Stardates in episodes?

[Crewman47]

I've always wondered this as in TNG we had practically every episode taken place on a given stardate (which imo makes it easy to judge when an episode takes place in the year) but then came DS9 and for each season only around a half dozen episodes ever got a stardate mentioned, which sort of makes it hard to track when each episode is set after the previous one.

Now I know that you can make assumptions based on production time that each episode could be around two weeks apart but why do you think they left it vague by not having Sisko (or anyone else) give a stardate for each episode in the series?

Just curious?

 

[Ezri]

Always felt that stardates were worthless as a mode to date anything.

First off, what if any official canon is there to deal with the subject of a starting date. Since it is 2008, I know there was a January 1, 1 as the start of the current era. True, nobody really understands what was happening on that date as it is lost. On the other hand, I could punch in the date and find out the sun rise and the sun set and the moon rise and the moon set.

With stardates, it is well not fixed in canon so your guess is just as good as mine about the most pointless topics of a single date.

 

[Smiley]

The stardates let you know which season you're watching on the modern shows, and they sometimes are accurate for before/after placement of episodes.

 

[cultcross]

DS9 ditched the plot device of log entries much more often than the other series, and as such we had much fewer stated stardates. Not an altogether bad thing, in my opinion.
It's not as if DS9 in its later years needed stardates to determine episode order, and when they're interchangeable reset button plots, it doesn't relaly matter what order they occurred in.

 

[Navaros]

Crewman47 said:

Now I know that you can make assumptions based on production time that each episode could be around two weeks apart but why do you think they left it vague by not having Sisko (or anyone else) give a stardate for each episode in the series?

Just speculation, but my guess would be because they knew DS9 had many strengths as a good show not just because of the Trek brand, and therefore did not have to rely on minutiae that if we are being honest, only hardcore Trek fans find interesting, in order to fill out screen-time. I suspect this is also why on a similar note, DS9 for the most part discarded the technobabble filler which plagues TNG and VOY.

Other part of the guess is that DS9, much to it's credit, is an ensemble show, not a the Sisko show. It would have been tacky and detracted alot from the quality & variety of stories they did if they had to be sure to insert a statement/scene of the Sisko giving the stardate in every episode.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, many of the DS9 plots were driven by events that did not even involve our Starfleet heroes at first. A TOS or TNG adventure would begin with exposition on what the mission of our heroes is. A DS9 story would often begin with Quark, Odo, Jake or Kira running into a plot element that in the first act sweeps the Starfleet heroes into the adventure, no exposition needed.

That's the advantage of being there already, as opposed to arriving in a starship...

Anyway, I'm thankful for the sparsity of stardate references in late DS9, as it means DS9 is practically free of chronological contradictions!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[FalTorPan]

Timo said:
Anyway, I'm thankful for the sparsity of stardate references in late DS9, as it means DS9 is practically free of chronological contradictions!

How useful are stardates really when trying to figure out the sequence in which stories are supposedly arranged?

I was glad to see a sparsity of log entries simply because it "broke the mold." I had hoped Enterprise would havce followed DS9 in this regard. At least they used Gregorian calendar references.

EDITED to correct a typographical error ("sparisty" to "sparsity")

 

[Ezri]

FalTorPan said:

Timo said:
Anyway, I'm thankful for the sparsity of stardate references in late DS9, as it means DS9 is practically free of chronological contradictions!

How useful are stardates really when trying to figure out the sequence in which stories are supposedly arranged?

I was glad to see a sparisty of log entries simply because it "broke the mold." I had hoped Enterprise would havce followed DS9 in this regard. At least they used Gregorian calendar references.

INDEED

Always like the Gregorian calendar references as I know what they are talking about.

 

[CaptainJon]

I always assumed that (unless otherwise stated) each episode was in in chronological order. Besides, look at the mess made out of the stardates in TNG season 1 where "Skin of Evil" apparently took place before several episodes where Yar is alive.

 

[Ezri]

CaptainJon said:
I always assumed that (unless otherwise stated) each episode was in in chronological order. Besides, look at the mess made out of the stardates in TNG season 1 where "Skin of Evil" apparently took place before several episodes where Yar is alive.

That is the reason why I hate stardates. First off, the vast majority of the population has no idea what is or is not a stardate. Second, even the fans really do not care about stardates as nobody really has any clue what they are talking about. Even Rodenberry the creator of the show really had no canon dealing with stardates.

