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Why Darmok Is a Good Star Trek: TNG Episode
An anonymous reader writes: "Last week, the Ars Technica ran an article listing their staff's least favorite Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes. They hit a few of the predictable ones, like Angel One — wherein Riker's chest hair takes center stage — and Up the Long Ladder — featuring space-Irish. But a surprising suggestion came from Peter Bright, who denounced Darmok, a fan favorite. (You remember: 'Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.') Now, Ars's Lee Hutchinson has (jokingly) taken Bright to task, showing how IMDB ratings mark Darmok (5x02) as one of the best episodes of season 5, and among the strongest in the series. He also points out a trend in some of the bad episodes they didn't pick: 'According to the data, the worst episode of TNG by a significant margin is the season 2 finale Shades of Gray, a clipshow episode famously hobbled by the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. We also managed to not pick season 6's Man of the People (the one where Troi falls in love with a brain vampire and gets really old) or season 4's The Loss (the one where Troi loses her empathic abilities and gets really whiny) or season 2's The Child (the one where Troi has dream sex with a space anomaly and gets really pregnant).' What are your picks for best and worst TNG episode?"
... all of them? Seriously the inclusion of a trained Shakespearian actor (Stewart) was the only saving grace of that branch-off of TOS.
manly tears
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
So basically the worst episodes are those featuring Trio.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Ya, maybe the episode would not of sucked so bad if their made up language, that was "completely different to all other languages" was not just a pile of bull.
Oh, you mean we could not decode the language because every word was just an arbitrary sequence of sounds denoting an idea, instead of how normal words work?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's facebook for nerds, guiding socialization one step at a time.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I'd go for the royal. Hated that one.
If Tasha or her space / time relatives are brought back to be killed again, that was a good episode.
Blake's 7.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
They lost me at the end of season 1. Saw a few later episodes, still never liked it much, even the borg battles.
Saw first contact as well; and that was it.
Saw some episodes of DS-9 which had like one character I liked; and was pretty much nonsense the rest of the time.
And I even forced myself to sit through a couple of episodes of Gilligan's Starship.
On the bright side, Star Trek looks absolutely brilliant compared to Hayden's Christianson 's whiny bitch Vader.
Who is an absolutely lovable character compared with Shinji Ikari from Evangellion. managed 8 episodes of that.
So yeah, I guess STNG is pretty good when you compare it to the most a lot of stuff from the past 20 years.
The stuff i remember; before the fucking ewoks:
Han didn't shoot first. That statement implies that Greedo got a shot off. Han shot Greedo dead.
That's the way badass heroes work.
I've always been partial to "Who watches the watchers" and thought that "Genesis" (final season) was one of the worst..
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
Because I wish I could.
Is the translation software suddenly doesn't work for this alien race. They had a mini crystal civilization living on a rock inside the lab and the computer had no problems translating that never before heard language. Now all of a sudden nobody can figure these people out?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Inner light" is my all time favorite from the Star Trek series.
Kiteo, his eyes closed!
Kadir beneath Mo Moteh
shaka, when the walls fell.
PPN
Darmok is not a good episode. To be fair, it's not among the worst episodes. It's about average or below average. But it's not a good episode, because it's dumb and goofy. But it's dumb and goofy in a way that's fun, so I still enjoy this episode, but it's a guilty pleasure.
One of my friends was a great star trek fan.
As a joke some colleagues assembled a play list of all the worst star trek episodes from TNG, DS9 and Voyager.
And made him watch them over the course of a few months. Needelss to say the lions share of it was voyager. eg: episode where janeway and paris devolve into salamander like amphibious creatures and procreate.
From TNG the i think it was an episode involving wesley and his mum. Lying about killing a co-cadet in a training accident.
There's plenty of bad episodes but all in all thats what long running sci-fi series do well.
needs a 'stupid' tag.
Darmok was a great episode but I also really like Tapestry where we see that Pickard only got to be captain because of the risks he took http://www.imdb.com/title/tt07...
Four. Lights.
period.
Watching the same six minutes over and over for an hour episode...
I rewatched the whole series last year, and I got really annoyed at the episodes where magic is featured. There are quite a few, considering it's supposed to be a science-fiction show.
