How Many Star Trek Productions are in the Same Timeline?

[Tuskin38]

Now let's take that a step further. If there was a new series of That '70's Show being produced today, and the creators said that it takes place during the same time as the original show, but the production values looked like the show takes place in the present day as opposed to what the original show looked like, then I'd be wondering why the producers are claiming such an obvious untruth, other than that they are trying to milk the popularity of the former show to get me to watch the new one even though there's very little resemblance to the old show.

Star Trek isn't historical fiction.
It isn't real life.

 

[Dukhat]

Star Trek isn't historical fiction.
It isn't real life.

Neither was That '70's Show. But it's not about real life. It's about believability. No one would think a sequel to That '70's Show that looks like it takes place in 2018 but advertised as taking place at the same time as the original is a legitimate sequel.

 

[Tuskin38]

Neither was That '70's Show. But it's not about real life. It's about believability. No one would think a sequel to That '70's Show that looks like it takes place in 2018 but advertised as taking place at the same time as the original is a legitimate sequel.

That 70s show was a fictional show talking playing a historical time period, the 1970s.

Star Trek isn't.

 

[Dukhat]

That 70s show was a fictional show talking playing a historical time period, the 1970s.

Star Trek isn't.

Go back and reread what I wrote. It is not about what the show is about. It's about comparing one show's production values to another.

 

[The Old Mixer]

In the first season of M*A*S*H, Hawkeye's parents were alive and living in Vermont. He also had a sister. Later in the series it was established that his mother died when he was young, he was an only child, and he lived in Maine.

In the first season of That '70's Show, Donna had a 14 year old sister. Later in the series it was established that she was an only child.

Chuck Cunningham is usually the go-to example for this sort of thing.

 

[TribbleFeeder]

Surely if you connect with the characters they matter regardless of which timeline they're in? "In a Mirror, Darkly" didn't work for me because they didn't make me care about those mirror-ENT characters. The Kelvin movies made me care about the alternate TOS crew and they work for me.

And don't different versions of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond or Batman and Superman matter?

I can see what you’re saying, for sure. It just gets messy in my head thinking okay...well who’s the real Spock?! Haha

As far as comic book heroes I don’t really care for them but it’s a different thing completely. It’s different versions of the same story. These are different versions of different stories in different worlds that are supposed to somehow connect. I don’t mind a good remake at all.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

So, what you're basically saying is that you look at it the same way you look at a stageplay.

Yes, that is quite apt!

 

[Ethros]

Rather than trying to use different timelines to explain the differences in the shows, I subscribe to the theory that the shows are just a representation of the single timeline of Star Trek that we can never truly 'see', because it exists as an idea and not something that is real... and representations/interpretations sometimes get things wrong or contradict each other.

The Enterprise-E comes from a timeline in which the Enterprise-E was there at the the events of the first flight. Same goes for how fat and old Riker and Troi look in TATV. That stuff always happened in Pegasus, however what we saw was just how the production presented it (in a really lame, cheesy, and hamfisted way). A Commander Riker was having a moral dilemma and was using the holodeck to work out his demons. What we saw was Jonathan Frakes acting out that story, but it looked really different because, hey, it was a decade later and those sets had been destroyed and had to be rebuilt and he got noticeably older.

When we see different things happening like Discovery Klingons looking all crazy or the ship not looking like it was built out of cardboard, what we are seeing is our universe telling the stories of that era with our universe's production technology and aesthetics. What we see as Micahel Burnham is actually MSG, playing a character from the single, unified, Star Trek timeline. This is why Sarek looks different in different eras. This is why sometimes little things don't link up perfectly. Would anyone assume that TAS takes place in a separate 2D timeline set apart from TOS, or that some sort of anomaly caused the universe to suddenly look animated instead of live action for a couple years?

Why? Because why not? People who see different timelines want to see different timelines. I want to see a single timeline, where the actions from one series or the histories they create really do impact later series. I want to have the comfort of knowing that we are seeing a chronicle of different groups of heroes from the same timeline; a history lesson on the future.

