Airdate vs Stardate

[shapeshifter]

Have you ever watched Star Trek in order of Stardate instead of Airdate?

Is there any substantial difference to any given story arc when viewed by SD instead of AD?

I know TOS has some episodes which were aired out of order of SD, (hence the above questions) but did the same occur for TNG, DS9, VOY & ENT or were those productions more on schedule than TOS?

One more question, which episodes do TNG era movies occur between by Airdates and do those positions change if viewed by Stardate?

 

[Timo]

I have never had the chance for a Star Trek marathon - I watch episodes at irregular order, at irregular intervals.

But for the purposes of interpreting Kirk and pals' adventures, I prefer stardate order. The differences vs. airdate are mainly these:

-Chekov definitely gets aboard in "Catspaw" before Khan does in "Space Seed", so they could plausibly meet as indicated in ST2:TWoK
-The Klingon ship is seen first in Klingon hands in "Elaan of Troyius", not Romulan in "The Enterprise Incident"
-The show ends with a bang, in the supernova of "All Our Yesterdays", not with the whimper of "Turnabout Intruder"

No big twists in drama arcs, though. But in stardate order, Spock does get to meet love and emotion in "This Side of Paradise" before again encountering them in "Amok Time", not vice versa.

In TNG, the first season had discrepancies in stardate order - not due to reshuffling of airdates, but because the stardates on the scripts were inexplicably altered before filming. The rest went smoothly -only the two parts of "Unification" were produced in reverse order to the airdate/stardate one, due to the commitments of the guest star.

DS9 and VOY have no stardate reversals, and in general the episodes supposedly weren't swapped out of production order. ENT had no stardates but calendar dates, without reversals, and again it seems the episodes were aired in production order.

Airdates for movies sound rather meaningless, considering the different release dates at different locations. ST:INS doesn't have a stardate, so people debate whether it happens during the last season of DS9 or after it; the others have stardates that roughly match the airdates and don't conflict with the stardates of the TV shows much. Although admittedly DS9 makes mention of "recent Borg nastiness" in an episode whose stardate predates that of ST:FC... But then again, ST:FC makes mention of repeated Borg nastiness that preceded the events of that movie.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[shapeshifter]

Wow! Thank you very much, Timo.

 

[Cyke101]

Stardate wins because it's newer and has more phaser arrays.

 

[Starbreaker]

The stardates were just randomly picked by throwing darts anyway.

 

[m.lp.ql.m]

One thing I've wanted to do, but will probably never get the time, is to watch the Trek canon, not just the individual shows, in stardate order; e.g., start off with ENT, then TOS, have eps of TNG and DS9 intertwined, etc. Sort of like reading Narnia in chronological order instead of the order they were written in.

 

[Jefferies]

One thing I've wanted to do, but will probably never get the time, is to watch the Trek canon, not just the individual shows, in stardate order; e.g., start off with ENT, then TOS, have eps of TNG and DS9 intertwined, etc. Sort of like reading Narnia in chronological order instead of the order they were written in.

That's what I have been doing, sans Enterprise, which I do not like and with the movies added in at their respective points in time (I used a bit of guesstimating for the TNG ones).

So far it has been a lot of fun and really adds a sort of historical feel to the watching experience. You get the impression of a fairly coherent universe instead of just watching TV shows. However, it's a huge project. I have been at it for over three and a half years now and am only just about to start with DS9 season 4 and Voyager season 2.

 

[Cmndr J Crichton]

I've been watching Enterprise as part of the Trek Canon. I'll watch Tos, Animated, TNG, DS9, Voy, and the motion pictures. I'm currently on Enterprise - Season 3 - Episode 60: Twilight.

 

[ToddPence]

There are two big problems in attempting to watch TOS in stardate order, nice as the idea is.

1) How to deal with episodes in which the stardates overlap. For example, should "The Corbomite Manuever" go before "The Man Trap" or after? Likewise, does "Miri" come before "Dagger of the Mind" or after?

2) Determining the placement of the seven TOS episodes which are not given stardates.

 

[Timo]

Well, a) is a big problem all right - although the two examples mentioned are the only ones applicable.

As for b), the list of stardate-free episodes is as follows:

"The Cage" (no-brainer in terms of relative placement)
"Mirror, Mirror"
"The Omega Glory"
"Assignment: Earth"
"Day of the Dove"
"The Mark of Gideon"

Of the six actual TOS episodes, "Assignment: Earth" must take place after "Tomorrow is Yesterday" which is referred, sort of. "Day of the Dove" comes three years after "Errand of Mercy", but that need not mean any reshuffling of order. "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Mark of Gideon" are basically free game.

