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In episode 3 ("Where No Man has Gone Before"), Gary Mitchell attempts to kill Captain Kirk. Before doing so he uses his powers to create a grave and conjures a tombstone, shown here:

Captain Kirk, his face bloodied and his shirt torn, stands centre-left facing Mitchell, right, back to the camera, who appears unhurt. Kirk has his back to a rocky wall and in the foreground before him is a plain gravestone whose inscription is the topic of this post.

The information on the tombstone is rather puzzling. As best as I can tell it says:

James R Kirk

0 12771 to 13187

On a regular tombstone this would represent the years that the deceased lived. However, the date range here is nowhere close to any of the answers given for when the show took place. If we drop the "1"s the date range is at least within a few hundred years of the answers given, but it still presents a problem of Kirk being apparently 400+ years old. Moreover, the tombstone has his middle initial as "R", yet his actual middle initial is "T" as far as I can tell (e.g. his Wikipedia entry is listed as James T. Kirk).

So what exactly is going on with this tombstone?

DavidW
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Alex
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    Does it help if I read the second line as "C 1277.1 to 1313.7"? – DavidW Sep 20 '21 at 02:01
  • @DavidW That would at least help to explain what the first character is doing there. – Alex Sep 20 '21 at 02:03
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    Those are stardates. I don't know if there is a 50 year fan consensus- but I'd speculate that was when he was captain as it's far too little change to be a birth date. This may also be of interest https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/9815/who-is-james-r-kirk – lucasbachmann Sep 20 '21 at 02:08
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    @DavidW The 1313.7 would also fit with the "stardate" of the captain's log, which in the very next scene is said to be 1313.8, though I'm not quite sure how that relates to actual dates. – Alex Sep 20 '21 at 02:09
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    Note that the episode's intro gives a stardate of 1312.4, so 1313.7 is only slightly later. – DavidW Sep 20 '21 at 02:10
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    I think the "R" is just early-installment weirdness. – DavidW Sep 20 '21 at 02:16
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    @Alex 1 stardate is 1 day, so 1313 is the day after 1312. (It took a day to reach the source of the beacon.) 1277.1 to 1313.7 is a bit more than 36.5 days, so the theory is the "C" means the dates refer to Kirk's period of being captain. – DavidW Sep 20 '21 at 02:18
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    @DavidW Had Kirk only been Captain for a month at this point? – Alex Sep 20 '21 at 02:21
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    I personally think the R is Gary teasing Kirk's emphasis on using his T. Stardates have never been particularly consistent but in TNG 1000 was 1 season. See also https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Stardate – lucasbachmann Sep 20 '21 at 02:24
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    @Alex ¯\(ツ)/¯ It is the first episode with Kirk as captain, so it's possible – DavidW Sep 20 '21 at 02:25
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    The "R" could possibly be explained by Mitchell's deteriorating mental state. Perhaps he's forgotten Kirk's middle initial, even though they've known each other a long time. – David Conrad Sep 20 '21 at 16:35
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    Don't remember for sure where I read it, maybe in "The Making of Star Trek" by Gene Roddenberry, but ISTR reading that when they coined the word, "stardate," it was with the awareness that they would not know for sure the order in which the episodes would be aired, and they wanted to be able to handwave away any questions about what "stardate" actually meant. E.g., "It's complicated,... Y'know,... faster than light travel, Warp drive, etc." – Solomon Slow Sep 21 '21 at 01:27
  • This is probably a coincidence, but "R Kirk" is later mistaken for Roykirk... – Matthew Sep 21 '21 at 13:07

3 Answers3

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The episode begins on 1312.4 with the receipt of the distress signal from the SS Valiant. At 1312.9 Kirk makes another log entry after the disastrous encounter with the galactic barrier. At 1313.1 he records one as they head for Delta Vega, and again at 1313.3 when they decide to beam back from the surface.

Kirk records his final entry at 1313.8, noting the deaths of Dr. Dehner and Lt. Commander Mitchell. Thus 1313.7 would be approximately correct for the time of the final encounter with Mitchell.

The Memory Alpha page for Stardate has this to say:

Stardates were first portrayed in TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second pilot for the series. Dave Eversole notes that the first draft of the teleplay (dated May 27, 1965) includes "Captain's Log, Report 197."1 In addition, Star Trek Fact Check shows a scripted narration from the same draft containing "star date 1312.6". This became "star date 1312.4" by the final revised draft (July 8, 1965), which also asks for "C-1277.1 to 1313.7" to appear on Kirk's gravestone.

(Note that I don't have access to the raw scripts, but sources like this one validate some of the details here.)

Working backward, then 1277.1 would be 36.6 days earlier. The "C" gives us a clue that this is not Kirk's lifespan that's depicted. It makes sense that this could be the length of Kirk's command of the Enterprise, this mission being his first in command. ("Where No Man has Gone Before" being the first regular episode shot after "The Cage," though episodes were not aired in the same order.)

