Doing another Voyager rewatch and something caught my eye that I hadn’t noticed before.
From season 7’s 22nd episode Homestead the writers forgot what year the show was set in. Even contradicting themselves within the same episode.
In the opening of the episode they are celebrating the 315th anniversary of first contact on Earth. So this puts the date at April 5th 2378. However season 7 is set in 2377 with a stardate given during the same episode of 54868.6. Or November 14th 2377. Which being at the end of season would be correct.
Even Memory Alpha lists the wrong year the episode is set in despite having the correct stardate shown.
The in-universe dates for the penultimate and final episodes are also wrong on Memory Alpha.
Renaissance Man takes place on stardate 54890.7 (November 22nd 2377) but is listed as 2378.
Also Endgame is set on December 22nd 2377 and is the day Voyager returns home. Again Memory Alpha says 2378.
It seems someone at Memory Alpha worked out the date first contact day was in Homestead and just went with that instead of converting the star dates to normal calendar dates.
I know it’s a bit of a nitpick but small errors like this bug me.
Trek tends to fudge the dates on purpose. It’s supposed to take place In The Future, and you’re supposed to be thinking about whatever philosophical concept the episode is about, not the exact timeline of events. From Wikipedia: “stardates were originally intended to avoid specifying exactly when Star Trek takes place.” I hate linking to Fandom wiki pages, but I’ll say the page on stardates goes on at length about how inconsistent Trek time is.
Jumping around within a single episode is a little funny, but doesn’t surprise me. Some writers try to be consistent, but maybe only for a few connected episodes, and some don’t try at all. Sometimes a character will die, but an earlier episode or a flashback with a clearly later stardate will see them alive. There’s all kinds of technobabble about where they are in the universe, and light speed relativity, and so on, but at the end of the day the show isn’t trying to hide any serious messages in its timeline so long as the story of the episode makes some level of sense.