I'm sure this will have been asked before somewhere so I apologise in advance for that!! I have got quite into TNG, DS9 and ENT in recent years, and I figure I really should start watching the series that started it all... However my problem is that there does not seem to be any universally agreed-upon order for watching TOS episodes. People talk about "airdate order", "production order" and "stardate order". Is there some essay somewhere I could read which contrasts these different orders and so I could decide which one to use? In particular, is there any "continuity" between episodes which would be broken by using one of the orders over another one? I have come across TV series before which haven't had universally agreed-upon orders (e.g. The Prisoner, Crusade) but normally there is some sort of "FAQ" which details the arguments for each of the different orders.
Episode order
- Thread starter kidburla
- Start date
No, there isn't. Just watch the episodes as they appear on the DVDs (which is the airdate order, BTW). (Well, you should watch Part I of The Menagerie before Part II and Mudd's Women before I, Mudd.
)Stardate order is nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. There's no internal consistency between the stardates of the episodes.
Oh, and welcome to the board! Hope you stick around ...
Yeah well airdate order does seem to be the most sensible order to me too, and I knew it was the order used on the DVDs. I was just a bit confused because various sites (including Memory Alpha) list the episodes in production order. In general this would seem a bit strange - e.g. for TNG it would mean me watching "Skin of Evil" before "Symbiosis" and I would be wondering why Tasha was back from the dead. But I wondered if there was some specific reason for TOS why people decide to watch them in production order.
I used to think that too, but there is some consistency if viewed from a large enough scale. Though there are numerous exceptions, a roughly continuous series emerges rather than just a random mish-mash. I still prefer viewing in straight production order, myself, but...
By sorting episodes first within general production order (pilot, seasons 1-3, TAS, and each movie), by omitting episodes which have no specified stardates, and by dealing separately with those which overlap with other seasons, a general arrangement can be obtained.
The data, omitting episodes which have no stardates specified, and grouping all episodes with cross-season stardates into their own group:
PILOT:
1312.4 Pilot 2 Where No Man Has Gone Before
SEASON 1:
1329.1 TOS-1 4 Mudd's Women
1512.2 TOS-1 3 The Corbomite Maneuver
1513.1 TOS-1 6 The Man Trap
1533.6 TOS-1 8 Charlie X
1672.1 TOS-1 5 The Enemy Within
1704.2 TOS-1 7 The Naked Time
1709.1 TOS-1 9 Balance of Terror
2124.5 TOS-1 18 The Squire of Gothos
2712.4 TOS-1 10 What Are Little Girls Made of?
2713.5 TOS-1 12 Miri
2715.1 TOS-1 11 Dagger of the Mind
2817.6 TOS-1 13 The Conscience of the King
2821.5 TOS-1 14 The Galileo Seven
2947.3 TOS-1 15 Court Martial
3012.4 TOS-1 16 The Menagerie
CROSS SEASON 1 AND SEASON 2:
3018.2 TOS-2 30 Catspaw
3025.3 TOS-1 17 Shore Leave
3045.6 TOS-1 19 Arena
3087.6 TOS-1 20 The Alternative Factor
3113.2 TOS-1 21 Tomorrow Is Yesterday
3134.0 TOS-1 28 The City on the Edge of Forever
3141.9 TOS-1 24 Space Seed
3156.2 TOS-1 22 The Return of the Archons
3192.1 TOS-1 23 A Taste of Armageddon
3196.1 TOS-1 26 The Devil in the Dark
3198.4 TOS-1 27 Errand of Mercy
3211.7 TOS-2 46 The Gamesters of Triskelion
3219.8 TOS-2 31 Metamorphosis
3287.2 TOS-1 29 Operation - Annihilate!
3372.7 TOS-2 34 Amok Time
3417.3 TOS-1 25 This Side of Paradise
SEASON 2:
