the past depicted in Star Trek takes place in an alternate universe because there are no toilets to be found anywhere. Well, there is one, but Riker's transporter-accident 5th cousin is using it and the burrito Chakotay had for lunch is not sitting well right now.
This is always the most obvious way to illustrate the problem. Their world was NEVER our world. No reason to make it line up after the fact.
I do like when stories try to take this into account and the “fiction” does appear in the history. They just figure out ways it’s secretly not fiction. (The Interview With a Vampire and Xanth books both do this for examples.) Not vouching for quality, but I still like the concept.
Thanks! Ugh what happens when history catches up with starfleet? I’m glad you’ll give a succinct explanation as opposed to a rattled cage of continuity. Love the work. Wish I could go monthly but my finances are day to day. “Take this please. I believe in you Steve!”
I've been "over" this issue since the first time I've heard Steve express this philosophical approach to the "dilemma", and I've been much happier as a result. This was a nice, more complete, reiteration of this way of thinking.
Thank you indeed. I love Star Trek's message (not just Trek mnay sci-fi series that also warn to dystopian worlds and problems steeming from related to. The issue I have at the moment is that sometimes it seems like people look at dystopian sci-fi and rather than think 'we should avoid that' actually look at like a road map of what they should be doing.
Part of that is class dynamics, that is, the people for whom those dystopian futures are good aren’t us, they are the 1% and 0.1%, but they also have the institutional power. The other part is that, much like how worrying about the nearby ditch when riding your bike often leads to turning into the ditch because that’s where you were looking, if the rest of us only have dystopia to look at we won’t see the other options and just figure it’s the only option and passively accept it
I'm with you, Steve. Star Trek, and science fiction in general, are meant to let us look at current issues through the lens of fiction with a shiny coat of the fantastic! Which reminds me, I need to get make to rewatching DS9. So many great stories about how what it's like to be human. Even if the character is an alien.
I hope you will make a part 2 of this video in april 2065, to talk about the missing first contact.
It's a separate different universe outside of ours. It's history is different. Nuff said.
we should have our own bell "riots" and do a big startrek meetup
While I agree with the general premise that since it's just fiction, we can just let it just be fiction, I think the reason why this is problematic for many fans is because science fiction is meant to be speculative fiction, something that could happen to us if our technology and social trajectory continued (this, by the way, is why Star Wars is fantasy and not science fiction). It breaks the illusion and consequently breaks the hope a little that we could become like society in Star Trek. Overall, though, Steve is right here that it ultimately doesn't matter. Fiction can be inspiring without it needing to be a future possibility in our world. It still even keeps the science fiction element of it. A good example is the book 1984, which is still incredibly meaningful even though the world didn't become what the book described by 1984 or even 40 years later in 2024. Star Trek is no different.
Yeah, _Trek_ especially is supposed to be a model of *our* future if we get our 💩 together.
That said, our understanding of science contradicts so much of _Trek_ canon (starting with the galactic barrier) that I think trying to keep the canon as a *literal* prediction / aspiration for our future is just going to generate confusion.
Parts of the world definitely are whats described in 1984. North Korea and Kazakhstan come to mind immediately. But let’s be frank, the US is moving there at an alarming pace as are many other “democracies”
Personally, the difference is that _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ is not a living franchise which continued to establish its history matching ours long after that stopped making sense.
A bunch of times over the last decade I've found myself reacting to certain news stories with "Nineteen Eighty-Four was a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual, you lunatics"
This video touches on something for which there are similar ideas: in Star Trek’s in-universe history, was there ever a man born in the 20th century named William Shatner? Would Federation records have any information about a science fiction franchise owned by a defunct earth company called Paramount Pictures? Could a Starfleet officer possibly find an antique Captain Janeway plastic action figure toy from 1997?
Fan service is a menace. People just want memberberries.
"Member the Bell Riots?"
"Yeah, i love the Bell Riots."
"Member Tribbles?"
"I member Tribbles."
...
Oh I membe
Pepperidge Farms 'members
TBH I think the main reason we hate it not lining up is the fact that we desire to have our future be the Star Trek future
what would need to happen so our timeline goes towards a future where earth is able to form a federation of stars? what could we do to nudge the world in that direction?
Regarding the second question: So many people treat sci-fi in the same bucket as fantasy, but most of the best sci-fi is EXPLICITLY social commentary. Especially Star Trek. They feel as real as they do because the writers take actual issues and set up parallels to allow people to analyze them and look at it without the baggage of who the viewer associates with and allow an outside view on a parallel world to re-evaluate how that moral issue really is. And sometimes, when people have made that realization for themselves and can bring it back home it starts that seed of change where people who have now changed their mind where they felt they had permission to now can see what's happening around them in new light.
