TOS chronology question...

[Riverside2233]

I'm working through TOS season 1 using the production order list and chronology guide and I was wondering why "The Squire of Gothos" at Stardate 2124.5 is not before "What are little girls made of" at 2712.4? There are multiple episodes in between but it seems like squire would be before.

Can anyone clarify?

97 TOS The Cage
98 TOS Where No Man Has Gone Before
99 TOS The Corbomite Maneuver
100 TOS Mudd's Women
101 TOS The Enemy Within
102 TOS The Man Trap
103 TOS The Naked Time
104 TOS Charlie X
105 TOS Balance of Terror
106 TOS What Are Little Girls Made Of?
107 TOS Dagger of the Mind
108 TOS Miri
109 TOS The Conscience of the King
110 TOS The Galileo Seven
111 TOS Court Martial
112 TOS The Menagerie (Part I)
113 TOS The Menagerie (Part II)
114 TOS Shore Leave
115 TOS The Squire of Gothos

 

[Christopher]

Stardates were not meant to be meaningful. They were specifically intended to be meaningless, to avoid giving any information about the time frame of the series. There was a halfhearted attempt to have them trend generally upward, but since the episodes' airing order was different from their production order, it didn't really matter, so the stardates were just kind of random. They're just filler, nonsense numbers that just vaguely sound like a date. Ignore stardates. Just go with production order.

 

[GSchnitzer]

I'm working through TOS season 1 using the production order list and chronology guide and I was wondering why "The Squire of Gothos" at Stardate 2124.5 is not before "What are little girls made of" at 2712.4? There are multiple episodes in between but it seems like squire would be before.

Can anyone clarify?

97 TOS The Cage
98 TOS Where No Man Has Gone Before
99 TOS The Corbomite Maneuver
100 TOS Mudd's Women
101 TOS The Enemy Within
102 TOS The Man Trap
103 TOS The Naked Time
104 TOS Charlie X
105 TOS Balance of Terror
106 TOS What Are Little Girls Made Of?
107 TOS Dagger of the Mind
108 TOS Miri
109 TOS The Conscience of the King
110 TOS The Galileo Seven
111 TOS Court Martial
112 TOS The Menagerie (Part I)
113 TOS The Menagerie (Part II)
114 TOS Shore Leave
115 TOS The Squire of Gothos

Star Dates are unrelated to production order. They are largely arbitrary. E.g., the earliest Star Date of them all is an animated episode.

Roddenbery said it relates to not only when they are but where they are. So different ships at the exact same time could well be experiencing two different Star Dates simultaneously--if they are in different locations.

(It's complicated.)

 

[Riverside2233]

Gotcha. Thanks for the quick heads up.

 

[HGN2001]

I was reading through the other, now defunct thread on TOS's best-perceived order of viewing. In that thread, member Captain Robert April stated:

The only time "airdate order" ever really came into play was when the show on on NBC,

...and I wanted to reply that that's not entirely true. During syndication runs in the early '70s, Kaiser Broadcasting station WKBS-TV in Philadelphia, having great success with airing syndicated reruns of STAR TREK, decided to do a special weeknight run in original airdate order, with original-length commercial breaks so as not to have to cut the episodes. It was a great success, and I believe that the other Kaiser stations in Detroit, Chicago and Boston may have done the same. And I wouldn't be surprised if some other stations did similar runs., but I have no information one way or another.

I choose airdate order, because I became a Trekfan during that original NBC run and continued in those early syndication years. Publications such as the early Concordance nearly always used airdate order, and it wasn't until later in syndication that the old order became somewhat overlooked in favor of production order.

Neither are right and neither are wrong - they just are - and we're all free to watch the episodes in whatever order suits us.

Ever consider watching them in alphabetical order?

Harry

 

[FormerLurker]

Channel 4 in Denver ran the show in random order for the first ten years or so they had it, and then ran it in airdate order over and over again until they lost their syndication contract for it, some time in the mid eighties. When Channel 2 took it over, the first thing they did was their infamous "edit of the syndication edit" and cut out entire scenes, making even the best episodes a confusing mess. And then they ran them in random order again.

Airdate order is what I know best, and is therefore my preference.

 

[Riverside2233]

Yeah I mean I'm new to the whole Trek universe so I'm certainly not trying to push one over the other. Different strokes for different folks I guess....

 

[UnknownSample]

Roddenbery said it relates to not only when they are but where they are. So different ships at the exact same time could well be experiencing two different Star Dates simultaneously--if they are in different locations.

I hadn't heard that, thanks. What I remember hearing decades ago was that Star Dates are an attempt to deal with how FTL and relativity affect time. Time was subjectively passing at somewhat different rates, on different ships, and compared to time on any particular planet. Any normal, simply linear time scale wouldn't work. With Star Dates though, there was a sort of common time scale for everybody, that gets around the problem... somehow.

Maybe the dates just don't happen in ordinary numerical order.