3468.1 TOS-2 33 Who Mourns for Adonais?
3478.2 TOS-2 40 The Deadly Years
3497.2 TOS-2 32 Friday's Child
3541.9 TOS-2 37 The Changeling
3614.9 TOS-2 36 Wolf in the Fold
3619.2 TOS-2 47 Obsession
3715.3 TOS-2 38 The Apple
3842.3 TOS-2 44 Journey to Babel
4040.7 TOS-2 43 Bread and Circuses
4202.9 TOS-2 35 The Doomsday Machine
4211.4 TOS-2 45 A Private Little War
4307.1 TOS-2 48 The Immunity Syndrome
CROSS SEASON 2 AND SEASON 3:
4372.5 TOS-3 57 Elaan of Troyius
4385.3 TOS-3 56 Spectre of the Gun
4513.3 TOS-2 41 I, Mudd
4523.3 TOS-2 42 The Trouble with Tribbles
4598.0 TOS-2 49 A Piece of the Action
4657.5 TOS-2 50 By Any Other Name
4729.4 TOS-2 53 The Ultimate Computer
4768.3 TOS-2 51 Return to Tomorrow
SEASON 3:
4842.6 TOS-3 58 The Paradise Syndrome
5027.3 TOS-3 60 And the Children Shall Lead
5031.3 TOS-3 59 The Enterprise Incident
5121.0 TOS-3 63 The Empath
5423.4 TOS-3 72 The Mark of Gideon
5431.4 TOS-3 61 Spock's Brain
5476.3 TOS-3 65 For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
5630.7 TOS-3 62 Is There in Truth No Beauty?
5693.4 TOS-3 64 The Tholian Web
5710.5 TOS-3 68 Wink of an Eye
5718.3 TOS-3 71 Whom Gods Destroy
5725.3 TOS-3 73 The Lights of Zetar
5730.2 TOS-3 70 Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
5784.2 TOS-3 67 Plato's Stepchildren
5818.4 TOS-3 74 The Cloud Minders
5832.3 TOS-3 75 The Way to Eden
5843.7 TOS-3 76 Requiem for Methuselah
5906.4 TOS-3 77 The Savage Curtain
5928.5 TOS-3 79 Turnabout Intruder
5943.7 TOS-3 78 All Our Yesterdays
The animated series can be included if its stardates are similarly handled by season. First off, any TAS episodes which overlap TOS seasons 1 or 2 must be omitted:
1254.4 108 The Magicks of Megas-tu
3183.3 203 The Practical Joker
4187.3 114 The Slaver Weapon
This still leaves a massive overlap with TOS season 3. While there are differences in the TOS Enterprise/crew and the TAS Enterprise/crew, I'm willing to combine TOS season 3 and the remaining TAS season 1 episodes (since all of TAS season 1 would otherwise be omitted):
4978.5 110 Mudd's Passion
5143.3 106 The Survivor
5267.2 112 The Time Trap
5371.3 103 One of Our Planets is Missing
5373.4 102 Yesteryear
5392.4 105 More Tribbles, More Troubles
5483.7 104 The Lorelei Signalof females.
5499.9 113 The Ambergris Element
5501.2 115 The Eye of the Beholder
5521.3 101 Beyond the Farthest Star
5554.4 107 The Infinite Vulcan
5577.3 111 The Terratin Incident
5591.2 109 Once Upon a Planet
5683.1 116 The Jihad
The following TAS season 2 episode is omitted for overlap with TOS:
5275.6 204 Albatross
Leaving the following episodes to represent TAS season 2's stardates:
6063.4 205 How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth
6334.1 201 The Pirates of Orion
6770.3 206 The Counter-Clock Incident
7403.6 202 Bem
MOVIES:
7412.6 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
8130.4 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
8210.3 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
8390 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
8454.1 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
9521.6 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Thus, the "pure" stardate ranges (which are the majority within each segment and which improved over time, except for the TOS-3/TAS-1 overlap):
1312 Second pilot
1329-3012 TOS first season
3468-4307 TOS second season
4842-5943 TOS third season & TAS first season
6063-7403 TAS second season
7412 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
8130 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
8210 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
8390 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
8454 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
9521 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
This provides an overall smooth progression from 1xxx to 9xxx.
I've watched them in air date order and production order and much prefer production order. I think production order is better especially in the early episodes of the first season when the uniforms and Nimoy's grasp of the Spock Character are evolving.
I also think Where No Man Has Gone Before (or The Cage if you include it) needs to be watched first regardless of which order the rest of the episodes are watched in.
I've never consider watching in Stardate order because I don't think that is something that was given a great deal of thought by the writers.
I also think Where No Man Has Gone Before (or The Cage if you include it) needs to be watched first regardless of which order the rest of the episodes are watched in.
I've never consider watching in Stardate order because I don't think that is something that was given a great deal of thought by the writers.
For me, it's because post-production seems to have sometimes shuffled the order of the episodes. Balance of Terror is an example of this: it feels like early first season to me, and it is in production order, but it comes five episodes later in airdate order.
Similarly, in production order, Elaan of Troyius appears before The Enterprise Incident, so we first see the "D7" design being used by the Klingons before Scotty is amazed to see it used by the Romulans. In airdate order, this is reversed.
