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?"

Comments

The Inner Light

[poity]

manly tears

Re:The Inner Light

[DerekLyons]

Indeed. When my DVR picks up on a TNG episode, that's the only one I will watch every single time.

Re:The Inner Light

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

One of the things that made Picard such a memorable character is that, once or twice a season, he would break out of the British Sea captain shell and reveal the character beneath, particularly the flaws and weaknesses.

In this regard, some of the best Picard Episodes are, to obviously begin with

- Chain of Command II (There are Four Lights!)
- Family (Picard reveals how much his Bord capture affected him)
- Tapestry (Reveals Picard's stabbing and its effect on his life)

However, I find one of the most striking aspects of Picard's character is revealed while he is offscreen, by Worf, in an otherwise fairly corny 5th season episode called "The Perfect Mate".

PAR LENOR: Perhaps your captain would care to invite us to join him for dinner this evening...

WORF: The captain dines alone.

It's almost a throwaway line, but manages to crystalise a lot about Picard's behaviour and relationships with the rest of the crew. He's never too close to any of them, or anyone, personally, but instead lives and relates to people through his leadership role as Captain, an effectively Father figure to the crew. There's a pay-off made on this during the last Episode (All Good Things - II) where Picard finally joins one of the poker games.

However, I think that the single best Picard moment related to this is his wordless reaction on hearing of Ensign Ro's defection, at the very end of the penultimate episode (Preemptive Strike). Ro betrays Star Fleet for personal, patriotic, emotional reasons, and does so precisely because Picard professionally pushed her into an undercover mission.

Here Picard finally tastes the bitter pill of consequence that he's been dishing out to aliens and miscreants for seven seasons, as his adoptive officer-daughter Ro finally makes her personal, matured, self-determined choice to not live the rest of her life in his perfect Star Fleet family, or by his cherished Federation rules. And after being betrayed by someone he trusted, for reasons he understands but cannot accept, Picard's livid silence makes for a deliciously dramatic conclusion. A crowning moment, no doubt.

Re:The Inner Light

[Zontar The Mindless]

I always liked Ro. She had a spine.

(Yeah yeah yeah... And she was kind of hot, too.)

Re:The Inner Light

[lennier1]

Don't forget "Lessons", the last chapter of "The Inner Light".

Re:The Inner Light

[drolli]

Definitely the best episode i remember. Actually one of the only ones I remember very positively. Great acting, great story, no rush for effects.

Re:The Inner Light

[greenfruitsalad]

Really? This you would pick? Rather than ANY Wesley Crusher centered episode?

Re:The Inner Light

[Anonymous Coward]

And what made it totally ridiculous is you can't develop metaphor without language.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Patrick Stewart a termite.

My suspension of disbelief, a pirate on the gallows.

Metaphor, an asteroid in deep space.

Constructive language, like Amelia Earhart.

Re:The Inner Light

[Tablizer]

We'd like to Ro her boat.

Re:The Inner Light

[Shakrai]

That's true, it takes a lot of backbone to order the torture and rape of a prisoner of war a few weeks after you shoot your XO in cold blood.... err, n/m, wrong series. :)

Useless Trek Trivia: Michelle Forbes was originally seen taking Nana Visitor's role on Deep Space Nine, in a continuation of the Ro character. She declined, because she didn't want the commitment of full time production, but it would have been interesting to see how different DS9 would have turned out if she had accepted the role. There's a throwaway line by O'Brien in the DS9 pilot, where he asks Sisko "Have you ever served with any Bajoran women?", hinting at Kira's (and Ro's) aggressive personality.

More Star Trek musing: Jean-Luc Picard was the best captain, and Patrick Stewart probably the best Actor out of all the Star Trek series, and TNG will always hold a special place in my heart. That said, DS9 had the richest set of characters, both regular and supporting. DS9 had more relatable characters (O'Brien), more ruthless ones (Garek), more tortured souls (Odo, Kira), all alongside the usual happy-go-lucky Federation types.

