When do stardate errors interfere with episode order?

[johnboy3434]

*Trivia experts wanted!*

Given the roughly standalone nature of most Trek episodes, arranging them in chronological order by stardate doesn't usually result in problems. Sometimes it does however. The only times that immediately comes to mind, though, are the four episodes that feature Yar after her death and the episode in which Riker drops a number from the stardate while recording his log. Are there any others?

 

[Caretaker]

Well, there was a mention of the Borg attack from Star Trek First Contact in the episode "In Purgatory's Shadow", but the stardate on the episode is lower than the stardate from the movie, so following that, the Borg attack would have occurred after the episode.

 

[Timo]

...But thankfully, that's basically the only stardate error in all of DS9. Or VOY, for that matter.

One might consider it an error that Sisko celebrates the fourth anniversary of Wolf 359 at the stardate given in "Second Sight", since it isn't exactly 4,000 stardates after the event, but Sisko might be living by a different cycle - say, Bajoran years.

The first season of TOS has some oddities - say, "Miri" overlapping with "Dagger of the Mind" - but it's not as bad as one might think. The first season of TNG is the worst offender by far, due to the Yar thing.

But really, while four episodes with stardates higher than "Skin of Evil" feature Yar ("Arsenal of Freedom", "Angel One", "The Big Goodbye", "The Battle"), and two of them are in fact important Yar vehicles, we might explain most of this away by saying that the offending stardate in "Skin of Evil", in Picard's initial log, was slightly misspoken. After all, the original script actually had SD 41801.3, not 41601.3 (and there was no second mention of a stardate later in the story where the aired version has 41602.1).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Therin of Andor]

arranging them in chronological order by stardate doesn't usually result in problems.

The first professional edition of Bjo Trimble's "ST Concordance" had two timelines, one in airdate order and one attempting to reorganise TOS and TAS into Stardate order. But TAS is all over the place, with one episode supposedly occurring before "Where No Man Has Gone Before".

The episode/movie/novel Timeline in Pocket's "Voyages of Imagination" now uses the revised TAS episode Stardates, which Alan Dean Foster gave them as he reshuffled and novelized them for the "ST Log" series.

 

[johnboy3434]

Thanks for all the responses so far! To be quite honest, I forgot all about TAS. Is it possible for that episode to take place prior to "Where No Man Has Gone Before"? Do any other inconsistencies arise?

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

Thanks for all the responses so far! To be quite honest, I forgot all about TAS. Is it possible for that episode to take place prior to "Where No Man Has Gone Before"? Do any other inconsistencies arise?

Well, the Enterprise bridge was refitted sometime prior to TAS, since it has an extra turbolift in TAS. And M'Ress and Arex are among the crew, but never seen during TOS.

 

[JayTheTrekkie]

I think the most messed up stardates for episodes are TOS mainly.

 

[Timo]

And the stardate for TAS episode "Bem" also overlaps with the first movie.

One might say that this isn't actually such a problem, because the four-digit TOS and TAS stardates seem to only describe periods of time that are shorter than a decade. It takes about a thousand stardates to cover a single year (just like it does with those TNG era five-digit stardates), or about 4000-5000 stardates to cover all of TOS which supposedly depicted a five-year mission and verifiably spanned at least three years of "in-universe" time.

So if Kirk says "I was born in SD 1206, fell in love fore the first time in SD 1205, got a commendation for exceptional cheating at Starfleet Academy in SD 1204, and earned my first command in SD 1203", there's no contradiction there. Those stardates would refer to different decades, with the decade digit dropped the same way we might drop the first two digits from "I was born in '68".

That way, TAS "Magicks of Megas-Tu" could easily take place on SD 1254, which would be almost a decade after the SD 1312 of TOS "Where No Man Has Gone Before".

It would take a bit of doing to squeeze an entire extra decade in the currently accepted timeline, I admit. Some TAS episodes (with stardates just a tad higher than the highest TOS one, or just a tad lower) would probably have to take place right next to or even during the original TOS adventures. So it's probably more elegant to just ignore the TAS dates.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Furlong]

I remember reading several years ago that the stardates for TOS were made up on the spot. When TNG came around, the writers adapted a new system in which the dates began with a '4' and the next digit signifying the current season of the show, i.e. 41xxx.x was season 1, 43xxx.x was season 3 and so on. the remaining numbers were gradually increased over the course of the season.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

I think the most messed up stardates for episodes are TOS mainly.

Oh, definitely. Even if you put them in Stardate order the stardates don't go by at any regular rate.

Where No Man...: 1312.4
At least a 3 year span in between
Turnabout Intruder: 5928.5

TMP (2.5 years after the end of the 5YM) : 7410.2
TWOK (15 years after Space Seed (3141.9)) : 8130.3
TSFS: 8210.3
TVH: 8390.0
TFF:8454.1
TUC (approx 27 years after McCoy signed on the 1701 and 3+ years after TFF) : 9521.6

 

[Timo]

I think the most messed up stardates for episodes are TOS mainly.

There aren't too many problems in TOS, actually. That overlap between "Miri" and "Dagger" is the most obvious problem, but apart from that, the only real problem is that the length of a stardate varies a bit. Sometimes it seems like one digit to the left of the decimal point equals one day, sometimes it's more like one hour. But that happens a lot in TNG, too.

TMP (2.5 years after the end of the 5YM) : 7410.2

A very nice match, really, about 2,500 SD units for 2.5 years. Assuming, of course, that the interval really is just 2.5 years, which is only a minimum estimate.

TWOK (15 years after Space Seed (3141.9)) : 8130.3

Again a very good match. Assuming that the fifth digit in front of the movie date is one higher than the fifth digit in front of the episode.

