How long did season 2 take in-universe?

[F. King Daniel]

At the very end, Pike gets a little overly dramatic with "goodbye my friends.... my family" and my reaction was, hasn't he known them for like 2 or 3 months?

Does anyone know how long the season spans in-universe? I know there are stardates, but season one stardates were TOS-authentic random numbers so I assumed they were here also?

 

[Boris Skrbic]

Less than a year, starting in late 2257 or early ‘58.

 

[Christopher]

"Through the Valley of Shadows," the episode just before the 2-part finale, says that it's been "months" since 2x03 "Point of Light" and "weeks" since 2x08 "If Memory Serves." So the spacing between episodes must be greater than it appears. (Conversely, 2x04 implies it's only a week or so after 2x01, with Linus saying he had a cold "last week." Unless he had two colds, or one really long one.)

Which is kind of a perennial problem with serialized TV these days -- the episodes seem to follow immediately after one another in terms of story and character developments, but even 13- or 14-episode seasons are presumed to span months. Even the Marvel Netflix shows are guilty of this despite each season being released all at once.

 

[The Wormhole]

For shits and giggles, I tried using the stardates given throughout the season on the stardate calculator. Granted, this is flawed since the site only works for the 24th century style stardates, and indeed it lists all the stardates from Disco season 2 as being in the 24th century year 2324. That said, if we ignore the year, it places Brother on January 10, and Such Sweet Sorrow on January 19, with the epilogue scene being March 14. Unfortunately, things fall apart with An Obol for Charon's stardate placing it on November 1 and the stardate for If Memory Serves being July 14.

 

[Lord Garth]

Does anyone know how long the season spans in-universe? I know there are stardates, but season one stardates were TOS-authentic random numbers so I assumed they were here also?

The stardates in Disco are pretty much useless.

The first five episodes span one or two weeks at most. Cutting and pasting what I said somewhere else. For context, I'm in the middle of a re-watch...

Season 2, at least the first five episodes, span much less time than I thought. In "An Obol for Charon", Linus said he had a cold "last week" and Tilly said it's the second time "this week" she feels like she was hit with a lightning bolt. And Reno is still hanging around. It's also Number One's first chance to see Captain Pike in person since the Enterprise went to dry dock.

If the first four episodes span just a week, it also makes Burnham and Pike finding out about Spock, Amanda visiting, and then Number One telling Pike she only told the Enterprise crew he's in trouble but didn't give any specifics seem a lot more immediate.

For shits and giggles, I tried using the stardates given throughout the season on the stardate calculator. Granted, this is flawed since the site only works for the 24th century style stardates, and indeed it lists all the stardates from Disco season 2 as being in the 24th century year 2324. That said, if we ignore the year, it places Brother on January 10, and Such Sweet Sorrow on January 19, with the epilogue scene being March 14. Unfortunately, things fall apart with An Obol for Charon's stardate placing it on November 1 and the stardate for If Memory Serves being July 14.

I'd go with the stardates from "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II" as the "correct" version (quotations deliberate) since that's the only place we'll find any type of consistency in the season. Stardates are given for each episode and point in time that Red Angel suited Burnham goes back to. And the consistency only works, retroactively, with this season. If you compare SSS's stardates to anything from the first season, forget about it.

 

[Timo]

DSC S1 really outdid TOS in the stardate business, being the first to do stardates that unambiguously go backwards. TOS episodes (and even TAS and early TNG ones!) can be shuffled, DSC ones can't... And even the whole Tasha business is in the details and final two digits, while DSC jumps to an all-new millennium and then back.

"Obol" vs. "If Memory Serves" kept up that proud tradition for S2. Then again, all of S2 went backwards on all of S1, to greater or lesser degree.

So, what to make of "Sorrow II"? Should we now expect a reboot of policy, with TNG-style move from initial indifference to strict systematiscm for all future seasons?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SJGardner]

So, what to make of "Sorrow II"? Should we now expect a reboot of policy, with TNG-style move from initial indifference to strict systematiscm for all future seasons?

I hope there's a new timekeeping system in the 32nd century, because even TNG-style stardates would be somewhere in the 900 thousands, if I calculate correctly. And of course, it depends on the crew of the Discovery itself whether they switch to another system or not. If the show goes for the fallen Federation setting, I'd rather that they just used plain old calendar dates or maybe even a "Day #" system.