Also, Uhura's uniform going from gold to red: in production order it starts gold, then becomes and remains red, but (if I recall correctly) it switches back and forth in airdate order, which seemed odd. And the airdate placement of Where No Man Has Gone Before is even more jarring.
I can certainly understand watching in airdate order: that's how the show first appeared and is thus the original experience. I just prefer to see the order that was (presumably) intended.
You're welcome. I had it lying around in an old file where I'd noodled with trying to get stardates in some sort of consistent pattern since they worked pretty well for the movies. I'm not a fan of viewing in stardate order (too many exceptions), but this seemed like the right place to suggest that stardates weren't completely inconsistent.
Production order has always made the most sense to me, particularly where the first season is concerned. I remember seeing some episodes first run on NBC when I was very young, but I never really got into the show until it was syndicated in the early 1970s, and the syndication runs were aired in production order. I suppose I might have been influenced by that.
Stardate order never made any sense to me at all, but WendellM does make some good points upthread.
Stardate order never made any sense to me at all, but WendellM does make some good points upthread.
Another vote for Production Order here. Much more enjoyable. But, as stated above, you can't go wrong with airdate order. But then again, people have been falling in love with Star Trek in random syndication order as well! So you really can't go too far wrong doing it anyway you feel like. However, I still recommend Production order if possible (it's the way it was intended to be seen).
Stardate order? ...In the 42 years I've been watching Star Trek, I've never heard of doing it that way (but given what has grown out of fans' minds in 40+ years, it doesn't surprise me! *grin*).
Stardate order? ...In the 42 years I've been watching Star Trek, I've never heard of doing it that way (but given what has grown out of fans' minds in 40+ years, it doesn't surprise me! *grin*).
One note about the stardate order listed above: The stardate for "City on the Edge of Forever", given as 3134.0, is never stated on screen. So officially, it's not "canonical".
A couple of other episodes are often given stardates which are never stated onscreen, although they may appear in the original scripts for the respective episodes. These are "A Piece of the Action", which is often assigned as stardate 4598.0, and "Patterns of Force", stardate 2534.0. The stardate given for "Patterns" is curious, since it would chronologically place that episode among the early first season shows, wheras the episode itself was actually produced late in the second season, when the other episodes produced at the same time have stardates in the late 4000's.
There is also the problem of some early episodes having overlapping stardates. This occurs specifically in "The Man Trap" and "The Corbomite Manuever"; "Dagger of the Mind" and "Miri"; and "The Conscience of the King" and the "Galileo Seven".
In addition to these three episodes, there are five more of the original series which are never assigned stardates. They are, in production order:
Mirror, Mirror
The Omega Glory
Assignment Earth
Day of the Dove
That Which Survives
Despite these problems, there is one instance in which stardate order clears up what has been traditionally viewed as one of TOS's biggest chronological inconsistencies. That is in is the stardate for "Catspaw", given as 3018, and establishing Chekov as a member of the crew. This occurs before "Space Seed", stardate 3141, and makes it plausible that Khan could have encountered Chekov on board the Enterprise during his original stay there. In real life of course, "Space Seed" was a first season episode, produced before Chekov joined the crew in the second year.
A couple of other episodes are often given stardates which are never stated onscreen, although they may appear in the original scripts for the respective episodes. These are "A Piece of the Action", which is often assigned as stardate 4598.0, and "Patterns of Force", stardate 2534.0. The stardate given for "Patterns" is curious, since it would chronologically place that episode among the early first season shows, wheras the episode itself was actually produced late in the second season, when the other episodes produced at the same time have stardates in the late 4000's.
There is also the problem of some early episodes having overlapping stardates. This occurs specifically in "The Man Trap" and "The Corbomite Manuever"; "Dagger of the Mind" and "Miri"; and "The Conscience of the King" and the "Galileo Seven".
In addition to these three episodes, there are five more of the original series which are never assigned stardates. They are, in production order:
Mirror, Mirror
The Omega Glory
Assignment Earth
Day of the Dove
That Which Survives
Despite these problems, there is one instance in which stardate order clears up what has been traditionally viewed as one of TOS's biggest chronological inconsistencies. That is in is the stardate for "Catspaw", given as 3018, and establishing Chekov as a member of the crew. This occurs before "Space Seed", stardate 3141, and makes it plausible that Khan could have encountered Chekov on board the Enterprise during his original stay there. In real life of course, "Space Seed" was a first season episode, produced before Chekov joined the crew in the second year.