The name "James R. Kirk" was an error in production (as previously answered):

On the infamous and incorrect "James R. Kirk" tombstone, created by Gary Mitchell in TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Kirk's middle initial was R, not T. According to D.C. Fontana in the introduction for Star Trek: The Classic Episodes 1, when the mistake over the middle initial was discovered, Gene Roddenberry decided that if pressed for an answer on the discrepancy, the response was to be "Gary Mitchell had godlike powers, but at base he was Human. He made a mistake."

DavidW
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    So C stands for Captain? Makes sense. *Captain from stardate 1277.1 to 1313.7* – ypercubeᵀᴹ Sep 20 '21 at 15:21
  • Maybe Gary Mitchell also didn’t know the stardate of Kirk’s birthday or the current Gregorian date (to the extent such a thing can even be defined across interstellar space in modern physics). – Davislor Sep 20 '21 at 18:42
  • Gyah, that "C" in the picture kind of looks like a "0", and both of those "3"s in the picture look kind of like "8"s. – Panzercrisis Sep 21 '21 at 15:01
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The middle initial is a well known anomaly that can also be ascribed to the episode being a pilot. It is answered by this SFF question.

As for the dates, you failed to see the decimal points in the two dates. This

  JAMES R KIRK
O 1277.1 TO 1313.7

There are many Stardate calculators out there and they all give different answers, so I won't present them here. I don't think these are true "Stardates" as Roddenberry imagined. If the person who made the prop got the middle initial wrong, (s)he could also have misunderstood what the date range was for and simply assumed it was the normal thing one puts on such a stone: birth and death years.

If we simply assign the star dates to years, this puts Kirk's "age at death" at a more reasonable 36.6 years.

According to Memory Alpha, the episode's "Captain's Log" lead-in monologue has Kirk giving a date of Stardate 1312.4, which is at least close to the latter date. Kirk would have been 35.3 given the "birth date". In 1966, when the episode was filmed, William Shatner turned 35.

This is still anomalous, because the episode started at 1312.4 and the confrontation happened at 1313.7, and it's hard to believe that the episode spanned 1.3 years of in-universe time. But remember the Enterprise made a very long run out to the edge of the Galaxy at maximum warp.

Spencer
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  • Kirk mentions several different star dates in his audio logs throughout the episode, each one being later than the last. The final date he mentions near the end of the episode is 1313.8. – LogicDictates Sep 20 '21 at 02:48
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    Stardates are not years. That's pretty clear. (And besides, they're called "star_dates_" not "staryears".) – DavidW Sep 20 '21 at 02:58
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    @DavidW Again: Pilot episode, inconsistent worldbuilding. The middle initial was messed up. The match with Shatner's age is enough for me. – Spencer Sep 20 '21 at 03:11
  • Your 1.3 years criticism based on Kirk's age may be based on what was possibly intended by the prop guy. But considering the log dates in the episode don't support it and do support something closer to 1.0 stardates = 1 day...and nothing in TOS to Voy supports it either- why even bother writing the bulk of your answer? – lucasbachmann Sep 20 '21 at 03:21
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    @lucasbachmann This is a question about a prop, so "what the prop guy thought" is what's important. I don't think it's based on any later star date system. – Spencer Sep 20 '21 at 03:27
  • @DavidW Star Trek was always a bit wishy-washy on time measurement. They still use seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. in almost every culture, even though these are defined based on values which are only relevant on Earth. Not every inhabited planet would have the same speed of rotation or revolution around its star, and deep space stations (e.g. DS9) don't even have a star to measure against, but it's implied they all seem to run on an Earth schedule for some reason. – Darrel Hoffman Sep 20 '21 at 13:57
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    @DarrelHoffman I always attributed that to simple translation to time periods that the audience would understand, just like the way the language was translated to English. – Barmar Sep 20 '21 at 14:22
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    @DarrelHoffman DS9 uses 26-hour days, the standard for its closest planet, Bajor. Though technically it's also a Bajoran space station that's only administrated by the Federation, so that may be why that standard, instead of location. – Izkata Sep 20 '21 at 15:09
  • @Izkata If you really want to get technical, it's a Cardasian station now owned by the Bajorans and administered by the Federation, which might also factor into it. I'm not sure how equivalent Bajoran hours are to Earth hours, nor why a space station (not apparently orbiting either Bajor or its sun) even needs to have a day/night cycle in the first place, but like time measurement, that's another detail they chose not to deal with. – Darrel Hoffman Sep 20 '21 at 16:44
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James Roy Kirk. Which in a later episode was the name of the scientist who made the changeling. It seeked out imperfection and would sterilize. The Machine had been damaged and repaired by "the other"... The Machine thought James t Kirk was it's maker. This was the cover up for the tombstone mistake...

Chris
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  • Nomad . Yep, it was the only way to learn kirks real middle name and discard the tombstone mistake of James R Kirk. – Chris Aug 25 '23 at 01:18
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    Hi, welcome to SF&F. What about the quote from Roddenberry himself that in-universe Mitchell simply made a mistake? And what about the numbers? – DavidW Aug 25 '23 at 01:32
  • I don't see how the two things are related. The tombstone wasn't made by Nomad – Valorum Aug 25 '23 at 05:47