I'd just love to see a scene with Burnham/Saru trying to narrate a log entry but giving up when the computer only returns 99999 ERROR: INTEGER OVERFLOW for the Stardate. Or, it could turn out that TOS Stardates are just time indices for some larger time unit.

 

[Timo]

Well, TOS stardates must repeat after every ten years, there apparently being 1,000 units per year in that "system", too. So there's no problem with DSC and TOS both having SD 1234, say. DSC just has the fifties version while TOS has the sixties one. (And perhaps TAS had the seventies one?)

Why TNG would bother to add the "decade digit" but not the "century digit" is anybody's guess. For all we know, stardates ever since the adoption of the system have been in a nine-digit format, catering for counting millions of years, but our heroes have dropped not only those leading zeroes but also any superfluous non-zeroes ("We already know we're in the sixties, thank you very much"). If DSC wanted to hold on to that system for the 32nd century or whatever, they needn't bother with any extra digits, the same logic of them themselves knowing which decade or century they are on still remaining. I just hope they wouldn't use the fifth digits 4 and 5 established in the TNG era, unless they are going to hit the same respective sixties and seventies in their future century...

Then again, whenever Kirk time-traveled, he dropped the whole stardate nonsense. I hope Burnham's posse has the sense to do the same. Especially if they keep on time-hopping, including hops outside the Federation brackets of world history.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

I wish they’d just gone with JJ stardates, which aren’t specific to the KT, especially since it shouldn’t be impossible to keep them consistent within the limited number of scripts.

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

I'd just love to see a scene with Burnham/Saru trying to narrate a log entry but giving up when the computer only returns 99999 ERROR: INTEGER OVERFLOW for the Stardate. Or, it could turn out that TOS Stardates are just time indices for some larger time unit.

Y2K all over again.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

They were in the MU for 9 months, right? That was 4 episodes with some sort of time-shenanigans between the 2 univereses.

 

[Timo]

No, they were away from the regular universe for 9 months, which is different. They apparently only spent a few days on the Mirror side, all the time fearing that the locals would catch up to who they were. It's just that the return trip involved time travel, moving them forward those nine months.

Stardate-wise, we got 1038 just before they left for the MU, and 1834 while they were in there, but nothing after their return. Not until "Obol" which continued at 1834, oddly but perhaps consistently enough (we should dismiss the MU datapoint in any case, and while the start of S2 may have spanned just a few weeks, the nine extra months added to the 1200-1300 -range S1 datapoints could yield somethink like this). But then it all got retconned in the finale, which retroactively gave stardates in the 1020 range to the S2 early adventures.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

They were in the MU for 9 months, right?

No, they just jumped forward in time when they returned to the regular universe.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

No, they just jumped forward in time when they returned to the regular universe.

Thanks. I was thinking along those lines, but didn't type what I meant. They were "gone" from the PU for 9 months.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

They were together for only a short time bug they were fighting to save all life in the galaxy. That has a way of bonding people.

 

[Timo]

Plus, Pike seems to be the type to summon the right words for the occasion. He got the heroes' (and the audience's!) unconditional love with his introductory speech already. Nothing strange about him finding parting words folks would agree with, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

The initial DSC stardates reach 4789.6 and 4851.5 for two Klingon attacks during the nine months. It looks like the writers took the TOS bible instructions very literally, picking four digits without even trying to keep incrementing them in general, so now we can probably extrapolate such four-digit stardates even further into the past (with a possible sharp dividing line in 2233 or later between these and JJ stardates).

 

[Jinn]

It seems pretty clear to me that the DSC stardates are TOS-style random numbers. And that's coming from someone who's build her Trek chronology around the assumption that TOS stardates imply an order of events.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

While you can’t build a chronology that way, for all their inconsistency, TOS stardates still increased in general and weren’t being used definitively for earlier decades, thus implying a zero point in the early 2260s which DSC writers could’ve chosen to respect, and therefore adopt JJ stardates for their show (both Spocks were born on 2230.06, while Robau of course used a JJ stardate before Nero could’ve influenced anything). I don’t see that the fifteen, then fourteen scripts couldn’t have been coordinated to use stardates in the 2256 to 2258 range, thus providing us with a number of explicit dates for the show, especially since DSC hasn’t shied away from being inspired by Abramsverse elements.

 

[Jinn]

While you can’t build a chronology that way

Oh, that worked pretty well, actually. I also included a ton of non-canon novels and lined them up by stardate. I didn't assign a specific value of passed time to stardate units though, that definitely wouldn't work.