That's about every episode where Troi uses her magic powers, incidentally. I especially hate when she can sense an alien being's emotions at a distance of A FEW LIGHT-YEARS.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Best: Measure of a Man
Meh: Anything focusing on Worf.
Worst: Anything focusing on Troi, Wesley, Riker, or the Holodeck. So most of the rest of the entire show.
I frequently refer to it when discussing what the internet will make us into, except instead of mythohistorical metaphors like "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", the 22nd century's equivalent of Crime and Punishment will be composed entirely in lolcat snowclones and rageface comics.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
His brown-eye then closed (over another man's pencil).
I hated pretty much all of seasons one and two.
Fortunately the series improved significantly after that, and I'd argue it finished very strong overall - which is very unusual for TV shows in general.
#DeleteChrome
Nice message. Thhttp://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/14/03/29/2010214/why-darmok-is-a-good-star-trek-tng-episode?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=facebook#e dangers of the law has been hijacked by an overzealous individual whose judgment is suspect.
Q was an incredibly lazy invention of bad script writers. The ultimate deux ex machina.
OK, there were a few other bad episodes :-)
Words have specific meanings only within the culture that uses them. The sounds have no meaning of their own.
This is another case where an episode's plot depends upon the failure of a system that works flawlessly in all other episodes.
The universal translator should have had no problem with that language. The same as it had no problem with any of the other brand new languages that it had no problem with.
And that is where that episode breaks down. Because every other time the translator has encountered a new language it has translated it.
It doesn't matter if I know what "a Samantha" means or not.
The translator in that show has never had a problem with translating such before.
> Meh: Anything focusing on Worf.
Best Worf episode: Redemption Part II is also a good Data story, when he gets command of the Sutherland and has to smack-down his first officer.
> Worst: Anything focusing on Troi, Wesley, Riker, or the Holodeck. So most of the rest of the entire show.
Best Troi episode: Thine Own Self
Best Wesley episode: The First Duty
Best Riker episode: First Contact
Best holodeck episode: Ship in a Bottle
It was not a matter of collections of sounds, but rather the societal context of those sounds.
"Where's the Beef?" when put into a literal translator will never come up with "this is insufficient", and that is precisely how the aliens communicated. No search of the words "Where" "Is" "The" and "Beef" will ever give you the meaning of the colloquialism. All the translator will do is make you think the person has lost a farm animal.
[back on the planet]
"I made a shelter for us. I think it will protect us from the storms tonight."
[exasperatedly waving arms and pointing at the flimsy shelter] "My cow is missing !"
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0092455
I mean seriously, they had an episode with a bunch of aliens that were a stereotype of the mental challenged.
For the most part, TNG was competent. At its best it was brilliant. I'm with people on episodes like The Inner Light and The Measure of a Man. Add in, for me, Cause and Effect, The Emissary, a few others. The human condition, in space. Good stuff.
Unlike many, I actually liked The Dauphin.
I thought Darmok was an interesting idea. How do you make aliens who are, well, alien, but not so alien that you can't interact with them? This was an issue with the Borg, badass aliens who could kick the shit out of Klingons and not work up a sweat, but who were so alien that no meaningful interaction was possible.
Bad episodes? Yeah, there were a few. I prefer to remember the good ones.
...laura
His cheeks spread wide.
Some of these episodes are from over 25 years ago.
Although Star Trek TNG was outstanding, the real problem is that there hasn't been much high quality science fiction TV series in the last 25 years.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
You can really tell those write-ups were written by 'youngsters' that are totally clueless, especially the one about Up the Long Ladder.
I agree, Darmok is probably the single-worst of all Star Trek episodes. Coincidentally, it came on TV last week in a hotel room I was staying at and I started swearing up and down at it to my girlfriend.
The central thesis is totally incoherent: all language is based on referents, and if the universal translator can't work on that, then it can't work on anything else, either. Or on the other hand, the alien race would have no way of expressing the legends to which they're referring to each other in the first place (no language can just be proper nouns). The main problem is that it's a Star Trek episode that wants to be actual hard science fiction (and not just space opera) -- the prospect of which excites fans, but scratch the surface and the premise actually is insulting, obviously stupid.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Best:
Lower Decks
Worst:
First on the list: Anything with Wil Wheaton doing anything more than staying off the set.