6:32 I do love how the creative team of Voyager took an actual ufo sighting of a ufo flying fast across the sky.
The VFX team took that footage from the News outlet and color graded it, and placed a cgi model of the USS Voyager flying across the sky
That explains why the subtitles don't match the voiceover, I bet the home-media release didn't have the same rights for all aspects of the broadcast so redubbed the voiceover with similar meaning
I kind of like when SF leans into its... failed futurism, I guess you could call it? Like how Blade Runner 2049 elected to maintain Atari and Pan Am still being big brands as they were in Blade Runner, or how Alien: Isolation used the archaic computer interface from the 70's. I think the problem Trek faces is they've already acknowledged that discrepancy and attempted to justify it, which makes it awkward for writers going forward.
Hmm, that's a good point. You can maintain stylistic/historical divergences that 'date' the origin of a sci-fi universe without making the universe seem less 'plausible'. It may create a sort of feeling of 'quaintness' in the audience if it goes on long enough (50s or earlier sci-fi tends to suffer this most of all, with society being almost unrecognizable outside 'period piece' tropes of a bygone time), but generally it just feels... kind of honest, at least in less severe instances.
Battletech has unreasonably heavy, clunky electronics and questionable 80s fashion going with its advanced energy sources and giant robots. Information tech is somehow never that much of a big deal, everything seems focused on the macro-scale technologies rather than the micro-scale ones. The periods of technological regression tend to help gloss over that, though. Most of the 'interesting' periods of the timeline are either in a decline or clawing their way back up out of one. There's still an overarching 'style' that's kind of 'retro', though.
Alien and its many imitators actually DRAW SUSPENSE and enhance their feeling of dread from their primitive, somehow mysterious and off-putting 70s-style computer technology and other period inconveniences (and other ways of deliberately avoiding making anything feel effortless for human characters). The world itself is constructed in a way as to feel hostile, mysterious, and difficult, mirroring both the airless harshness of space and the ceaseless uncaring hunger of Big Business, forces this subggenre tends to compare/contrast and personify through its monsters.
A good demonstration of this would be to look at or play the video game Duskers (even though the interface there is slightly more advanced). It's not a traditional in-your-face monster horror game, exactly, rather a salvage management game of sorts, but it pulls the same interface/technology tricks to create suspense in a similar setting; nervously fumbling over commands as the situation goes bad, watching the slow-updating blips move on the monitor, hearing the distant bangs, turret gunfire, and alarms, holding your breath awaiting the result as unseen horrible things shuffle about at the edges of your detection and desperate last stands are pitched somewhere else to decide your eventual fate.
There seems to be a tension within cyberpunk fiction whether or not to redesign a universe around wireless connectivity being a ubiquitous thing, or ignore it and continue as the classics of the genre (and often previous installments of the franchise, if applicable).
There's a certain 'honesty' to finding what works in your aesthetic and accepting it, not abandoning it even when it makes your universe no longer plausible as an evolution of our own. Though both methods can be made to work, of course.
Great Video, thank you!
In the early days of the internet, I had read that Star Trek takes place in a universe that closely paralleled our universe. The only difference is that the Trek universe (and it’s parallel universes) became more technologically advanced than us (being shaped by the events that happen in their universe). We are inspired to create a world like in the Trek universe buy creating identical technology and possibly becoming more of a society brought like that in Trek. We may never meet Klingons or Vulcans, but the exploration spurred by the love of a tv show, will advance mankind further past our currently know galaxy. But I agree, it’s just a story and we should not get hung up on the details and just enjoy the story.
In some ways, we are seeing the problems with mental health that Dr Bashir mentioned in this 2 part episode. We are in a mental health crisis and we are dealing with an economic inequality. I sometimes think this is a warning just like books from Ray Bradbury and George Orwell and many other authors.
That said, i also feel that people are struggling to differentiate fiction and non-fiction or perception vs reality. We also have people confusing opinions as facts.
Great video Steve.
I remember that Voyager episode and what I found slightly distracting was the fact that they did not see a war ravaged world in the aftermath of Khan and his people because, as you said, this was the world of Star Trek, not reality except metaphorically in what the shows tried to say to us. The Strange New Worlds episode was very good even if switching the time of Khan was unnecessary. The best was "Past Tense". Of course it really happened in the sense that it was a metaphor, a substitute, for things that did really happen and are still happening. I think one of the best lines in the history of Star Trek is when Bashir tells a woman of the year 2024 that its not her fault that the world is the way it is and she says, "Yeah. That's what everybody tells themselves, and nothing ever changes." That's a writer and a story telling us we should not be okay with these kinds of injustices and should be fighting to change the world. That's what Star Trek really is.