The idea that each series is its own timeline, or events in one series completely overwrites the histories of that same series (such as the First Contact/ENT incursion timeline theory) seems like an overly complicated solution to a very minor issue. The simplest explanation for me is that productions don't always represent the "true" story perfectly. If the sets of the DSC Enterprise look different from the TOS Enterprise (which it 100% will) I'm not going to assume that they are different Enterprise's from two separate timelines. I'm going to assume that neither Enterprise set is what the 'real' Enterprise looked like; they are just different interpretations of the same ship. In the 'real' imaginary Star Trek universe, there is an alien species called Klingons that have ridges sometimes and sometimes not. Whether they had hair or other weird crap on their face was up to the production, and Discovery just hasn't revealed why there aren't any non-ridged Klingons running around. They might never do it (although they probably will, and it'll be hamfisted for sure). If they don't? We can rationalize it easily.

If we were presented with a set of movies and tv shows all done back to back, starting with the past parts of First Contact (like a sci-fi drama about Zephram Cochrane's first flight, in which astronauts from the future came to help him out), followed by ENT (augment virus and all), followed by DSC (along with whatever explanation they give for non-ridged Klingons), followed by TOS (where the episode of Trouble with Tribbles also included DS9 characters in the background), followed by TNG (where the episode Pegasus included scenes of Riker in the holodeck), leading up to a movie about the Enterprise-E fighting the Borg and traveling back in time (A sequel to the Zephram Cochrane movie), no one would be saying that there were different timelines, because we'd be presented with a story that is told in a linear fashion which includes incursions from their own futures. But the shows and movies weren't presented in chronological order, and production design between each was vastly different.

I use the same logic for the books. There are things that happen in older books that can't have happened in the established continuity of the modern books, but modern books often reference them. So little details in Imzadi can't link up to the modern continuity, but the events in Imzadi are the history of Riker and Troi's relationship.

Now, I don't mean to say that all time travel in Star Trek operates this way. We've been presented with lots of stories where the effects of time travel vary, depending on how the time travel is achieved. There are plenty of times where the events in a episode or film re-writes events (Year of Hell, for instance), or create a separate alternate timeline (ST09), but those stories are presented as such. The events of First Contact, The Voyage Home, Past Tense, Time's Arrow, Trials and Tribble-ations, etc, are not presented as having huge, timeline altering effects, changing the fundamental basis of history for later events. Before ENT showed Borg on Earth, I would have agreed that yes, it is possible that the Ent-E didn't show up in the past in the original Zephram Cochrane flight, and their timetravel began with them, but as soon as ENT had their own Borg that solidified it as always happening that way for me. That information was classified and studied by rogue scientists (Seven's parents) but was not known to the everyday starship captain. We are never told that Starfleet had NO information on the Borg, only that the people we see on screen had no knowledge of them.

Now, if Michael Burnham beams aboard the Enterprise and kills Spock and Pike in the first two seconds, then I will concede and say that it could be a different timeline, but I'm 99.99999% sure that won't happen. Because this is an actual contradiction of events presented.

Great post. I was suprised no one else had liked it when I got to the bottom

 

[MAGolding]

What are the three usual episode orders? Do you mean Air-date, Production and Stardate orders? There is the BBC order but that is pretty weird to be honest! Are there any other orders apart from those?
JB

1=Production order, 2=USA broadcast order by NBC,3=stardate order,4=season order and by stardate within a season. I think that I year or two ago I listed those four possible orders, and then added a fifth possible order which I forget.

 

[Lt. Tyler]

1=Production order, 2=USA broadcast order by NBC,3=stardate order,4=season order and by stardate within a season. I think that I year or two ago I listed those four possible orders, and then added a fifth possible order which I forget.

So then what would be the most logical choice out of all of those to determine sequence of events from each episode?

 

[Vger23]

Rather than trying to use different timelines to explain the differences in the shows, I subscribe to the theory that the shows are just a representation of the single timeline of Star Trek that we can never truly 'see', because it exists as an idea and not something that is real... and representations/interpretations sometimes get things wrong or contradict each other.

The Enterprise-E comes from a timeline in which the Enterprise-E was there at the the events of the first flight. Same goes for how fat and old Riker and Troi look in TATV. That stuff always happened in Pegasus, however what we saw was just how the production presented it (in a really lame, cheesy, and hamfisted way). A Commander Riker was having a moral dilemma and was using the holodeck to work out his demons. What we saw was Jonathan Frakes acting out that story, but it looked really different because, hey, it was a decade later and those sets had been destroyed and had to be rebuilt and he got noticeably older.