Second on the list: Anything that required Jonathan Frakes's character, Riker, to do anything other than say "Yes, sir"
Third on the list: Anything that required Marina Sirtis' character, Troi, to act like she was an empath
Fourth on the list: Anything with Q in it. Anything at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Troi: What do you think?
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Soulskill, his employment lost
Soulskill and resume, on Dice
I think my least favorite episode was the one that featured Montgomery Scott from TOS being revived.
Just felt like they trashed the character through out the episode needlessly.
Best = "The Inner Light".
Worst? I dunno, there are quite a few to choose from!
Darmok was easily one of my favourite episodes. A great experiment with language and what it might be like to encountered a different culture, classic science fiction done right.
Most of my least favourite episodes involve Q or centre around Troi. The former, because Q was mainly used for comic relief and therefore steps outside of the usually serious setting of TNG. Troi, because, well, she's mostly whinning or just stating the obvious.
Many of the episodes of season 7 were weak. There was a run of around half a dozen episodes in season 7 which basically boil down to "What we saw didn't really happen because it took place in a dream/Data's head/alternative dimension". I dislike that sort of story, where nothing we just saw was real, and they really over-used it toward the end of the show.
How... how many of them?
These people would never have invented mathematics never mind space travel saddled with a language based entirely upon metaphor. Can you imagine what their logic classes in philosophy would be like? Or their legal system?
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
My favourite for one reason - the Enterprise finally get seatbelts! Seriously, did they get rid of all Health and Safety regulations in the future? How many minor injuries could have been avoided if they'd buckled up!
That smarmy little douchebag is a death sentence for tv shows.
When they started to focus TNG on wesley crusher the show went to shit and got canned.
That guy is a curse for shows. Everything he's ever been in. When they start to give him center stage even as a bit player...
The show turns to shit and gets canceled pretty quick.
So far he's killed star trek TNG. Eureka. Generator Rex. Ben 10. Teen titans. And likely several others i've not noticed.
Next up. big bang theory. Watch and see. Season 7 gonna be the last one.
Keep that dude away from your stuff if you want it to continue.
Any episode with Q was horrible. (John Delancy was great)
Holodeck centered episodes -- lame (Barkley's stuff was passable)
Any episode focused on Troi, Data,or Wesley, were really bad.
Worf or Geordi episodes were more palatable.
My favorites:
Arsenal of Freedom
Inner light
Thine Own Self
Peak Performance
Who Watches the Watchers
The Defector
The Hunted
Best of Both Worlds
In some language "Gabaraba fala" means "You don't understand."
A straightforward sentence can be decomposed into morphemes, whose meanings combined produces the meaning of the sentence. For example, a language might work like this: ga- "negation prefix", baraba "understand", fala "you (subject)". In adult Tamarian, on the other hand, just about every utterance is an opaque figure of speech.
The translator in that show has never had a problem with translating such before.
That's because the translator had never encountered a language that relies so heavily on opaque idioms.
I liked the first episode and I liked the last episode. There was very little of redeeming value in between. The second season actually had even worse episodes than the first as well as my least favorite character, but it also saw the introduction of an excellent new character and as well as one of the series best episodes ("Measure of a Man"), so no competition, the first season wins hands down as the worst episodes despite not having Dr. Pulaski and "Shades of Grey".
I mean, in two of the first episodes of the first season they could not afford makeup for their aliens, so they just made one alien race all-black and the other all Scandinavian. Talk about phoning it in.
How old are you? Are you still hung up on your DVD collection?
Seriously, I have enjoyed watching ToS, TNG, etc a few times through but none of them have much re-watch value. They're OK but I re-watch the series maybe once every 5-10 years. Star Trek, mediocre good better there is not much better, meh.