"Omega Glory" features the grisly death of redshirt Galloway, but the actor reappears (albeit in a nameless role) in "Turnabout Intruder", so we might want to place the death scene towards the very end of the show, either between "Turnabout Intruder" and "All Our Yesterdays", or then after the latter one.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[erastus25]

One thing I've wanted to do, but will probably never get the time, is to watch the Trek canon, not just the individual shows, in stardate order; e.g., start off with ENT, then TOS, have eps of TNG and DS9 intertwined, etc. Sort of like reading Narnia in chronological order instead of the order they were written in.

I'm in the process of doing that and it's a lot of fun. I'm in the middle of DS9 and VOY right now and it feels like old times watching them simultaneously. I've been using a combination of airdate, stardate, production number and practical sense to determine the order to watch the episodes. I've spent wwaaaayyyy too much compiling what I think is the "correct" viewing order.

As far as stardate vs. production vs. airdate problems go, if you watch first season TNG there is an episode (The Big Goodbye) in which Yar appears that has a stardate after Symbiosis.

One other discrepancy that doesn't come up too often is the beginning of the 3rd season of Voyager. The production numbers line up with the stardates for the most part (except Basics, part II, I believe) but they are aired in a different order. I choose to watch them in production/stardate order instead of airdate. It doesn't really matter, though, because no story arcs are involved.

 

[Timo]

..if you watch first season TNG there is an episode (The Big Goodbye) in which Yar appears that has a stardate after Symbiosis.

It's worse than that. The following Yar-featuring episodes all have stardates after "Skin of Evil" (which is the one where Yar dies):

"The Battle"
"The Big Goodbye"
"Angel One"
"Arsenal of Freedom"

Yar's role in "The Big Goodbye" is in fact just a bit part, and the one in "The Battle" could also have been played out by some other character - whereas she features very prominently in "Arsenal of Freedom" and "Angel One", in her specific roles of Security Chief and Female Protagonist, respectively.

Yet if you scan through the TrekCore scripts, the offending stardates aren't there. They were only rewritten into the episodes just before airing, for some inexplicable reason. It's almost as if the producers were trying to avoid having a consecutive stardate order...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ToddPence]

Well, a) is a big problem all right - although the two examples mentioned are the only ones applicable.

Actually, there are two other sets.
"The Conscience of the King" and "The Galileo Seven"
"The Gamesters of Triskellion" and "Metamorphosis"

As for b), the list of stardate-free episodes is as follows:

"The Cage" (no-brainer in terms of relative placement)
"Mirror, Mirror"
"The Omega Glory"
"Assignment: Earth"
"Day of the Dove"
"The Mark of Gideon"

Actually that's not exactly the same group of episodes I had in mind. I didn't consider "The Cage" and "The Mark of Gideon" HAS a stardate (5423).

My eight stardateless episodes were.

"The City on the Edge of Forever"
"Mirror, Mirror"
"A Piece of the Action"
"Patterns of Force"
"The Omega Glory"
"Assignment: Earth"
"Day of the Dove"
"That Which Survives"

A few of these episodes are attributed stardates in non-canonical sources, possibly because they may have been included in scripts although the stardates were never spoken or referenced on screen. "Patterns of Force" is sometimes given the stardate of 2534.0 by some sources. This is somewhat curious, as it would place this episode, a product of late in the second season (in which stardates were usually assigned numbers in the high 4000s), chronologically among the early first-season episodes.

However, with these minor problems, creating a timeline based on stardates is not that difficult for the original 78 stories of TOS, certainly much easier than doing the same with TNG episodes. As pointed out before, it even makes a more sensible chronology in some cases such as having Chekov established on the Enterprise before "Space Seed".

Of course, for those of you who consider TAS episodes canon, and try to adopt those stardates into the mix, that's when trouble starts. Such a timeline mixes up TOS and TAS episodes indiscriminately. And to top it off, the animated episode "Magicks of Megas-tu" becomes, chronologically the first-ever adventure of Kirk's Enterprise, predating even "Where No Man Has Gone Before"!

 

[Timo]

...At which point I evoke the theory that stardates in TOS have more than four digits before the separator. After all, stardates are used for referring to events of relatively distant past, such as Kirk's birth or something that Kodos the Executioner did. That's impossible if the entire cycle is only about a decade long, and incredibly confusing if there are multiple stardates 1234.5, once every decade.

