Star Trek: Discovery is a prequel series currently airing, set about ten years before the original 1960s Star Trek which starred William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. There are many things a die-hard Trek fan can point to that violate “canon”, the established history and lore about the Star Trek universe that have been established over the half century of the franchise’s existence.
Most of these changes are visual in nature, updating the look and feel of the show to something that seems futuristic to a modern television audience, instead of what would seem ten years less advanced than what seemed futuristic to a 1960s audience. Some changes are to avoid overly complicated lore that might turn off new viewers (although the show has also indulged in using some of the most complicated continuity in the franchise to tell its stories on occasion). Many of these changes can be justified by the need to make a modern Trek show that appeals to everyone, not just diehard fans.
But the show fucks up stardates constantly, and it’s driving me crazy.
Now, stardates might be the most inconsequential thing to complain about, the very definition of the kind of asinine nitpicking Trek fans are mocked for, but the thing about it is this: it costs Discovery nothing to get it right. Unlike costumes and set designs, special effects and alien make-up, stardates are not an expensive visual, nor are they a complicated story element that eats up exposition time. They’re just some numbers rattled off during the traditional “Captain’s log” voice-over segments of the show, that were originally designed to make things easier for the writers.
Star Trek is set in the future, but exactly when was originally left somewhat vague. Years of filling in the details has led to the original series being pegged with the years 2265-2269. Discovery begins in the year 2256. But the original series writers didn’t want to be bogged down with exact dates, and besides - the Enterprise serves a United Federation of Planets: there are enough different calendars on Earth let alone when you consider alien worlds with different methods of measuring time altogether.
So stardates were designed as nonsense numbers that supposedly are a kind of standard nonbiased timekeeping method in the Federation. You aren’t really supposed to pay too much attention to them on the show, or wonder what they mean. However, if you do pay attention to them, presumably because you’re detail obsessed as many fans of Trek are, you’ll notice they aren’t wholly random.
Stardates in the original series progress roughly from episode to episode - more smoothly if you take the episodes in the order they were produced rather than they were aired. Season 1 features dates that range from 1312.4 to 3417.7, Season 2 runs 3018.2 to 4770.3, and Season 3’s dates cover 4372.5 to 5943.9. Whether you watch the episodes in airdate order or production order, the stardate progression isn’t perfect, but it is approximate - the numbers go up, roughly 1000 units for each year that passes in story.
With Star Trek: The Next Generation, the franchise moved 100 years into the future, with that series set from 2364-2370, and the show’s producers paid greater attention to stardates, with a more consistent system in place. Like on the original show, these dates are not the responsibility of the show’s writers, but rather are written in later by story editors and other staff members who work consistently from episode to episode and are aware of what order the scripts will be produced in the season. The earliest date in TNG is 41153.7. The decision had been made to increase stardates from four digits to five to show that the new series was further in the future, the leading number 4 was chosen as a subtle reminder the show was set in the twenty-fourth century, the next number was the season, and the last three numbers progress roughly from 000 to 999 throughout each season, with each season covering roughly one year in the story. The last date in season 7 of TNG is 47988.0. This system continued until the film Star Trek: Nemesis, set in the year 2379 on stardate 56844.9.
When JJ Abrams rebooted the Star Trek timeline with his new films in 2009, the writers of that film decided to just make stardates the Earth year with a decimal point after them. Which kinda misses the whole point of why stardates exist, but at least was easy for an audience to understand and was consistent, and missing the point was largely the raison d’être of the Abrams helmed Trek films.
So that brings us to Star Trek: Discovery, which - despite all the visual differences - is set within the original continuity of the franchise, ten years before the adventures of Kirk and Spock. Based on this, what would be a reasonable system of stardates to assume? Perhaps to take it down to three digits, to show that we are before the original four digits of TOS, similar to how TNG employed five digits?