The guy from the Ars article went over to the IMDB for checking outside his own little village. Tvtropes.org is another good place to look for disussions and other opinions on anything to do with entertainment. There they use to have a trope called "The Good Troi Episode", though when I went to confirm, I found that it's been renamed to 'A Day In the Limelight' after some discussion amongst the tropers. (Personally, I knew instantly what the trope was about from the old name, much more than 'Day In The Limelight', which doesn't even seem to be about the same thing. After all, having a day in the limelight doesn't mean you have a good episode for a change.) The episode in question is "Face of the Enemy", episode 14 of season 6. The implication is that this was the only episode featuring Deanna Troi that was actually good.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies?
I haven't seen the episode, but it's possible to have a taboo against using direct language in public. Plenty of indigenous cultures have "avoidance languages" used to communicate with in-laws. Tamarian could just have a rule to speak in analogies within strangers' earshot.
A geek and his card divided.
Which leads handily to a previous discussion about Slashdot discussions that end up turning into a pile of inside jokes.
There are people who are attracted to Science Fiction as a literature about ideas. 'Darmok' is a relatively pure version of that. It does have a physical threat and there's some facing off between the aliens and the Enterprise so it's not completely devoid of Space Opera, but maybe not enough to please, or maybe not done well enough to please those that were expecting Space Opera.
Also, the idea in 'Darmok' is very subtle and cerebral for TV, and I think that's why a lot of people like it. It must have been a tough one to write. I do think they glossed over some complications. Children would have to learn a more conventional form of language first, in order to be taught about the metaphors for example.
I do vaguely remember reading something like this is in some sci fi book I read once. I think it might have been a Larry Niven book. The protagonist is stuck among some aliens who communicate by singing excerpts from some big epic. He meets another human who was raised among them from the time she was a child and knows some basic usages and teaches him enough to get by. It was just one episode in the protagonist's various adventures in the book.
Suzette Haden Elgin's 'Native Tongue' and Jack Vance's "Languages of Pau" also deal with ideas about language in science fiction but not in the same way as 'Darmok'.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
You don't die instantly when you are shot by a bullet.
And Han isn't a badass hero you fucking moron. He is a badass period. Which means when it comes to "being a hero" or "Honor" you can shove it up your ass, but if his friend needs saving in a bar-fight or terrorist plot to destroy a weapon of mass destruction; he'll show up at exactly the right time.
^^^
Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra!
Thank you Dave Raggett
^^^
Temba, his arms wide.
Thank you Dave Raggett
^^^
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Thank you Dave Raggett
^^^
Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I kept waiting for it to get better, and it never did. I never liked any of the characters, except maybe Warf. From the first episode I had the distinct feeling that they took the characters from ST TOS and split their personality traits up, mixed and matched and came up with more characters. Kirk got his leadership, arrogance and womanizing split between Picard and Rikker. Spock's logic and telepathy was split between Data and Troi. The empathetic Dr McCoy role was split between the two doctors. And I just never liked any of them. I particularly despised Rikker and Troi. I despised that every other episode was resolved with a new batch of applied phlebotinum. How many different ways can you configure the deflector shield? Why didn't you shoot a tachyon burst from the warp nacelle last time? Bad actors, bad writing.
I'm really surprised Tin Man wasn't listed. For me it's always stuck in my mind as the worst. It was an interesting idea completely marred by that insufferable, whiny ass Tam Elbrun.
http://graphtv.kevinformatics....
Were that I say, pancakes?
Lists of best and worst things always omit something obvious or include something stupid as a way to make discussion of the list go viral.
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
By far and away the worst episode ever was Conspiracy.
I remember being a teenager and seeing it live and thinking WTF is going on?!?!?!
I saw it later as an adult and I still have no clue what the authors were thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
that I don't care about this...
Talk about wasted resources. Can't believe they even filmed the show in the first place.
It's the 24th century. Why does it need to be piloted at all by anything other than the computer?
Union rules. Not you don't see Uber or Lyft shuttles either.
And where the fuck is the local Federation OSHA bureaucrat, anyway?
Ironically, that role has been replaced by a computer. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
dude, you study language, in the context of this planet at best.
Do you also believe that ALL life requires carbon?
Get back to us when you have some, any, references to language on another planet.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
How old are you? Are you still hung up on your DVD collection?