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Whoa, I disagree with this tidbit. They were only shot in a certain order because of actor's schedules, mainly guest stars. The episodes were finished in a certain order, and episodes that didn't have as many effects as others generally got to the air first. This explains why an episode like "Balance of Terror" didn't get aired until roughly mid-season.
They weren't intended to be in any specific order at all, production or airdate. I'm just happy they were produced!
I would not reccomend air date order, mainly for the reason that "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second pilot, which obviously takes place some time before the rest of the series, is inexplicably aired as the third episode. Also you have the issue of certain episodes which were aired out of production order because of the date of the original airing corresponding with some theme of the episode (i.e. "Catspaw", aired the week of Halloween; "Friday's Chid", aired close to Christmas; "Bread and Circuses", aired on the Ides of March; and "Spectre of the Gun", aired on the weekend of the OK Corral gunfight anniversary.)
Good to know, thanks. I just grabbed a big list o' episodes from somewhere and started chopping.
Also, that Chekov bit is great.No, there isn't. Just watch the episodes as they appear on the DVDs (which is the airdate order, BTW). (Well, you should watch Part I of The Menagerie before Part II and Mudd's Women before I, Mudd.
The only other bit of continuity I can think of is the mention of the Organian Peace Treaty from "Errand of Mercy" being mentioned in "The Trouble with Tribbles", but both viewing orders have Errand coming first by quite a few episodes.
Having seen the series so many times, I simply pick and choose an episode as I fancy, but that led to me having never seen "Dagger of the Mind" until about a year ago!
Generally, I prefer stardate order as the "pseudohistorical sequence of events". Viewing order? What's that? I can't really hope to view more than perhaps two episodes a day anyway, and I have never tried a full marathon of all the 79 hours. So viewing order is irrelevant to me as a concept.
Stardate order is fun for the reason that it at least provides some rationale by which to organize the episodes, and doesn't lead to contradictions (unlike airdate order, which messes up Uhura's uniform, or production order, which messes up Chekov's backstory, at least when we consider the broader Trek pseudohistory that includes the movies).
Also, organizing TOS into five years by the five "stardate millennia" creates a plausible and enjoyable pseudohistory for the mission, for example freeing it of the artifact of exciting things happening to our heroes at regular two-week intervals... It also, say, allows for three years between "Errand of Mercy" and "Day of the Dove", as specified in the dialogue in the latter.
And the three cases of stardate overlap are actually more like two. "Miri" indeed stretches over "Dagger", rather annoyingly - unless we assume that our stranded, isolated and infected heroes down on Miri's planet got their passage of time confused for some reason. And "Man Trap" and "Corbomite" both stretch over the same range of stardates, in an amazing example of lack of coordination.
But "Conscience of King" ends with the last SD entry reading 2819.1, while "The Galileo Seven" begins with SD 2821.5, so there is no overlap there. True, at one point Kirk claims that the ferry mission of "Conscience" will not be over until SD 2825.3 - but it seems the ferry mission was aborted in favor of the more urgent medical mission of "The Galileo Seven".
Timo Saloniemi
Stardate order is fun for the reason that it at least provides some rationale by which to organize the episodes, and doesn't lead to contradictions (unlike airdate order, which messes up Uhura's uniform, or production order, which messes up Chekov's backstory, at least when we consider the broader Trek pseudohistory that includes the movies).
Also, organizing TOS into five years by the five "stardate millennia" creates a plausible and enjoyable pseudohistory for the mission, for example freeing it of the artifact of exciting things happening to our heroes at regular two-week intervals... It also, say, allows for three years between "Errand of Mercy" and "Day of the Dove", as specified in the dialogue in the latter.
And the three cases of stardate overlap are actually more like two. "Miri" indeed stretches over "Dagger", rather annoyingly - unless we assume that our stranded, isolated and infected heroes down on Miri's planet got their passage of time confused for some reason. And "Man Trap" and "Corbomite" both stretch over the same range of stardates, in an amazing example of lack of coordination.
But "Conscience of King" ends with the last SD entry reading 2819.1, while "The Galileo Seven" begins with SD 2821.5, so there is no overlap there. True, at one point Kirk claims that the ferry mission of "Conscience" will not be over until SD 2825.3 - but it seems the ferry mission was aborted in favor of the more urgent medical mission of "The Galileo Seven".