TSFS: 8210.3
TVH: 8390.0
TFF:8454.1

Not too bad, really. TVH could be a bit higher to accommodate the months of self-exile on Vulcan, though.

TUC (approx 27 years after McCoy signed on the 1701 and 3+ years after TFF) : 9521.6

Now that's a bit of a problem, because it's a bigger leap than the McCoy reference should allow for. We could always say McCoy had been a CMO for 27 years, not including lengthy breaks, and TUC would then take place a couple of years later than intended. But that would be a problem because the next TOS cast movie, the intro for GEN, is nailed down pretty solidly in terms of Gregorian dates.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SFRabid]

I picked up the three seasons of TOS on DVD and was surprised that the order shown on television is not the origional episode order. It is like the filmed a bunch of episodes and then changed their minds about the order to show them.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

The worst offenders as regards the length of a stardate are the TOS movies. TOS itself never was exact enough with its timekeeping to produce any clear-cut errors or contradictions.

I agree. TOS was pretty good about keeping time spans pretty vague, there are a few inconsistencies that can be nit picked, but nothing--to me--that stands out glaringly like the time spans covered by stardates in the TOS movies.

TUC (approx 27 years after McCoy signed on the 1701 and 3+ years after TFF) : 9521.6

Now that's a bit of a problem, because it's a bigger leap than the McCoy reference should allow for. We could always say McCoy had been a CMO for 27 years, not including lengthy breaks, and TUC would then take place a couple of years later than intended. But that would be a problem because the next TOS cast movie, the intro for GEN, is nailed down pretty solidly in terms of Gregorian dates.

Yeah, TUC is definitely the worst offender in this area. TWOK-TVH is actually pretty consistent with the spans seen in the series.

I picked up the three seasons of TOS on DVD and was surprised that the order shown on television is not the origional episode order. It is like the filmed a bunch of episodes and then changed their minds about the order to show them.

Basically what happened, if I'm not mistaken, is that Roddenberry and Co filmed the episodes and handed them over to the network, who decided what order to broadcast them in. It wasn't that the creators changed their mind, its that they had no say in what order the episodes went out.

 

[ToddPence]

It is my belief that stardates work in a way similar to time zones. To wit, while those onboard a starship in one part of the galaxy might be experiencing stardate 2700, it might be stardate 3000 on another starship in a different part of the galaxy at the same moment of real time. This is so the dates can be related to one central focal point, maybe Earth or the center of the Federation.
This explains such oddities in TOS such as the "overlapping" of certain stardates, as stardate 1514.1 occurring in both "The Corbomite Manuever" and "The Man Trap". These two episodes happened very close to each other in real time, but the repition in stardates happened because the Enterprise was in a slightly different part of space in each episode. It's kind of like a person flying from the East Coast to the West Coast getting to relive the same hour twice in one day.
In the case of the odd stardate for the animated episode "The Magicks of Megas-Tu", the Enterprise in that episode was said to be investigating the center of the galaxy. This area may have been so far removed in distance from the center of Federation space that the stardate used to represent it had to be a much lower number than what it might have been had the Enterprise been closer to Earth.
This is just my explanation for certain oddities in the stardate timeline, anyway. Hope it makes some kind of sense.

 

[johnboy3434]

Just out of curiosity, which theory on the inner workings of stardates is the most widely accepted (or at least referred to)? I read the one by Andrew Main, and it seems to be pretty solid, but it hasn't been updated since 1996. Another one on TrekGuide.com is more recent, but it seems to revolve more around its calculators than how it came to its conclusions.

 

[erastus25]

It is my belief that stardates work in a way similar to time zones. To wit, while those onboard a starship in one part of the galaxy might be experiencing stardate 2700, it might be stardate 3000 on another starship in a different part of the galaxy at the same moment of real time. This is so the dates can be related to one central focal point, maybe Earth or the center of the Federation.
This explains such oddities in TOS such as the "overlapping" of certain stardates, as stardate 1514.1 occurring in both "The Corbomite Manuever" and "The Man Trap". These two episodes happened very close to each other in real time, but the repition in stardates happened because the Enterprise was in a slightly different part of space in each episode. It's kind of like a person flying from the East Coast to the West Coast getting to relive the same hour twice in one day.
In the case of the odd stardate for the animated episode "The Magicks of Megas-Tu", the Enterprise in that episode was said to be investigating the center of the galaxy. This area may have been so far removed in distance from the center of Federation space that the stardate used to represent it had to be a much lower number than what it might have been had the Enterprise been closer to Earth.
This is just my explanation for certain oddities in the stardate timeline, anyway. Hope it makes some kind of sense.

Wow - I never thought of that and it makes a lot of sense. I don't know if it holds up for inconsistencies in early DS9 though (e.g. Dax) because those were held almost entirely on DS9. I also don't know if it would work for Voyager on the other side of the galaxy. But it definitely seems to be a promising way to explain minor inconsistencies.

Just out of curiosity, which theory on the inner workings of stardates is the most widely accepted (or at least referred to)? I read the one by Andrew Main, and it seems to be pretty solid, but it hasn't been updated since 1996. Another one on TrekGuide.com is more recent, but it seems to revolve more around its calculators than how it came to its conclusions.

I don't know that there is a "widely" accepted theory. Probably a result of the fact that Gene Roddenberry himself even said they originally weren't meant to mean anything but by the DS9 Voyager era TPTB had set up one year = 1000 stardate units, but we still see inconsistencies. As a consequence, fans are attempting to make a logical system flow with a system that was not intended to have a concrete basis in reality so there will never be a good resolution. I think it's best just to take them with a grain of salt.

As an aside, when I made my own personal chronology of episodes I used a mish-mash of production order, airdate and stardate. It works for me, maybe not for others.