Re:The Inner Light

[Hognoxious]

I sort of agree. Still, if you push that to the back of your mind - maybe their language has no smaller syntactic element than clichés - it's still a decent episode.

Maybe it's not that much of a stretch. Old people, in Korea, needing citations. Natalie Portman, naked and terrified.

Re:The Inner Light

[Samizdata]

And the unfulfilled promise of Sisko punching Q in the nose.

Troi

[wisnoskij]

So basically the worst episodes are those featuring Trio.

Re:Troi

[DudemanX]

For the most part, yes. They only mention the ones where Troi gets space raped. They don't even bring up the Luwaxana episodes.

Re:Troi

[Dan East]

There was at least one really awful episode involving Beverly Crusher too. So you could say both female leads had some zingers.

Re:Troi

[Anonymous Coward]

> They don't even bring up the Luwaxana episodes.

IMHO, one of the finest episodes of the series was Half a Life, which centered around Lwaxana. She had to drop her facade of strength when she faced a very personal moral dilemma, and showed her true vulnerability.

Re:Troi

[DudemanX]

Some of the Crusher episodes were good though like the one involving the solar shielding tech(which showed up in a later episode) and the one where everyone on the Enterprise keep disappearing. I'm assuming the awful one you refer to is the one from season 7 where she gets space raped by a ghost candle. The lesson here is that stories about women can be good when the writers give them stuff to do besides being space raped.

Re:Troi

[DudemanX]

I enjoyed that one too but when I think Lwaxana the first things that pop into my mind are when she, Troi, and Riker get kidnapped by Ferengi and when she goes crazy because of Troi's secret sister. I did like her DS9 episodes though.

Re:Troi

[AmiMoJo]

They didn't know what to do with her but needed an attractive young woman on the show. Even in that capacity the terrible costumes tended to ruin it.

Re:Troi

[miller701]

I liked Troi a lot better when she went with the standard SF uniform in the last 2 or so seasons

Re:Troi

[dbIII]

She suffered from a power level, and indeed just about everything about her, swinging from one extreme to the other depending upon the writer of the week.
Next up I'd say the writers didn't quite know what to do about Wesley which resulted in some annoying "Wesley saves the day" episodes.

Re:Troi

[dbIII]

Claudia Christian filled that role as the attractive young woman on a show that they didn't know what to do with in Babylon5 to start with - but then writers starting giving her Ivanova character stuff to do, the character became defined and it worked out well.
In a show where continuity is not important and history resets just about every episode you end up with a cardboard cutout decoration that stays that way.

Re:Troi

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thirdly, why did a shuttle pilot need to be sent out on what all the scientists believed to be a suicide mission? It's the 24th century. Why does it need to be piloted at all by anything other than the computer?

They live in a socialist utopia where scarcity has been eliminated and humanoid androids have existed since at least Kirk's time.

The only reasonable explanation is that they must execute android builders (err, re-program...) and they desperately need jobs for people to do.

Re:Troi

[Immerman]

Quite so. The first season left much to be desired, but Ivanova ended up developing into a fairly rich character. I think one of the reasons I really prefer the "long story arch" series to the episodic ones is that they not only permit, but practically mandate the growth and evolution of at least the primary characters. There's also something to be said for occasionally killing off one of the major/semi-major character - which is something I think especially the older Doctor Who's did well - you pretty much assume the good guys still win, but you're never 100% certain they'll survive the experience, and even the most beloved of the single-story protagonists could die horribly with little warning. Really amped up the drama. Decades later and I still remember most of the good Doctor's deaths.

Re:Troi

[AmiMoJo]

I want both to live on. I think Slashdot can still be saved.

The line of code in my sig is doing an approximation of fixed point maths using integers for performance. Aside from the fact that it makes little sense in this scenario and gives not preceptable performance increase it's also a pretty terrible name for a variable.

Re:Troi

[cycler]

Say what?

I (as a casual viewer) was under the assumption that the B5 series was all written before they started filming?
So every development of the character was already determined.