Wow, how naive are you? That show blows away most sci-fi screenwriting done since. Maybe when you grow up you might realize that good stories aren't just written and portrayed within your limited lifetime or experience.
Don't forget that there is an awesome Darmok and Jalad T-shirt available here:
http://www.spreadshirt.com/dar...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
DS9 has better plots and characterization.
Don't waste time on TNG.
-The Inner Light
-Chain Of Command (There are FOUR lights!)
-Best Of Both Worlds
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
fuck off you self righteous prick. I've watched every episode a hundred times and it had invisible monsters, different coloured blood, an allegory about allegories and picard in hand to hand combat cum-homage to kirk and star treks from years past.
its as fucking start trek as they come, so why dont you lay down and die...
motherfucker!
The entire episode is just an allusion to a much better episode. You guys wouldn't get it.
I've always liked the episodes involving weird space time anomalies. There's that one where the Enterprise keeps exploding. Theres a repeated scene where the officers are playing poker. By the end of the episodes they all know what the card order is..... except on the last sequence.... because Data unconsciously stacked the deck because of some info sent to him from the cycle before. Cause and Effect was the name of that one. My favorite.
... then it isn't.
...rather than single episodes. Of course there are a few episodes that are bad without fitting in one of the groups (and of course a few, very few, good ones that do actually belong in one of the groups), but in general you can lump the bad episodes in one of four groups:
- Holodeck malfunction. Seriously, folks. Considering how often that piece of junk fails and how often it endangers critical personnel of an interplanetary organization, it's just not funny anymore. Did emergency power off switches get out of fashion? That piece of gunk works by transforming energy to matter. No energy, no matter. Yes, that means with a hint of bad luck the personnel inside will fall from like 10 feet down. That's not even a big deal today, let alone in a few centuries. Huh? What do you mean, you can't turn it off? No later than the first time such a malfunction happens that damn thing gets a kill switch. Let's be honest here, we're in a world where security is considered more and more important, we live in a world where we pretty much wrap ourselves in bubble wrap because we might stub our toe, and you tell me that in the future people suddenly don't go apeshit anymore when technology threatens their life and DEMAND that something be done about it? Are in the future engineers as inapt as politicians are today?
- Anything done in subspace to save the day. Seriously. I'm going to build me a weekend home in there some day. It's gotta be quite simple, considering that EVERYTHING is possible in subspace. This, along with inverse tachyon pulse (or whatever the particle-of-the-week was) is the one single overused deus-ex-machina of the STTNG universe. Whenever some author paints himself into a corner, whenever you sit there and simply can't find any good, hell, not even a bad, idea that could possibly save them, you may rest assured that all they have to do is put the whole gabbleygoo into subspace where it automagically resolves into bliss and pink ponies. And if that fails, you simply send some inverted tachyon pulse that way. ITPs really double as fairy dust in STTNG.
- Every time Wesley saves the day. I mean, let's be honest here, that's worse than Lassie. There you have a ship full of highly trained specialists, every single one hand picked to serve on that ship. It's the flag ship of the fleet, after all. It's not some backwater freighter, it's THE big thing. And these top level scientists, strategists and diplomats need some snooty kid to show them how to do it. To get an idea just HOW dumb the whole situation is, take the average US aircraft carrier and imagine some 15 year old who wants to become ensign at some point in the future, who just happens to be on board because his mother serves on it, to single-handedly save the ship from teh evilz terrists because everyone from the Admiral down to his whole staff were too dumb to notice it. And because neither Admiral nor anyone else on the ship learns from it, he gets to do it over and over again. And then nobody gets reprimanded for being stupider than some 15 year old kid without training when they not only had training but have been picked for the main ship of the fleet, and nobody is pissed at the kid for showing off their stupidity but actually praises him. Sounds like a good, believable plot for a show? Doesn't, eh? Then why the fuck should it be one in the future?
- Every "political" show. Quite frankly, it's amazing that every kind of political bickering we have on our world and every little silly idiocy we partake in gets repeated a few centuries in the future by different planets (instead of different countries). As a sidenote, is it just odd to me that every planet, no matter how backwards, no matter how advanced, is united (unless of course the script needs two bickering factions on the same surfeace), but that ability to unite didn't go as far as being able to tolerate other species from other planets? So we're able to integrate societies from the same planet, no matter how alien their customs may be, but it's impossible to do the same with specie
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pretty much everything after the end of season 3?