0:44 It's cute they thought we'd be using Celsius by now.
Star Trek should be considered an aspirational future, not predictive of the *real* future. The whole point of the franchise is about the great things we'll accomplish when we finally get our shit together.
No, we didn't have the Bell Riots, but we had something arguably similar in 2020. And, unfortunately, the 2020 riots did not lead to the reforms we desperately needed. They kind of got swept under the rug when Trump lost and Biden pulled out all stops to pretend that Trump never happened.
This is actually a great opportunity for future writers of Star Trek to talk about the present via the future. When something similar to the Bell Riots happened in real life, the powers that be did nothing, and we all just kind of moved on. When there was an attempted coup and civil war shortly after, we didn't fix ourselves, we did everything we could to forget. We aggressively refuse to learn in real life. Very different from how things went in Star Trek.
The British sci-fi series "Doctor Who" sorted this out, at least in their second phase (2005 onwards), by making clear that the show takes place on a slightly alternate timeline, similar but not identical to actual history. For instance, it mixes historical British Prime Ministers (Winston Churchill, who actually appears on the show, and Margaret Thatcher, who IIRC doesn't appear -- but is mentioned) with completely fictional ones (Harriet Jones, Harold Saxon -- the latter actually a front for one of the show's main villains). It seems like, the closer we get to the present day (when the show is aired), the further it drifts from history. When the time-travelling Doctor goes to Earth's past, it usually lines up with known history; when he/she travels to the present-day, the general state of society and technology are similar to what we know, but some very important details, names and events are entirely different. And when s/he travels to the future, it's obviously a future that stems from the *show's* version of 2024, rather than the historical version of 2024
Especially when you mix-in past-close-futures such as the 2005 season's visit to 2012, or the classic show's Moon Base, it really becomes a guddle! I like that they just vibe with it all though.
All I ask of my fiction is that it be internally consistent and that's it.
That's a big ask of a "work" of fiction that has been written by dozens of writers over a 60 year time period. Sorry, you lose.
@@BS-vx8dg I mean I don't expect people to maintain lore over decades, but just within their own shows isn't a big ask. Like in TOS they could use the ship to stun entire city blocks, something no-one has ever used again, that's fine.
But if you make up a rule for your fictional world and make a big deal about it you don't just get to ignore it three episodes later (beaming through shields).
@@tekkaoz Well, on that matter we can agree. Having a mushroom drive for two seasons and then having that groundbreaking technology disappear from the history books is pretty stupid.
But technology is one thing that I don't think Steve was addressing here. He was talking about one issue: What to do when history catches up with the fiction, and I think his prescription was the only way to go.
I think that even more so than other sci fi franchises, many Star Trek fans are invested in the fantasy of Trek being *our* future, and probably because it’s such a good one.
You don’t see Mad Max fans worrying about this.
In our watchalong together, I/we spent a fair bit of time comparing aspects of the episode to today (there is a lot of similarity) because though the details themselves aren't important, what it tells us about how we treat people, _is_. There are two very strong messages in the episode that comparing the episode to today show we as a society still have not learned from and need to bear in mind.
It is amazing how wrapped up in canon people get. It is almost as if their own identities become entwined within those fictional worlds.
Well, if the Bell’s riot not happening startles you, I hope you are preparing yourself for 2063…
Because the invention of Warp Drive and first contact with the Vulcans are pretty unlikely to happen.
And maybe you should check all the Cocharanes living in Montana and make them having a boy named Zefram, without him, you will be very disappointed in less than 40 years.
Well put and a nuanced reminder of how Trek at its best is both entertainment and social commentary.
Finished watching the 2 parter and then waited for your video. Ya just made it!
I'm good at suspending all disbelief, and just enjoying a good story, and even picking out the moral of a particular story. What I'm not so good at is equating it to real world..and for that I thank you. I never thought of this in terms of the LA riots, and the rest of your video contents here.
Thank you for helping me see deeper meanings in the stories I enjoy about Star Trek.
All fiction takes place in parallel universes, as I explained to my kids why the present hasn't turned out like '1984'....who's that at the door? Oh no, it's the Thought Police!
Forever I think of that line from the first issue of "Kingdom Come", the 90s comic by Mark Waid and Alex Ross
"My God, the bystanders! They'll be killed! Someone should do something!"
