20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Star Trek
3. Star Dates Don't Mean Anything
Each episode of Star Trek lead in and out with Captain Kirk narrating, supposedly recording his Captain's Log, and each of those entries would begin with a star date which supposedly placed the events of the episode within a certain time span. Dates that are not based on the current Gregorian calendar that most non-hippies use. It turns out that, at least in the original series, those star dates were largely arbitrary. Seriously, go back and compare a couple, and it seems like episodes that aired within a week of each other were set decades apart. Weren't the crew of the Enterprise only meant to be on a five year mission? The star dates were mainly picked to sound futuristic, with the series set in a far-off future, but later series and movies tried to be more consistent with their dating. Before that happened, however, there was a long-running debate within Star Trek fandom as to what year the original series actually took place, with Roddenberry unhelpfully suggesting it was set in anywhere between 21st to 31st Centuries.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
