In science fiction, it’s common for the problems of the human condition to be addressed through allegory. Star Trek did this regularly. Throughout in the series, aliens would stand in for different elements of an all-too-familiar debate about race, class, or gender. For example, the 1969 Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” tries to make a point about the absurdity of racism—via a ham-fisted story about an alien population that’s divided between individuals whose faces are half-white and half-black, and those who have the color scheme reversed. The allegory was obvious, but it elided the complexity of how racist societies operate.
“Past Tense” aired 26 years later, in the third season of Deep Space Nine. Combining a searing look at homelessness with an indictment of America’s refusal to tackle the crisis head-on, it was arguably the most straightforwardly political story Star Trek ever told. It dispensed with clumsy metaphors to examine public health and mental illness; it also confronted the effects of the country’s waning optimism following Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society,” a series of domestic programs meant to end poverty and inequality in the ’60s. The script was also written and produced only two years after the Los Angeles Riots, which clearly influenced the story. The episode could perhaps have dug even deeper into its critique of bigotry. Still, “Past Tense” was notable for depicting racism not from the perspective of a well-meaning white liberal, as seen in previous iterations of Star Trek, but through the eyes of people of color directly threatened by violence and indifference.