Stardate for Dummies
- Thread starter Kai "the spy"
- Start date
Yeah, and in other news they should re-release the film with Pine's eye colour changed to match William Shatner's. That's how much stardate gibberish numbers changing really matters.
"The nerds who care" won't be happy with anything, ever. Under any circumstances. Clone the TOS cast, crew and writers, recreate the sets and models exactly as they were in the 60's and they'll still whine and cry just as much as they are now.
"The nerds who care" won't be happy with anything, ever. Under any circumstances. Clone the TOS cast, crew and writers, recreate the sets and models exactly as they were in the 60's and they'll still whine and cry just as much as they are now.
I somehow doubt this movie had a "regular audience". 
Every fan is going to have differing standards on what they'll accept as far as changes go (I love how quickly the name-calling comes out when someone doesn't like a change made)...
But there is also the issue of respecting the sandbox you're playing in. If the Star Trek sandbox is too darn restrictive, Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman should've created their own sandbox. YMMV.
Just like TMP respected the TOS sandbox?
Is there something in TMP's story that openly conflicts with what came before in TOS?
Or are you just talking about visual changes that came due to having a much larger budget?
You're right! Fuck continuity! Let's rename the ship to the USS Abrams, and set it in the year 2009, and rename the main character to Dr Kickass McGee. We're just calling it Star Trek for the name recognition, not because it has anything to do with the 40+ history of shows and movies called Star Trek.
It takes a diehard nerd to care that "Stardate" now means "Earth year with a fancy prefix so idiots think it sounds futuristic".
Of course it matters, otherwise you wouldn't be here with everyone else arguing on a Trek forum. They can either use the Earth year, or use a real Stardate system (including making up their own that makes sense), but using the regular Earth year and calling it a Stardate is lazy, and patronizing to anyone with an IQ of over "Revenge of the Fallen".
It was never a problem for the audience in the past to follow along.
And still I'd bet that most of the audience didn't know what (Earth) year any given episode was set in, unless it was clearly stated.
They didn't even know yet how many years in the future TOS was set in the early days of the series, and yet the stardate-system is supposed to work and be consistent in itself?
That's because they didn't want to date the show. Stardates were there to merely show a futuristic timekeeping method. You know cause the show was set in the future...
Suffix actually.
No. It gives the audience an easy tool to know when the movie takes place.
My bad.
So does using the regular Earth year, which is essentially all they're doing anyway, except modifying it in a way that makes no sense, and doesn't even make a half-assed attempt at maintaining canon. Not that I care for canon all that much, or expect them to have to stick to it, but when you have old Spock using it, there is at least grounds for him using the old system.
The Stardates in TOS and the other series were completely random numbers that roughly incremented (for the most part), and they never had an issue communicating their meaning to the audience, and it's not like they haven't done enough time travel episodes that ran into the same issues.
In cases like this, they usually just refer to the year rather than Stardate, or say "400 years in the future" etc. I understand their desire to find a good compromise that works for the new fans, but their compromise was unnecessary and silly imo. They could have made it just as easy to understand for casual fans without having it make zero sense in universe.
Which open conflict do you mean?
If you accept the premise that TMP is set in the same reality as TOS, they aren't just visual changes. Within a few years, Starfleet redesigned its ships, redesigned its uniforms, Klingons gained ridged foreheads, and just about every trace of TOS style was erased. These events happened within the story, and what was the reason? TMP needed to compete with Star Wars. This is not story logic, it's commercial logic.
TAS, on the other hand, would fit my definition of respecting the TOS sandbox.
Stardates didn't even make sense until TNG, so I don't even know what the problem is there. It's a fictitious stupid numbering system that makes no sense even when you try to make sense of it.
When you're a writer or someone trying to document how this relates to an Earth time system, it gets stupid retarded and frustrating. So what if they decided to dumb down the Stardate - it isn't like there's 700 odd episodes and 10 movies using the old Stardate system compared to one movie.
The airlines run on Zulu time, regardless of location because it is a universal reference point. Perhaps the Federation, because it's headquartered on Earth, decides to use Earth as it's reference point in time.
When you're a writer or someone trying to document how this relates to an Earth time system, it gets stupid retarded and frustrating. So what if they decided to dumb down the Stardate - it isn't like there's 700 odd episodes and 10 movies using the old Stardate system compared to one movie.
The airlines run on Zulu time, regardless of location because it is a universal reference point. Perhaps the Federation, because it's headquartered on Earth, decides to use Earth as it's reference point in time.
Not stupid audience, smart Jellyfish computer. Works for me.
Do you think it really matters enough to be getting angry over? I don't.
I also don't think patronizing has got much to do with it. Abrams is on record as having said that he wanted the movie to have a runtime of about two hours. What gets into the movie then becomes a simple question of "How important is this or that detail to the story that we need to spend X amount of time on verbal or visual exposition so that the audience gets what's happening?"