However, if we assume a fifth digit to denote decades, and a sixth to denote centuries, the dates make theoretical sense. We can then try and apply this in practice, so that "Magicks" is from the next stardate decade with respect to, say, "Turnabout Intruder"; the TAS episodes would then fit in, and TMP would be restored to where the writers probably originally intended it to be, 2279 or so vs. the late 2260s of TOS (so that the dates in fact are airdates plus three centuries).

That means mixing some of the "sensible" TAS stardates with the TOS ones within the same stardate decade, though, with the attending problems of whether the bridge has one or two doors...

Generally, I'd argue the six-digit stardate theory has merit in sorting out the live-action shows and movies, but trying to apply it to TAS is wasted effort, and not all TOS movies conform, either.

"The Conscience of the King" and "The Galileo Seven"

This is an example of a potential overlap, not realized one. In the first episode, the ship was projected to reach a specific destination at a specific stardate; in the latter, we learn that there was an emergency mission that apparently got priority, so that the ship at that originally given stardate wasn't at the originally intended destination after all. The stardates referring to events that actually took place don't overlap.

"The Gamesters of Triskellion" and "Metamorphosis"

This is a good example of plausibly arguing that one of the characters misspoke. Spock's final "Stardate 3259.2; the Captain has been missing for two hours" is completely out of line with the fact that the Captain went missing moments after declaring that the stardate was 3211.8. If we ignore Spock here, there's no overlap.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[milo bloom]

DS9 and VOY have no stardate reversals, and in general the episodes supposedly weren't swapped out of production order. ENT had no stardates but calendar dates, without reversals, and again it seems the episodes were aired in production order.

Timo Saloniemi

I seem to vividly recall during VOY's first run that there were a couple incidences of them holding eps over from one season to the next, with the effect being the stardates got out of order. I'd have to dig up a list to be sure, but it's always bothered me, especially so when the DVDs didn't correct the errors.

Edit: I was right, Memory Alpha shows S2 had four S1 eps mixed in, along with several other episodes shown out of order. http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Star_Trek:_Voyager#Season_2

 

[Timo]

They did plan to do more eps on the first season, but many got delayed to the second. Yet they did air basically in stardate order - it's just that the first few S2 eps had stardates beginning with the digits familiar from S1 (48XXX), until finally rolling over to the digits more indicative of the changing of the season (49XXX).

The one exception (which I completely forgot) was "Initiations", which got SD 49005.3 even though "Projections" and "Elogium" coming after it were S1 leftovers with 48XXX. Moving "Initiations" after "Elogium" would present no real continuity problems...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ToddPence]

There are also a couple of TOS episodes in which the stardates go backwards. In "Mudd's Women", the stardate goes backward from 1329.8 to 1329.1 during the episode! Also, in "Spock's Brain", although the latter is almost certainly a line flub on Shatner's part.

 

[Ziz]

Although admittedly DS9 makes mention of "recent Borg nastiness" in an episode whose stardate predates that of ST:FC... But then again, ST:FC makes mention of repeated Borg nastiness that preceded the events of that movie.

Actually, you can nail down the DS9/ST:FC overlap a little tighter.

In the beginning of "Trials & Tribble-ations" when Sisko is starting to tell the story to Dulmer & Lucsly, when he mentions the Enterprise...

Dulmer: Which 'Enterprise', captain? There have been five.
Lucsly: Six.

I took that as a reference to the newly built & launched NCC-1701-E, since FC came out right around the same time as T&T aired. And looking at it from a strict TV production history perspective, they couldn't have been referring to NX-01, since that series didn't exist yet.

What I would have loved if they had done it was bumpers on two episodes - one at the end where Sisko tells Worf to take the Defiant to Earth because of another Borg incursion, and another at the beginning of the subsequent episode of Worf coming back with the Defiant. O'Brien says something to the effect of "We've got a lot of work to do to patch her up", and then starts asking Worf how everyone on the E is as the scene fades out or goes to commercial or whatever. Maybe even spread them apart by an ep or two and do without Worf on the station, with the characters making a reference to wondering how he's is doing against the Borg.

 

[Captain Pike]

Production order is the way to go imo..

 

[Timo]

Actually, you can nail down the DS9/ST:FC overlap a little tighter.

In the beginning of "Trials & Tribble-ations" when Sisko is starting to tell the story to Dulmer & Lucsly, when he mentions the Enterprise...

Dulmer: Which 'Enterprise', captain? There have been five.
Lucsly: Six.

I took that as a reference to the newly built & launched NCC-1701-E, since FC came out right around the same time as T&T aired.

But how does that help with "tightening up" things? We don't know the exact launch date of the E-E, nor the relationship between that date and "Trials". All we have is a vague reference in ST:FC to the ship having been in existence for a year before the movie.

Timo Saloniemi