Timo Saloniemi
One more instance of overlap - "The Gamesters of Triskellion" and "Metamorphosis". I came up with an explanation on another thread, saying that stardates function in a somewhat similar way to how time functions here on earth. Here on earth you can experience the hour of three o'clock on the east coast, get on a plane and fly to the west coast, and then experience the hour of three o'clock all over again on the same day. Of course it's not really the same hour, but the official designation of the hours has to be set at a different scale for different locations in order to correleate them with a central focal point, and you can never "gain" or "lose" more than several hours because of travel. It's the same way in the galaxy. Say the Enterprise has the adventure of "The Corbomite Manuever", which occurred from the designated stardate 1512 to about 1514.For their next adventure, "The Man Trap", they travel an appreciable distance across the galaxy from the territory of the First Federation over to the Crater's planet, and in so doing, they "gain back" a few stardate units of time, not very many. Thus in the adventure of "The Man Trap", the stardate range is the same as it was in the previous adventure.
For a long time, people didn't readily know the "production order" of TOS. The "ST Concordance" by Bjo Trimble (and all other lists) presented summaries of the the episodes of TOS and TAS as they had originally aired in Los Angeles, and then tried an experiment by adding a second list: putting the stardates into order (which really only proved that stardates, particularly in TAS, were quite random).
TOS was usually made to be viewable in random order and, when the series went to US syndication, stations either stuck with original airdate order or total randomness.
Then along came TMP - and Alan Asherman's "ST Compendium". He had researched the production numbers and dates and, for the first time, many ST fans could see the order the episodes had been made. The TV order they'd all been used to had only came about due to late SPFX on some episodes and/or network exec demands ("Give 'em a monster ep first up", ie. "The Man Trap".) When a few fans (and TV stations) started using this "new" order to screen episodes, it was noticed how a few continuity threads suddenly matched up. Uhura's gold uniform episodes suddenly ended up together, for example. "Where No Man..." was not suddenly a confusing "flashback" episode, but more like an Episode 1.
With TAS, the airdate order in Los Angeles (and Bjo's Concordance) was different to the rest of the country. George Takei was running for political office when TAS premiered, so a Takei-less episode of TAS had to be run on a certain week in LA, otherwise his opponents could have demanded "equal time" (22 minutes) from the station running it.
By the time of TNG and beyond, if an episode was running late due to SPFX, or if episodes were shot out of order (ie. Denise Crosby making another episode after her on-screen death; or "Unification Part II" being made first to fit in with Nimoy's availability), they were able to tweak things to keep the screening order okay, continuity-wise. There are a few glitches they glossed over: originally, the realism of the holodeck scenario in "The Big Goodbye" was originally possible only because it had been upgraded by the Bynars in "11001001", but they realised they'd have to screen those episodes out of intended order, IIRC.
Anyway, if you want to recapture the viewing experience of the very first TOS fans, watch your TOS DVDs as presented, with "The Man Trap" first. Hop around your discs if you want production order instead. (The first DVD twinpacks, originally released in the US, had production order, and many TOS diehards - including the people preparing the DVD sets - thought that was a travesty!)
For the rest of ST, just relax and let the DVD boxed sets screen you the eps as presented.
Actually, a couple of fanzines in the 70's were published that contained fairly comprehensive listings of the filming dates of the episodes based on the clapperboards shown in the film clips. Not to take anything away from Asherman's hard work, but those fanzines pre-dated his Compendium. Of course, the Compendium was more widely available.
God, I loved that Compendium when it came out
...but I digress...Where do you get this information? I've not read or seen any mention of episodes being delayed. I have read plenty about the network playing them the way they thought they should be seen. Production order (which I take to be synonynmous with filming order) is the order they made it. All rough edges are smoothed by progression. (ref: Ship Design, Costuming, Character Development, etc).
This episode is mentioned specifically in at least one "Making of" but no production delays are mentioned at all. Of course, "production order" is still "production order." Not "production completion order," which I think you may be thinking of?
I disagree with the former, but whole heartedly agree with the latter. Of course this is all mental masturbation in the long run... production order or airdate order... I still say you can't go too far wrong either way. Go with the order it was filmed or the order we originally saw it. Either way, it's all golden. Either way beats the way subsequent generations saw it... completely random in syndication! (and even that way drew probably the majority of the fans!).They weren't intended to be in any specific order at all, production or airdate. I'm just happy they were produced!
What I don't agree with is stardate order... I am firmly convinced Stardates were just "filler" dialogue to make the Captain's Logs sound official while specifically avoiding being pinned down to real dates and years. Even Roddenberry sidestepped the incongruities by making up, I mean "explaining" that Stardates were a combination of time, date and place.
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