There are not many series which should run longer than 3-4 seasons, no matter how big the commercial success is. After this they usually focus on single ideas too much and serve the viewers who watched everything before. The only notable exception which would come to my mind is Dr. Who, and even there i would argue that the long break with a big restart (insteadt of a small one which is implicit in Dr. Who all the time) worked out very well.
...best episode of STTNG ever was "The Inner Light". Simply a tour de force of acting and writing.
People can't dream so they go crazy. Troi has a recurring nightmare floating in space. This episode dragged on and is probably the worst of the series.
(A Troi episode is bad???)
"The One Where Troi Falls in Love with a Brain Vampire and Gets Really Old..and Rachel Marries Ross."
Straczynski had the main arc in mind, but he could not foresee where the show will end up.
So, he had "trap doors" written for all characters. But episodes and characters still had to be written as they went along.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think that this was the best episode, as far as writing. It was Warf's break-out episode. The story runs like bit of a mystery. The closing lines are sharp as any could be.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
This is another case where an episode's plot depends upon the failure of a system that works flawlessly in all other episodes.
Well there's your problem. You assume it works flawlessly. It doesn't. It works somewhere between "good enough" and "nearly flawlessly". For example, in Star Trek VI, Chekov and Uhura must avoid using the universal translator because the Klingons will be able to detect its use. This implies flaws.
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I don't know the episode names, but for me the worst are anything with Q; anything with evolution, terminally dumb, especially the episode where they all devolve into different animals - please! - and then evolve back in the same episode! -and the Wesley Crusher episode where he takes off with - gag - the Traveler. And I'm not fond of holodeck-takes-over-the-ship episodes, either, at least as a premise; the execution wasn't always bad. I do love, in no particular order, the first Vash episode, any Data episode, Lwaxana Troi episodes, Barclay episodes, episodes that feature Picard or Worf or Alexander. The one in which Worf gets paralyzed is wonderful. The episode in which the crew is out for "30 seconds" but it's really 24 hours and only Data knows the truth is excellent. I'm not a big Wesley Crusher fan, but the episode with Ashley Judd was fun. Lots of silly episodes but some marvelous ones, as well-- too many to mention. And don't hate on Voyager! Some great time paradox stories there (tho the series finale was too contrived for me), great B'Elanna and Tom episodes, oh! And that great episode about smuggling telepaths through hostile territory in spite of the duplicitous and cultured customs agent! Not to mention the episode in which Jane way and Chakotay are quarantined on a planet together. And then there's Deep Space 9....!
Posters on this thread have done a much better job of defending "Darmok" than Hutchinson did. Hutchinson's reply is to dig out statistics on how popular the episode is. It doesn't address Peter Bright's complaints at all.
Peter: "It's a terrible episode, made all the more terrible by the fact that some people actually like it. They're objectively wrong."
Hutchinson: "But people like it, so it must be a good episode."
somewhere around 15 to 20 comments on the subject, All I hear in my head was the Villain from the movie "Revenge of the Nerds" screaming "NERDS!!!"
Saw the episode, liked it, thought it was appropriate for Star Trek.
All of which have Councillor Troi in it/. Amazingly enough, Marina Sirtis is a fine actress.. how she got her "boat hitched up" to play Troi is unknown, although I "sense" they were l;ooking for a great plot device for dealing with difficult conundrums. I simply can not STAND that character though.. as regards watching the series.. it's a deal breaker for me...
First Duty was a good episode, perhaps even a great one, easily in TNG's Top 20. Final Mission was good too. There were also some perfectly watchable Wesley episodes, like The Game, and the evolution of his character in Journey's End hinted at bigger things to come.
In fact, all of the bad Wesley episodes were in the first two seasons, which with few exceptions (Q Who, Measure of a Man) were filled with all sorts of suckitude that usually had nothing to do with Wil Wheaton or Wesley Crusher.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I like strong female characters that know how to handle themselves.