'Indeed."
Good video
Honestly, I think it's fine for fiction to not be like real life, as long as it's at least somewhat internally consistent or if you can at least make sense of why it's not.
I honestly always just assumed that there are historical gaps in the time between First Contact and when we are.
When people are struggling to survive fallout and everything, records can get lost, destroyed or the like incidentally.
They could still have the date of their present known thanks to astronomical observations and positions while still having spotty records from the 20th and 21st century in their timeline.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING IT OUT LOUD!! FINALLY!! LOL.... Spider Man happens in our current time period and no one bats an eye they open their windows and do not see spandex clad people flying around... Star Trek is fiction... and a hopeful fiction... and not an exercise in precognition. Despite the fact reality is unsettlingly creating factors that make us remember pieces of fiction that reflect on those things. And like any good fiction, help us somehow, find the ways to handle them and move society towards a better path. If we dream of a fair future similar in some aspects to what happens in Star Trek, it is not because our lives follow a fictional path, but because we built it.
Oh MAN I need to watch this two-part episode again!!! I'm sure that I'll see MUCH MORE than what I saw, when I last watched it, still as an adult, nearly twenty years ago.
Enterprise was in it's own altered timeline as it was technical before Kirk, but it's timeline started after the First Contact movie as the Borg shpere that crashed in that movie was discovered in Enterprise.
A note about the Bell Riots as depicted in the episode - the DS9 writers didn't anticipate the *smartphone*! Remember the people in the District had no access to the "global communications network", access was mediated by the office overseeing the district, and nobody could tell their stories or look for work even...and the outside really had no idea what was going on inside of the districts. I remember communications/internet access was one of Bell's demands.
But no days, a lot of the people INSIDE of the District would have had cheap "Obamaphones" - though a lot of people just LOST access to highspeed internet and cell service, though they could still use their devices for wifi...and I could activist groups dropping in cell phones and setting up wifi networks just over the districts borders.
I suppose we could retcon things to say that the districts had cellphone and wifi jamming...for some reason.
I couldn't agree more with you Steve. Let your fiction be just that, fiction. The people who created Star Trek, in the 1960's, never dreamed that Star Trek would still be around 30 years later in the 1990's; or that Star Trek would still be making content over 50 years later in the 2000's or the 2020's. Star Trek has always been an ongoing commentary of we the people in whatever decade these shows are being made. Star Trek has always used its science fiction premise to comment on today's problems. It is up to us now, here in the present, to make the future a better one to live in.
You mention Holly Hunter’s character bringing up historical things in Trek, actually that’s the one character and show where bringing up past events in Trek does make sense given it is a story about young cadets who are learning things about themselves and their world.
"point of divergence" makes it an alternate time line like the whole shattered mirror time line, done.
Personally, I think an episode where one of the characters in Starfleet Academy is doing a report on the Bell Riots could be interesting. Like, I kinda want to see how someone in the 24th century sees them and such, and how they compare the Bell Riots to the Rodney King riots and other similar events in history. There's no need to change the timeline of them, like you said, but I do believe that having the occasional reference to them can be a good thing.
my own personal head If there is already 3 universes in star trek known original alternate And Kelvin so why can't our own universe Just be one in the multiverse that coincidentally enough Has some influence over the others
I have a dnd session to run tomorrow. I have done zero prep. This video is the pep talk I need.
I'm with you here. and if someone INSISTS on this kind of thing? I like Futurama's solution - "well we don't really know much about that time period, the date was probably only a guess anyway"
"We're whalers on the Moon, we carry a harpoon. But there ain't no whales so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune."
When did _Futurama_ do that?
@@BlackCover95episode 2
Quick correction, the DS9 crew didn't prevent the Bell riots- but with Bell's premature death, there was no convenient martyr for society to coalesce around and make the needed changes to pave way for the Federation. Instead, it was just another burst of violence that amounted to nothing.
I didn't realize this was a thing people worried about...of course it's fiction. It's not our timeline. It's Star Trek's. *I'm so confused as to why this is a thing.* "Multiverse did it" has been explaining this stuff forever.
Considering one of the reasons the Bell Riots occurred was due to lack of good paying jobs and adequate and affordable housing, we are closer to that destiny in 2024 than we were to the Eugenics Wars in the 90's.
But one of the biggest issues with NuTrek is most of it is prequels looking back, while OG Trek was about looking forward and advancing the time line with almost each new series.
Fun fact: One of my favorite Anime characters was born on 8/15/2024 just a couple weeks ago
Basara Nekki from Macross 7.