Or am I wrong? /C

Re:Troi

[dbIII]

Very wrong, but for good reasons. Once JMS worked out how good some of the actors he had for secondary roles were he gave them much more to do. The three ambassadors were played by more experienced and capable actors than the rest of the recurring cast for example.

Re:Troi

[Toad-san]

I was wondering about that too. Are they overly fixated on Troi? Or hugely disappointed about What Might Have Been?

Re:Troi

[Master Moose]

I am sensing that I was only hired for my cleavage

Re:Troi

[Samizdata]

Or the one episode that had us throw a "Wesley FSCKED UP" party. The one where they did the stunt that ended up in death.

Re:Troi

[toddestan]

One of my favorite parts of the series was in Chain of Command where the Enterprise-D (temporarily) got a new captain who basically told Troi to put on a goddamn uniform. It was also pretty cool that it stuck for the rest of the episodes after that.

Re:Troi

[toddestan]

I actually liked how they offed Tasha like that. Usually the death of one of the main characters turns into some horribly overly dramatic thing, but instead they basically offed her like one of the many proverbial redshirts. It was both startling and at the same time a bit refreshing. (though other than that, the whole "Skin of Evil" episode was pretty horrible though).

Also, I don't agree that it was an empty death. She basically died to the line of duty, trying to assist and rescue one of her shipmates. Of course, Star Trek couldn't leave it at that, so instead they brought her back in a time travel/alternate reality episode, had her be captured by the Romulans, turned into concubine of some sort, and ends up being killed trying to escape but not after giving birth to that horrible Sela character. Now that was a stupid death.

Re:Troi

[Rakarra]

Hey, sometimes they had a Good Troi Episode.

Re:Troi

[imidan]

I liked those Crusher episodes particularly because they didn't involve Crusher getting space raped, kidnapped, falling in love, or playing the role of generic 'damsel in distress'. So many of the TNG episodes that featured the women characters as the focus did so *because* they were women, and someone needed to have a space rape baby, or someone needed to be emotionally compromised, or do something else stereotypically 'female'. So I really liked the episodes where Crusher or Troi or some of the other less prominent women characters (like Ensign Ro) get the opportunity to play a lead part in a story that could have been played by a man, but wasn't.

Bullshit Made Up Language

[wisnoskij]

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?

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[TheGavster]

I think you missed the point ... the language was formed out of references to a common body of knowledge. The universal translator was doing just fine figuring out what the individual words meant, but without the common story to refer to they made to sense. It's essentially as if an entire culture communicated only in pop culture references. For example, someone might say "You're such a Samantha", but if you haven't watched many hours of Sex and the City, you would have no idea what they meant despite knowing all of those words.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[sizzzzlerz]

Interesting thought, however, since I never watched any Sex and the City, I assumed you were referring to a cute witch housewife with a twitchy nose. I guess it all depends on what generation of TV shows one was raised on.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[The Rizz]

All I can really think to say about your post, and your understanding of the episode, is "Shaka, when the walls fell".

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[wisnoskij]

You seem to have missed the point. That is the entire basis of a language, a shared body of specific knowledge. "You're such a Samantha" is from a SatC language, heavily based on English. That is why I and everyone else that know English can understand the words but not the meaning. But, lets assume we know nothing about SatC and English both. In that case "You're such a Samantha" is completely identical to "You're such a slut/bitch/smartypants" (whatever "Samantha" means to SitC fans). Samantha is just a random assortment of sounds/letters that denote an idea, No different than any other word.

Samantha in this case is just a new word that I do not know. There is nothing toilety about the word toilet, for example, the guy that designed it was probably just called Frank Toilet, that does not mean that an Alien culture would be unable to understand the word toilet because it used to be a proper noun.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[emorning]

The unbelievable part is that the Tamarian's were advanced enough to built interstellar spacecraft and transporters but somehow they weren't smart enough to say to themselves "hmm, you know what, I bet they can't understand us because we only speak in metaphors".

