I subject the semantic claims of stage theory to scrutiny and show that it's unclear how to make them come out true for a simple and deep reason: the stage theorist needs tensed elements to semantically modify the denotations of referring expressions to enable us to talk about past and future stages. But in the syntax of natural language, expressions carrying tense modify verbs and adjectives and not referring expressions.This mismatch between what the stage theorist needs, and what language provides, makes it hard to see how the stage theorist's semantic claims could be true.