When we see different things happening like Discovery Klingons looking all crazy or the ship not looking like it was built out of cardboard, what we are seeing is our universe telling the stories of that era with our universe's production technology and aesthetics. What we see as Micahel Burnham is actually MSG, playing a character from the single, unified, Star Trek timeline. This is why Sarek looks different in different eras. This is why sometimes little things don't link up perfectly. Would anyone assume that TAS takes place in a separate 2D timeline set apart from TOS, or that some sort of anomaly caused the universe to suddenly look animated instead of live action for a couple years?

Why? Because why not? People who see different timelines want to see different timelines. I want to see a single timeline, where the actions from one series or the histories they create really do impact later series. I want to have the comfort of knowing that we are seeing a chronicle of different groups of heroes from the same timeline; a history lesson on the future.

The idea that each series is its own timeline, or events in one series completely overwrites the histories of that same series (such as the First Contact/ENT incursion timeline theory) seems like an overly complicated solution to a very minor issue. The simplest explanation for me is that productions don't always represent the "true" story perfectly. If the sets of the DSC Enterprise look different from the TOS Enterprise (which it 100% will) I'm not going to assume that they are different Enterprise's from two separate timelines. I'm going to assume that neither Enterprise set is what the 'real' Enterprise looked like; they are just different interpretations of the same ship. In the 'real' imaginary Star Trek universe, there is an alien species called Klingons that have ridges sometimes and sometimes not. Whether they had hair or other weird crap on their face was up to the production, and Discovery just hasn't revealed why there aren't any non-ridged Klingons running around. They might never do it (although they probably will, and it'll be hamfisted for sure). If they don't? We can rationalize it easily.

If we were presented with a set of movies and tv shows all done back to back, starting with the past parts of First Contact (like a sci-fi drama about Zephram Cochrane's first flight, in which astronauts from the future came to help him out), followed by ENT (augment virus and all), followed by DSC (along with whatever explanation they give for non-ridged Klingons), followed by TOS (where the episode of Trouble with Tribbles also included DS9 characters in the background), followed by TNG (where the episode Pegasus included scenes of Riker in the holodeck), leading up to a movie about the Enterprise-E fighting the Borg and traveling back in time (A sequel to the Zephram Cochrane movie), no one would be saying that there were different timelines, because we'd be presented with a story that is told in a linear fashion which includes incursions from their own futures. But the shows and movies weren't presented in chronological order, and production design between each was vastly different.

I use the same logic for the books. There are things that happen in older books that can't have happened in the established continuity of the modern books, but modern books often reference them. So little details in Imzadi can't link up to the modern continuity, but the events in Imzadi are the history of Riker and Troi's relationship.

Now, I don't mean to say that all time travel in Star Trek operates this way. We've been presented with lots of stories where the effects of time travel vary, depending on how the time travel is achieved. There are plenty of times where the events in a episode or film re-writes events (Year of Hell, for instance), or create a separate alternate timeline (ST09), but those stories are presented as such. The events of First Contact, The Voyage Home, Past Tense, Time's Arrow, Trials and Tribble-ations, etc, are not presented as having huge, timeline altering effects, changing the fundamental basis of history for later events. Before ENT showed Borg on Earth, I would have agreed that yes, it is possible that the Ent-E didn't show up in the past in the original Zephram Cochrane flight, and their timetravel began with them, but as soon as ENT had their own Borg that solidified it as always happening that way for me. That information was classified and studied by rogue scientists (Seven's parents) but was not known to the everyday starship captain. We are never told that Starfleet had NO information on the Borg, only that the people we see on screen had no knowledge of them.

Now, if Michael Burnham beams aboard the Enterprise and kills Spock and Pike in the first two seconds, then I will concede and say that it could be a different timeline, but I'm 99.99999% sure that won't happen. Because this is an actual contradiction of events presented.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you ENJOY a fictional franchise that spans over 50 years and 750+ hours of entertainment without causing your head to explode.

 

[Lt. Tyler]

Rather than trying to use different timelines to explain the differences in the shows, I subscribe to the theory that the shows are just a representation of the single timeline of Star Trek that we can never truly 'see', because it exists as an idea and not something that is real... and representations/interpretations sometimes get things wrong or contradict each other.