So you've chosen to pick the character that turned to mush after her unconsummated lover sacrificed himself for her? Ivanova was cool, but Kira Neryes kicks her ass in the "strong female" department.
Ivanova turns to mush after her lover(s) dies, Kira keeps going. Ivanova has PTSD after watching her Mother get tortured to death by the Psi-Corps, while Kira picks up a phaser and starts fighting after her Father is tortured to death. Ivanova defers to the Minbari dominated Interstellar Alliance at the expense of Earth, Kira defends her people against everybody, including the Federation when necessary.
No comparison between those characters.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Everyone raves about "The Inner Light," which is a wonderfully written and acted episode - but it suffers from a flaw even BIGGER than the one in Darmok.
The central conceit is that there's an alien space probe that locks onto Captain Picard and puts him in a coma-like state while transmitting the memories of a long-dead scientist from the alien civilization, which Picard experiences first-person as a "new life" in his mind.
Even aside from the fact that the aliens would have no way of knowing the biology of the race that would encounter the probe, and how to interface to such a brain to transmit memories. You think conveying your language to an alien mind is difficult? Try images, sounds, emotions, etc. It's laughably implausible. To use Peter Bright's own words: "This is just nonsense. It doesn't work."
Not to mention that if your civilization is dying, sending a space probe into deep space in some random direction with the firsthand memories of a SINGLE member of your species, in the hopes that someone will find it, is the WORST possible plan for preserving the history of your race. These people deserved to die out if they're that stupid!
Offhand I can think of at least half a dozen ways they could have made "The Inner Light" reasonably plausible, but the premise is IDIOTIC. Yet "Inner Light" gets a free pass and "Darmok" gets condemned.
I haven't seen this yet, so here goes:
https://xkcd.com/902/
Meta joke of the day: Imagine Kate Mulgrew reciting that post! : )
She was also a regent on Warehouse 13.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Without a doubt the best is Yesterday's Enterprise.
"We think we speak the English, or French, of today. But our English or French language of today is of yesterday and elsewhere. The miracle is that language has not been cut from its archaic roots -- even if we do not remember, our language remembers, and what we say began to be said three thousand years ago."
https://prelectur.stanford.edu...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
There just aren't any *really* good episodes. At best it's ok. Why? Because the TNG universe is clean and sterile. TNG's characters are soppy and goody-goody and lack the human flaws and classic mythic plots that made the first incarnation of ST so good. It's more soap than sci fi. I've watched and re-watched the best original ST episodes on occasion, they're good for the soul as someone once said here. But I never seek out a TNG episode, not when there's such good tv drama available now (Sopranos, Breaking Bad - now that is good television). It's just not that good.
FFS it is just a kids show: intended for 9 year old boys. Get over it!
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
Yes, that was inconsistent with the character but sadly the real world got in the way and a producer decided she had to be written out for daring to ask to be paid as much as male actors with less lines. Ivanova was supposed to end up running B5 and the Loxley character was brought in to fill the gap without changing the plot much.
At the expense of a corrupt Earth government and effectively for the people of Earth. Don't go all "my country right or wrong" on me about a series where the Nightwatch story was about when the state is being run in a perverse way.
Yes, that was inconsistent with the character
No, it was perfectly consistent, did you read my other gripes about her character? Strong she was not. Which Star Trek female had PTSD? Which Star Trek female whined as much as Ivanova?
At the expense of a corrupt Earth government and effectively for the people of Earth.
My issue with Ivanova and Sheridan was what they did after the Civil War, setting themselves up as a higher power, withholding advanced technology from humanity, and so on. Sheridan fancied himself a Messiah and drove me absolutely up the wall towards the end of the series. Ditto for Deleen. Ivanova was PTSD addled victim, Garibaldi and Franklin were both addicts, hell now that I think of it was there a single likeable human character on that show? There were some great alien characters (Mollari and G'Kar) but human ones? I guess JMS is a misanthrope, because I can't recall a recurring human character that I genuinely liked. Marcus maybe, he never had any illusions of godhood from what I recall, or let down people who trusted him with their lives on a regular basis.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I was comparing with Troi and will have to take your word on Kira, since the stupid amphibian sex episode that had zero effect on continuity on Voyager turned me off the entire Trek franchise and anything those writers are likely to come in contact with.
