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Watching Star Trek in Chronological Order: Just as Gene Roddenberry Intended

A few years ago, someone in the comments section of a podcast that would be impossible to find now suggested an idea, and that idea has been stuck in my head ever since. It's like a worm, burrowing through my brain. I couldn't let it go. I even tried to do this as a podcast, but it turns out podcasts are time consuming to make, so here we are.

The idea is, as the title suggests, to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order, by stardate. This means starting with a few episodes featuring time travel (not all), then going into Enterprise and continuing on from there. The last thing in the current timeline is the Short Treks episode Calypso, though at the time of writing it remains to be seen how canon that is.

I am inviting you all to join me on this journey. Star Trek as a work of collaborative media that has spanned over 60 years has always fascinated me. Can so many people and so many creative visions all come together to create one coherent narrative? Well, no, but I want to treat it like one anyway.

So this means watching everything. Well, almost everything. I will be following a spreadsheet that I have been working on and been actively updating as new episodes release. The bulk of the work was copied from the Star Trek Chronology Project, weaving together many of the live action shows. All of the animated shows were fairly easy to figure out, so I have added them in as well (minus Very Short Treks).

Most time travel will be ignored, taking place where they would normally from the time traveler's perspectives rather than from the universe's. The two exceptions to this rule are DS9's Past Tense, and the TNG movie First Contact. The former takes place in 2024 and is as much about a historical event as it is about the time travelers, and the latter shows the birth of the federation and seeds some Enterprise storylines later on. Beyond that, you'll have to wait till DS9 to watch Little Green Men. Also, we will be revisiting these time travel episodes in their normal places as well. Finally, if time travel happens WITHIN the series (eg Trials and Tribbalations), we'll watch those episodes twice as well.

As far as I am concerned, most animated content is canon. This means the three main animated shows: TAS, LRD, and PRD, plus all animated Short Treks.

The Kelvin Timeline is also canon, though I don't group it with TOS. It is the result in a time travel event that occurs after the destruction of Romulus, so I have put it between the Short Trek Children of Mars and the start of Star Trek Picard.

If you're curious about the watch order, here is the spreadsheet in all its glory:

I'll be reviewing episodes as I watch them. If enough people are interested in making this a community thing, I will come up with a schedule and even maybe make a discord, but for now I'll just be posting reviews at whatever pace I happen to watch things in.

So my friends, please join me as we embark on a journey that Zefram Cochrane so succinctly calls "Some kind of Star Trek". We will strive to avoid the notice of Temporal Investigations, and adhere as much as we can to the Temporal Prime Directive.

Let's watch all of Star Trek in order, just as Roddenberry intended.