The Enterprise-E comes from a timeline in which the Enterprise-E was there at the the events of the first flight. Same goes for how fat and old Riker and Troi look in TATV. That stuff always happened in Pegasus, however what we saw was just how the production presented it (in a really lame, cheesy, and hamfisted way). A Commander Riker was having a moral dilemma and was using the holodeck to work out his demons. What we saw was Jonathan Frakes acting out that story, but it looked really different because, hey, it was a decade later and those sets had been destroyed and had to be rebuilt and he got noticeably older.

When we see different things happening like Discovery Klingons looking all crazy or the ship not looking like it was built out of cardboard, what we are seeing is our universe telling the stories of that era with our universe's production technology and aesthetics. What we see as Micahel Burnham is actually MSG, playing a character from the single, unified, Star Trek timeline. This is why Sarek looks different in different eras. This is why sometimes little things don't link up perfectly. Would anyone assume that TAS takes place in a separate 2D timeline set apart from TOS, or that some sort of anomaly caused the universe to suddenly look animated instead of live action for a couple years?

Why? Because why not? People who see different timelines want to see different timelines. I want to see a single timeline, where the actions from one series or the histories they create really do impact later series. I want to have the comfort of knowing that we are seeing a chronicle of different groups of heroes from the same timeline; a history lesson on the future.

The idea that each series is its own timeline, or events in one series completely overwrites the histories of that same series (such as the First Contact/ENT incursion timeline theory) seems like an overly complicated solution to a very minor issue. The simplest explanation for me is that productions don't always represent the "true" story perfectly. If the sets of the DSC Enterprise look different from the TOS Enterprise (which it 100% will) I'm not going to assume that they are different Enterprise's from two separate timelines. I'm going to assume that neither Enterprise set is what the 'real' Enterprise looked like; they are just different interpretations of the same ship. In the 'real' imaginary Star Trek universe, there is an alien species called Klingons that have ridges sometimes and sometimes not. Whether they had hair or other weird crap on their face was up to the production, and Discovery just hasn't revealed why there aren't any non-ridged Klingons running around. They might never do it (although they probably will, and it'll be hamfisted for sure). If they don't? We can rationalize it easily.

If we were presented with a set of movies and tv shows all done back to back, starting with the past parts of First Contact (like a sci-fi drama about Zephram Cochrane's first flight, in which astronauts from the future came to help him out), followed by ENT (augment virus and all), followed by DSC (along with whatever explanation they give for non-ridged Klingons), followed by TOS (where the episode of Trouble with Tribbles also included DS9 characters in the background), followed by TNG (where the episode Pegasus included scenes of Riker in the holodeck), leading up to a movie about the Enterprise-E fighting the Borg and traveling back in time (A sequel to the Zephram Cochrane movie), no one would be saying that there were different timelines, because we'd be presented with a story that is told in a linear fashion which includes incursions from their own futures. But the shows and movies weren't presented in chronological order, and production design between each was vastly different.

I use the same logic for the books. There are things that happen in older books that can't have happened in the established continuity of the modern books, but modern books often reference them. So little details in Imzadi can't link up to the modern continuity, but the events in Imzadi are the history of Riker and Troi's relationship.

Now, I don't mean to say that all time travel in Star Trek operates this way. We've been presented with lots of stories where the effects of time travel vary, depending on how the time travel is achieved. There are plenty of times where the events in a episode or film re-writes events (Year of Hell, for instance), or create a separate alternate timeline (ST09), but those stories are presented as such. The events of First Contact, The Voyage Home, Past Tense, Time's Arrow, Trials and Tribble-ations, etc, are not presented as having huge, timeline altering effects, changing the fundamental basis of history for later events. Before ENT showed Borg on Earth, I would have agreed that yes, it is possible that the Ent-E didn't show up in the past in the original Zephram Cochrane flight, and their timetravel began with them, but as soon as ENT had their own Borg that solidified it as always happening that way for me. That information was classified and studied by rogue scientists (Seven's parents) but was not known to the everyday starship captain. We are never told that Starfleet had NO information on the Borg, only that the people we see on screen had no knowledge of them.

Now, if Michael Burnham beams aboard the Enterprise and kills Spock and Pike in the first two seconds, then I will concede and say that it could be a different timeline, but I'm 99.99999% sure that won't happen. Because this is an actual contradiction of events presented.

Reading this was almost as long as the 5 year mission.

 

[MAGolding]

So then what would be the most logical choice out of all of those to determine sequence of events from each episode?

For the first 10 Star Trek movies production order, release order, and stardate order will be the same, so any of those orders will be fine for putting them in order of fictional events.