Yes, there were writing problems on B5 with Ivanova's character but I was putting that forward as an example of "decoration" that evolved into something more when the writers worked out that Claudia could act. Remember she was cast as Ivanova immediately after being cast as a pole dancer FFS - chosen as eye candy and not the ability that provided the best moments for the character.
Also I see the PTSD as a very clumsy hook to link into a psi-corps plot. I can't see how the character would have made it as far as being a mid ranking military officer in peacetime if they had that in their past before they even joined. I also see the lesbian fanservice thing as a clumsy addition that added nothing to the character apart from an excuse for a skimpy costume.
The actors playing them were just about the only members of the main cast that had ever trod upon a stage and probably turned mediocre writing into good TV. The transformations of those two characters (thug to Ghandi, clown to Stalin) showed a lot of range.
There are inconsistencies because that is life.
People are inconsistent, all organizations are inconsistent, all philosophies and POV's are, and most of the time you are only getting 10% of the story.
You will enjoy and understand fiction much better if you keep this in mind.
That episode really showcases Patrick Stewart's legacy as a Shakespearean Actor. It is on of the best in the series (the scenes with Stewart, at least)
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I just don't think B5 stands the test of time very well. The resolution to the Shadow War was one of the biggest deus ex machina endings ever, the Minbari were hard to swallow as a serious civilization (it would have been awesome to see humanity eclipse them in a spinoff series rather than continue to play second fiddle to a bunch of religious fanatics), the telepathy nonsense is annoying (as it is in Star Trek, but at least there it's not central to the entire series), and two of the lead characters (Sheridan and Deleen) were Messianic megalomaniacs that needed to brought back down to reality by their respective Governments but somehow managed to elevate themselves over and above their own people.
B5 wasn't the best military themed Sci-Fi series, that honor probably goes to Battlestar Galactica. It wasn't the best at exploring the human condition, that honor goes to Star Trek. It was cool in the beginning from a space geek standpoint when they paid heed to real world physics, but that aspect of the show was largely forgotten by the third season, and some of their tech ideas (like this crazy notion that we're all going to evolve into beings of energy, or that biological ships could be superior to conventional building methods) were as dumb as the particle-of-the-week technobabble laden Star Trek episode.
The best plot line was the Earth Civil War and that got short charged by JMS when he thought the show was going to get axed in Season 4. He was a one hit wonder in any case, just watch Season 5, Crusade, or (god help you) The Lost Tales. I still want my $12.00 back for that stupid two story disk.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If that's the case then SF is doing a piss poor job at doing that.
Of course it's great: some friends of mine run a band here in Portland, Oregon called Tanagra!
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
I liked Darmok, it was one that stuck in my brain, and always remember the lines. It was really the only episode that sort of points out universal translator aside it very well could be that aliens being so aliens, it may be next to impossible for real understanding.
However the episode that I perhaps I liked the best was Lower Decks. Main characters play relatively minor roles, and shows the ship from the junior officer perspective. Apart from the corny bartender I thought it was really well done. I also thought it was one of the more poingent and sad episodes. One of the few that actually choked me up a bit.
Defying Gravity had so much potential, yet it was developing so slowly that the network killed it prematurely, presumably because it's all about ad revenue and things that go boom in space. Essentially the same pattern happened with the British series Outcasts, though it was finally bringing it together at the end of the first season. I first saw it as a rerun on SciFi, then was terribly disappointed to find that the BBC had canceled it before the second season started.
- T
Having recently just re-watched all of ST:TNG, my picks for worst are fairly simple: most episodes focusing on Troi, any episode featuring Troi's mother, and almost every episode featuring or focusing on Worf's son Alexander.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
...is THE most ridiculous 1 hour in television history. Paul Winfield, an otherwise outstanding actor, should STILL be in hiding.
Ars Attentionica picked just enough bad ones to appear like they were trying, then picked good ones to stir up a bunch of drama and attention. I bet the people who made the list never even watched TNG, much like how they don't know much about anything else they write articles about.