#i can't believe y'all have gotten me to make yet another comprehensive-ish post on the damn timeline lolol

[wild-aloof-rebel]

Been thinking about the timeline... I know oKAY I KNOW... but listen isn’t it possible it has been three years? Maybe each season is 6 months long. In that case, Patrick comes into the picture about 1 year and 3 months into it. So that would almost make David/Patrick comments about “2 years” kinda make sense because by season 6 they’d have been together like a year and a half plus so maybe they’re rounding? Okay okay I know I’m wrong but I just want to to make sense!!!

honestly, running with about 6 months per season does probably work the best in a very general sense. but ultimately there are some things that support that and some that don’t, which is pretty much true of every way you try to look at the timeline.

i’m pretty sure we can at least accept that the first two seasons take place over about a year. (a year ago we had a staff of 25… / ronnie says you’ve only lived here a year / are you complaining about the quality of the free lodging i’ve arranged for you this past year? / this is the first real money we’ve seen in a year.) there’s not a whole lot within those two seasons to contradict that, so we can run with that.

johnny says in murder mystery it’s been 3 years since he played a round of golf, but okay, maybe he hadn’t played in a while even before they lost their money. i’ll let that one slide.

another point in your favor is ronnie telling moira in stop saying lice! that she still has 3 ½ more years on council. it’s been about a season since she was elected to her 4 year term then, so that pans out. 

but then moira says in dead guy in room 4 that she’s endured a cornucopia of trauma the last few years, which……. is definitely a stretch if we’re looking at about a year and a half there.

david says in girls’ night that it’s been a year since ted and alexis split, which works in your favor as well. 

but then just 8 episodes later, ted tells alexis he’s thought about kissing her every day for the last two years. maybe he’s rounding up, but i definitely don’t like it lol. 

in that same vein, joan says in sebastien raine that she’s been trying to set ted up with her granddaughter for 2 years, but it’s pointless because she’s not alexis, which implies that ted and alexis have been split for 2 years at that point. however, their split had happened not quite 2 seasons ago by that episode, which should only be a year if we’re running with the season = 6 months theory. maybe she was trying to set him up with her granddaughter starting before alexis came along, but that’s not really the implication of this line.

in mcjr, johnny says this is their third christmas in sc. IF they originally moved to sc right before christmas, it can conceivably be about two years at this point. however, nothing about any of the first few episodes of the show is conceivably wintery, so this one really takes some suspension of disbelief on that front. (nevermind the fact that none of the other episodes from what would presumably be their second christmas there around the end of s2/start of s3 mention anything at all about winter, christmas, hanukkah, etc either. it is truly eternally summer in sc, which adds to how fake time feels at any given point lol.)

over the course of s4, jocelyn has a baby, so presumably s4 is prob a bit longer than 6 months. david and patrick’s 4 month anniversary happens right at the halfway point, so let’s say maybe the season is closer to 8 months long, which is plausible. that’s not terribly far off of 6 months, but just something to keep in mind.

roland jr is then implied to be 8 months old as of love letters, which means that 8 months have passed between then and singles week.

in that case we’re looking at 8 months for s4 (minus mcjr), 8 months between seasons (including mcjr), and let’s go back to 6 months again for s5. so by the end of s5 we’re conceivably at 3 years and 4 months in sc. 

johnny partners with stevie on the motel in new car, and in the hospies he says it’s been a couple of years’ work. as long as we’re remembering the gap between the season’s there, i think that’s fine. we’re looking at just about two seasons, but plus the extra 8 months between, yeah, that’s 2ish years.

david says in liac that he went to fill out his business license two years ago. that’s about the same time frame as the previous johnny/stevie point, so i’ll allow it.

s6 goes and makes everything a little weird because somehow the first 6 episodes supposedly take place over the course of a month since it’s all before alexis’s flight is supposed to leave. that’s a weird shift from the other seasons, but if it’s not terribly long after that johnny says they’ve been staying in the motel for the last 3 years, he’s not that far off. we’d be at 3 years, 5 months or so by the middle of s6, so presumably it’s at least not quite 4 years yet by the time johnny says it, so i’ll give it to him.

those are the really broad strokes of the timeline. as you can see, there are a few things that we have to kind of sweep under the rug–which is the way the timeline always works–but some of them are at least more vague as markers anyway, so if you want to run with the 6 month theory, as long as you extend s4 by a couple months, it probably does work the best out of any fixed-length per season option.

however, it’s really when you get down into some of the details that things start to give you a headache. for instance, i wrote a whole entire primer on s4′s issues with david’s brithday and jocelyn’s pregnancy here, so feel free to dive into that if you’d like to pull your own hair out lol. those are really the kinds of things we’re talking about when we joke about the timeline being a disaster. 

ALSO something else i didn’t get into in that post is that rachel says in the barbecue that she’s trying to win her fiance back 6 months later. david and patrick have been dating for 4 months at that point. so in the 2 months before that, patrick apparently left his fiance, moved to a new town, started a new job, met the love of his life, decided to invest in his new business, applied for grants (and received them), helped get everything ready for the soft launch, and finally once their store is up and running asked his business partner out on a date. i’m not saying it’s impossible for that to have happened over 2 months–well no actually i am saying it’s impossible, lolol. the grants alone would take at least that long lmao. even if we’re running with the 6 months per season, that’s about half a season or 3 months, and that’s still awfully quick for alla that to happen. yeah yeah, suspension of disbelief, yadda yadda yadda, but i’m just saying there are a lot of spots that we have to kind of wave our hands at to make whichever timeline of your choice work.

also there’s the june 22 open mic poster in the bathroom at the apothecary, which adds a whole other conundrum because if it’s for the original open mic, which has to take place between david’s birthday and their 4 month anniversary, that only really works if david’s birthday is in april or so, which does not at all work with alexis graduating on his birthday or any of the numbers he gives. and if it’s for another upcoming open mic night, that means it has to be sometime before june 22 in roadkill when we see the poster, which is about 2/3 of the way into the season, making the start of the season february-ish? but that doesn’t even come close to working with an 8 month time jump between mcjr and love letters. in that case love letters has to take place in june, but then randomly 2/3 of a season later there’s a june event poster in their [recently redesigned] bathroom??? that seems to imply that maybe it really is a poster for the original open mic night, but as i just said, there are issues with making that theory work as well.

(and that’s just the actual time in sc timeline. i didn’t even touch on moira’s career timeline or how long she and johnny have been married, where over the course of just s5 and s6, we’ve gotten we’re still here 35 years later / after an award-worthy trilogy of decades together / your father and i have produced beautiful wine together for over forty years.)

so again, yes, i think in broad strokes you can kinda run with each season being about 6 months or so if that’s what you want to go with, but there are certainly things you have to ignore to make that work. 

and that’s just how the timeline is.