Picard’s Stardates

Captains log, stardate 76656.0. The showrunner of Star Trek: Picard, Michael Chabon, has said that the show would not be using stardates, for reasons. Last night I watched the first episode of season 3, and was surprised to hear a stardate! But I was not the stardate of the episode, but 43996.2, which meant that it was from  2366, the end of season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was during the Battle of Wolf 359. I looked at the shirt I was wearing. It says, “Never Forget — Wolf 359, 43989.1”! Even if I didn’t remember, I could have known that it aired in mid-1994 from the stardate. 

The epoch of the TNG was 2323. The first two digits indicate the year, and the following ones a decimal fraction on a year. The digit(s) after the decimal point represent the decimal time of day. That finale episode ended in a cliffhanger, which was resolved during the season premiere later in 1994. That two-part story was one of the most popular in Star Trek. 

Fans knew when a particular episode aired from its stardate. This, they could use the in-show stardate as a sort of real-time calendar for the 20th century. The epoch was 1987 - 41.000 = 1946, sometime in the middle of the year, which was when there was a break between seasons. 

In the 2009 The Big Bang Theory episode, “The Adhesive Duck Deficiency” (s3e8), we hear, “Sheldon's log, stardate 63345.3,” referring to the Leonid meteor shower of that year. This is exactly, to the moment, in line with this system. It would put the current stardate in the mid-77000s. Picard is set currently around 2402. That would make it in the 79000s, since a bit more time has passed in-show than in real life. 

There was also another, partial stardate, 4115… This would have been during the first episode of TNG, when Captain Picard first met Q. 

What I’m hoping is that we’ll get at least one current stardate, perhaps in the finale. This season uses a lot of nostalgia, and  it reunites the TNG cast, so that would just add to it, if we get one, last captain’s log.