Robau gives the stardate as 2233.04 in response to Ayel's question. The Jellyfish gives its year of manufacture as 2387 in response to Spock's question. During SpockPrime's meld with Kirk in 2258 (Kirk's log entry on Delta Vega: "Stardate twenty-two fifty-eight point four two... four uh... four whatever"), events are mentioned which take place "one hundred twenty-nine years from now".
Total amount of screentime used, what... fifteen seconds? Twenty?
And everyone knows everything they need to know about the timeframes involved, whether or not they've ever been exposed to the stardate system before. Now: if you're being honest rather than looking for reasons to be indignant, how important was it—from a storytelling standpoint—to spend any more time on the subject of stardates than that?
I don't think anybody is asking for any retroactive edits or anything that tedious. The whole idea is forethought or attention to detail, but that is asking a bit too much of these writers.
And eye color is hardly on par with stardates, even though the stardates still mean very little.
Honestly, I'm not sure that's entirely true. Sure, there are those who are negative just because, but then there are other people who might just appreciate more attention to detail, even if it seems silly to others to devote any amount of time to it. And really, we're talking about the kind of thing that takes a minute to figure out.
You mean like coming up with a calendar 'system' an audience can make sense of right away instead of picking random (even more) numbers from the blue sky?
You don't get it. The randomness of stardates was itself a creative decision. A way to make the future seem a bit mysterious.
And it worked.
^ And the NEW stardate system was a creative decision intended to make the future LESS mysterious. Primarily because the cat's already out of the bag and everyone has known since TWOK that Star Trek takes place in the 23rd century, so there's no point pretending we don't know what year it is anymore. We DO know, so we might as well come up with a system that recognizes that years actually still exist and allows us to count them in a non-complicated fashion.
If you think about it, alot of things that were toyed with in TOS were later retconned out of existence in later Trek, and even in TOS itself. For example, Star Trek is never again going to treat the Vulcan Mind Meld as "a hidden, personal thing to the Vulcan people, part of our private lives," neither will it have anything to do with nerve endings or blood vessels. Too much is already known about Star Trek to still pretend it's unknown or mysterious; there's plenty of room for novelty, of course, but not so much in the realm of world-building, and a lot is going to have to be simplified if it's going to continue to make sense.
If you think about it, alot of things that were toyed with in TOS were later retconned out of existence in later Trek, and even in TOS itself. For example, Star Trek is never again going to treat the Vulcan Mind Meld as "a hidden, personal thing to the Vulcan people, part of our private lives," neither will it have anything to do with nerve endings or blood vessels. Too much is already known about Star Trek to still pretend it's unknown or mysterious; there's plenty of room for novelty, of course, but not so much in the realm of world-building, and a lot is going to have to be simplified if it's going to continue to make sense.
I didn't mean for that to come across as angry, sorry about that. Just my failed sense of humour at 2:30am. The change of Stardates doesn't anger me, I didn't even take a lot of notice of it while watching it the first time. It isn't something that detracts from the movie, but this is Trek, so of course the fans are going to analyze every detail. That's what forums are for!
TOS intentionally obscured the Stardates to keep it at an indeterminate time, so obviously Trek XI didn't want to go with random gibberish. The TNG onwards system was still sort of vague, but it was accurate enough to years, and to the level where nobody ever complained about it being too confusing for the audience to understand. I couldn't give you the Stardate or even the year for when anything happened in Trek, but I've never been confused about how many years have passed between events in time travel episodes.
And even in their 45 minute episodes, they didn't have to waste their time explaining Stardates. Since they're mostly humans, there was no issue with them just stating Earth years when time gaps were involved. I can't remember any episode where they ever needed to explain Stardates for the audience, because they didn't really matter. So it's not like they're wasting 2 hours repeating a 2 page forum post from here about how Stardates work.
Unless it's prefixed with "Captain's Log", I'd have no problem with them just using our year for the entire movie.So if Stardates are useless, then why do I care at all?
Because there is a difference between a system making sense for the audience, and a system making sense within the context of the movie. But they're not mutually exclusive goals, so it's not like I want them to use a difficult Stardate system at the expense of the audience. And I don't expect that they should have wasted time bogging down the movie with the very kind of nerdy over-exposition that they were trying to do away with. But they could have done a better job of it.
I remember Meyer stating that the reason he explicitly stated that ST took place in the 23rd century was to give his father a point of reference for the movie so he could know when it took place.
Directors want to connect with their audience with something tangible -- something they can relate to and understand. I think the Stardates in AOS are fine... it didn't even dawn on me that the Stardates were "YYYY.DD" until someone told me. When you add a "blah blah point blah blah ", it kind of throws you off.
I mean, how much better could they have done with it without stepping all over TOS' shoes?
Directors want to connect with their audience with something tangible -- something they can relate to and understand. I think the Stardates in AOS are fine... it didn't even dawn on me that the Stardates were "YYYY.DD" until someone told me. When you add a "blah blah point blah blah ", it kind of throws you off.
I mean, how much better could they have done with it without stepping all over TOS' shoes?