No. The earliest stardate we get in Discovery is 1207.3, which is certainly an earlier number than the earliest TOS given date, but based on the rationale of the previous stardate systems would indicate a date earlier the same year as the first stardate of TOS, not ten years earlier. Things only go downhill from here, however. The next stardate we get is six episodes and seven months in story later, and is 2136.8, which would place this story in the middle of season 1 of TOS, presumably. Then the very next episode after that features the much earlier date of 1308.9 - which again predates TOS, but only by a few weeks perhaps. And unlike past Trek shows, where the storytelling was largely episodic and so non-consecutive stardates in consecutive episodes can be hand-waved away, Discovery is an extremely serialized show. The 1308.9 episode definitely takes place after the 2136.8 episode. The next stardate we get is five episodes and nine months in story later, 1834.2. Five episodes later, in season 2, we get 1029.46, the earliest stardate we’ve had yet, and then in the very next episode 1834.2512, which would be about twenty-five minutes later than the stardate from six episodes ago. This utter nonsense, while seemingly inconsquential, demonstrates the core of a recurring problem with Star Trek: Discovery. They want the touchstones of Star Trek, the recognizable elements, without doing any of the work for them.
They know that stardates are a thing in Star Trek, a string of numbers with a decimal point after them, sometimes four digits, sometimes five. Better make it four since we’re closer to TOS than TNG, I guess. But no one is paying attention, it seems, to what the stardates are episode to episode, whether they progress in anything close to a logical or consistent manner, not just with previously established shows, but more significantly in my eyes - with each other in the same show!
Going back all the way to the original series, when you read behind the scenes interviews with the producers, writers, and designers who worked on it, you consistently hear about decisions that were made in at least a desire to appear believable and coherent. “What would this thing actually look like in the future, maybe?” or “If this was real, how would you really design it?” It’s why the Enterprise has a smooth exterior hull for instance, instead of the highly detailed fiddly bits of ships in Star Wars which show scale more easily. Because if you really wanted to make a spaceship, why would you put a ton of stuff on the outside since that means you’d have to go out in a spacesuit to fix it?
The stardates on past series were arbitrarily decided, but then once those arbitrary starting numbers were chosen, they progress forward throughout the shows in a roughly consistent manner. As if they were a real thing, that worked. And for many fans, “as if it were a real thing, that worked” is a big appeal of the world of Star Trek. It cannot be stressed enough, it is all arbitrary fictional bullshit, but it’s consistent within itself, and that helps us to believe it, which helps us be invested in the stories and characters, even if they are set on strange new worlds where no one has gone before.
On Discovery, you get the sense that the design principles have changed from “what would seem believable?” and “what can we afford?”, the two masters of past Trek worldbuilding, to “what looks cool?” and “what signals Star Trek to people?” So sometimes things look familiar, like iconic props such as phasers and communicators, other times things look utterly different, like the overall aesthetic of Starfleet interiors or the entire Klingon race. It’s not consistent within itself, because the goal is to either make your jaw drop at how awesome it was, or else to signal something in your brain that says “aha! Like on Star Trek.” The stardates on the show are the latter - no one seems to care how they work or if they’re consistent, but they’re a thing they know the audience knows are a thing from Star Trek, so let’s throw them in there, and who really cares?
What’s the most frustrating is, they’re the easiest things in the world to get right. It’s just numbers on a page, dialogue said by an actor, it costs nearly nothing to just make sure you’re counting up from episode to episode rather than spouting random numbers. So when something that small, and that easy to get right, is utterly disregarded, it puts you on edge about how the rest of the show is being handled.
I like Star Trek: Discovery. I like the cast and the characters a lot, I often enjoy the writing, and sometimes I even like the aesthetic choices. But I would be lying if the feeling I often get from watching the show is that for all the money being put into it - and it is indeed the most expensive and thus most impressive Star Trek has ever looked - the entire series from writing to post-production feels a bit sloppy. As they say, the devil’s in the details.
