Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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I agree that ideally they would maintain that kind of fuzzy timeline to maintain our connection to their future. In fact, many years ago on the old Daystrom I tried to argue that we shouldn't take dates on the show literally other than as an indication of the general order in which things happened -- leading to massive pushback from almost everybody! It seems like Picard season 2 went pretty far out of its way to endorse the fan-favored theory that the Trek timeline forked sometime prior to the 90s, though, and I worry about the slipshod continuity management that is emerging as the streaming era matures. Of course, the Picard finale also abruptly undid the whole climax of season 2, so maybe the official position is that we're going to pretend season 2 never happened.
I absolutely am fine with this take now, especially. Ultimately, what we are talking about is the narrative importance of the events. If we want to have episodes where the characters go to "today" today must continue to exist within the narrative. If the narrative says that the world was noticeably different in 1996 - move it to 2036. If we're still going strong move it to 2056.
These changes don't make as much difference in the narrative that was being told to begin with.