Rodenberry the creator of the show had two major problems with canon. The first is what does NCC stand for and what does stardates stand for. Let me be like Shatner on Saturday Night Live when he did his skit when asked questions like this “You, have you ever kissed a girl. GET A LIFE. Move out of your parents basement. You have taken a job I did in the 1960’s and made it a total waste of your life.” I may not have gotten the dialog half right, but it is very much like he said.

 

[Nebusj]

Ezri said:
That is the reason why I hate stardates. First off, the vast majority of the population has no idea what is or is not a stardate.

Most people seem to have tumbled on pretty quickly to the idea that it's an internal-to-the-universe way of dating when things happen, and that these things happen sometime in the future but we can't really say just when. Since that's the behind-the-stage reason for having them, it's pretty good that people pretty much get that.

Second, even the fans really do not care about stardates as nobody really has any clue what they are talking about.

Um ... they're ways of denoting time that can't really be pinned down to exact dates or hours, and they're intended to proceed sequentially? This is hard to figure out?

I mean, yes, there are people who want to figure out whether stardate 44173.9 is in the morning or afternoon of July 17th, but that's no more hazardous a pastime than people trying to make up estimates for how big ships are or how much they weigh.

 

[FalTorPan]

Ezri said:

CaptainJon said:
I always assumed that (unless otherwise stated) each episode was in in chronological order. Besides, look at the mess made out of the stardates in TNG season 1 where "Skin of Evil" apparently took place before several episodes where Yar is alive.

That is the reason why I hate stardates. First off, the vast majority of the population has no idea what is or is not a stardate. Second, even the fans really do not care about stardates as nobody really has any clue what they are talking about. Even Rodenberry the creator of the show really had no canon dealing with stardates.

Rodenberry the creator of the show had two major problems with canon. The first is what does NCC stand for and what does stardates stand for. Let me be like Shatner on Saturday Night Live when he did his skit when asked questions like this “You, have you ever kissed a girl. GET A LIFE. Move out of your parents basement. You have taken a job I did in the 1960’s and made it a total waste of your life.” I may not have gotten the dialog half right, but it is very much like he said.

Stardates had a storytelling purpose in the days of the original series, when no Gregorian calendar year had been established for the adventures depicted in that show. Now that we know the year of basically every story, stardates have no use other than to maintain continuity with the original series... and to sound futuristic.

 

[Ezri]

Therefore stardates are pointless

 

[Timo]

Well, Trek is pointless, really.

But as long as writers write "Captain's log, Stardate <insert date here>; we're proceeding to...", and a separate set of "specialists" inserts the actual date, we do get a benefit of sorts. Namely, that bunch of specialists can then keep overall continuity on how the episodes relate to each other, which takes place before or after which, and by how long approximately.

The writers couldn't be bothered to do that - they don't even have timely access to what their colleagues have written, and can't know in which timepoint their story will be inserted. And the experts would have a tough time if they really had to figure out exact dates in the usual Gregorian fashion. But as long as we have the practice where the writer leaves a <____> for a single stardate somewhere near the beginning of the episode, and the expert inserts something coarsely fitting there, things work pretty smoothly...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[FalTorPan]

Timo said:
Well, Trek is pointless, really.

But as long as writers write "Captain's log, Stardate <insert date here>; we're proceeding to...", and a separate set of "specialists" inserts the actual date, we do get a benefit of sorts. Namely, that bunch of specialists can then keep overall continuity on how the episodes relate to each other, which takes place before or after which, and by how long approximately.

The writers couldn't be bothered to do that - they don't even have timely access to what their colleagues have written, and can't know in which timepoint their story will be inserted. And the experts would have a tough time if they really had to figure out exact dates in the usual Gregorian fashion. But as long as we have the practice where the writer leaves a <____> for a single stardate somewhere near the beginning of the episode, and the expert inserts something coarsely fitting there, things work pretty smoothly...

Timo Saloniemi

There is that, although TOS (produced well before the informal "1000 stardate units per calendar year" rule), DS9 (with many "stardate-free" episodes) and ENT (with Gregorian calendar references) did fine without them.

 

[Ezri]

Still having problems with the library call number (example DS 559.45) and you want me to understand stardates that is just a fantasy?