After the first season of TNG the staff got their act together a bit and after that the production order, original syndication broadcast order, and stardate order were usually the same for all future TNG episodes in the next six seasons. Of course some TNG episodes didn't have stardates and some TNG episodes weren't broadcast in production order for various reasons, but over 90 percent of TNG episodes agree in production order, broadcast order, and stardate order. For the rest the probable order should be deduced on an episode by episode basis, but in most cases there should be two possible orders that agree.

And the same can be said within each of the two other TNG era series. The episodes within DS9 and VOY can be ordered easily whenever the production order, the broadcast order, and the stardate order agree. And when two of the possible orders agree, that should be enough. So there should be only a few problems with the relative order of the DS9 and Voy episodes.

But there is some chronological overlap between TNG and DS9 episodes and between DS9 and VOY episodes. In those cases if both have stardates the one with the lower stardate is earlier and the one with the higher stardate is later. If one episode doesn't have a stardate stated only it's star should be between the most recent stardate and the next stardate of a of a later episode of the series. If there is a block of episodes without stardates in a series the episodes should be in order of production and order of broadcast if those are the same. And if episodes in one series and episodes in another series don't have stardates they should probably happen in order of production since it should be possible to find the dates of production of those episodes. And in some cases plot elements may indicate whether a move or episode in one series happens before or after a movie or episode in another series.

For ENT episodes the possible orders are production order, broadcast order, and Earth calendar order. And in most cases the production order and the broadcast order agree. There are only a few exceptions that have to be investigated case by case.

And the Earth dates, when given, agree with the production and broadcast order. Except that in the first season the 11th episode made and broadcast "Cold Front" has the Earth date of September 12, 2151 and the 12th episode produced and broadcast, "Silent Enemy" has the Earth date of September 1, 2151. Therefore, "Silent Enemy" must happen before "Cold Front". Unless the Earth date in "Cold Front" is given in the official United Earth calendar at the time, and then the United Earth adopted a different official calendar before "Silent Enemy". For example, if United Earth switched from the Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar between the two episodes it would be just barely possible for September 12 to be followed by September 1 a few days later.

The three - so far - alternate universe due to time travel Star Trek movies in The Kelvin Timeline happen in the same order in production order, release order, and stardate order. So there's no problem.

I have only seen the first episode of Star Trek Discovery. But I think that the first season is highly serialized and if so the episodes should all happen in the order they were streamed on CBS All Access.

So that leaves the three seasons of TOS, the one and a third seasons of TAS, and the first season of TNG to consider.

And in those cases the three usual orders - production order, broadcast order, and stardate order - give very different episode orders. It is rare for an episode to have the same number in two of those orders, and probably unknown for an episode to have the same number in all three of those episodes.

If you believe that the the stardates correspond to the passage of time on Earth and other planets always with the same consistent ratio of stardate units to planetary time units, then all episodes must be ordered by stardates.

But if you believe that the ration of stardate units to planetary time units can vary over time, and that stardates can even go down instead of constantly going up, then you can order the episodes in the three seasons of TOS, the one and a third seasons of TAS, and the first season of TNG by production order or by broadcast order.

And it is the general opinion that production order is the better choice as it shows things changing during the first episodes from they way they were in the pilot episodes to the way they were in the rest of TOS.

If one accepts that stardates can go down as well as up, there are two other ways to order episodes.

Order episodes by seasons, and within each season order episodes by stardate order. That will require that stardates go down a bit four different times between live action and animated seasons, while going up during each season.

And the second new possible order is the same, ordering episodes by seasons and by stardates within seasons, but chooses different seasons. The 1st season would be the episodes produced by Gene Roddenberry, the 2nd season the episodes produced by Gene L. Coon, the 3rd season the episodes produced by John Meredyth Lucas, the 4th season the episodes produced by Fred Freiburger, the 5th the 1st animated season, the 6th the 2nd animated season.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

 

[Dukhat]

Chuck Cunningham is usually the go-to example for this sort of thing.

I was never a huge fan of Happy Days, but yes, Chuck is the prime example.

 

[johnnybear]

How does one work with the TNG first season stardates? I tried to once but found episodes mentioned in the show to have a later stardate than the episode it came from! The Battle is one such example I think! I'm sure it was recounted in Coming of Age when Dexter Remmick first comes on board but it's stardate is set after the episode?
JB