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[adric22]

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ShanghaiBill]

This is how all languages work.

I once watched an interview of Bob Woodward about his book All the President's Men. He mentioned that it had been translated into other languages, including French, but the title for the translations had been changed to "Nixon and Watergate". The interviewer asked why, and he replied "Because the French don't have Humpty Dumpty".

Some languages use cultural idioms more than others. English has many idioms that refer to our common culturall heritage, but Chinese has far more. You can get by in English without studying idioms specifically. In Chinese, there is no way. You have to learn them or you will fail to comprehend almost every conversation.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[wisnoskij]

"Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?"
Shaka, when the walls fell

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs. Shockley, his arms wide!

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Nidi62]

I think you missed the point ... the language was formed out of references to a common body of knowledge. The universal translator was doing just fine figuring out what the individual words meant, but without the common story to refer to they made to sense. It's essentially as if an entire culture communicated only in pop culture references.

So, essentially me reading this entire thread having never seen a whole episode of Star Trek, or even seen an hours worth combined (not counting the recent lens flares).

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[VortexCortex]

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?

Data, his technospeak halted! Vanna White, her job made easy. A function calling itself:

Spock at his station, one brow raised. Free flaming hairdos from a biblical tower. Einstein, his M and squared C: A Pulp Fictional briefcase, it's contents unshown. A babbling brook's fish swims in 42 ears. Buddha his belly grown large.

A pig eats pearls at the library of Alexandria. Riker and Picard, both faces palmed. A geek and his card divided.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[miller701]

I think you're missing a big point. In Darmok their language doesn't even have a concept for "You" or "are"

Re: Bullshit Made Up Language

[emorning]

If that were the case then they wouldn't have gotten so pissed off when when they were not understood.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[michael_cain]

Or enough math to do the physics for warp drive. Ask anyone who's taken math-heavy graduate classes: notation, the language, matters a lot. The British fell behind Continental Europe in terms of advancing analysis, and stayed behind, until they finally tossed Newton's notation in favor of Leibniz.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Baloroth]

But the meaning of the word "toilet" does not (generally) depend on the whole sentence nor on the context of the sentence. "You're such a Samantha", however, does, especially since Samantha doesn't literally mean anything besides the name itself. Samantha does not mean "bitch/slut/etc., except in this context (toilet, on the other hand, retains its meaning even entirely outside any other context). As another example, one could easily translate the phrase "a New York minute" to another language, but conveying what it actually means would require using completely different words (in fact, the literal translation would be entirely different from the idiomatic meaning). A computer which tried to translate the phrase would have zero concept that it's an idiom (unless explicitly told so), and would simply translate the sentence as it was, which would create an intelligible translation, but would not convey the desired concept at all.

You could argue that single-word (such as "Samantha") could intelligently be translated by the universal translator successfully, even when used in such an idiomatic construct. But a sentence which depends entirely on the context ("Darmok at Blahblah" might well refer to an entirely different Darmok, or not even to a person at all) is vastly harder, if not impossible, to translate.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ildon]

But you don't have to know who Samantha is or watch Sex and the City to learn the context of that reference. That's exactly how ALL language works. "Samantha" is no different from "bitch." "Bitch" requires the context of knowing that "female dog" is an insult. (I'm not saying "Samantha" == "bitch", I've never watched the show, I'm simply using that as an example of how all language requires context).

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Kjella]

You seem to have missed the point. That is the entire basis of a language, a shared body of specific knowledge. "You're such a Samantha" is from a SatC language, heavily based on English. That is why I and everyone else that know English can understand the words but not the meaning. But, lets assume we know nothing about SatC and English both. In that case "You're such a Samantha" is completely identical to "You're such a slut/bitch/smartypants" (whatever "Samantha" means to SitC fans). Samantha is just a random assortment of sounds/letters that denote an idea, No different than any other word.

Yes, but nearly all languages can be broken down into reusable words. The idea is that in this language the metaphors wildly change meaning depending on the context in which they were spoken. Say that in the context of clothes "being a Samantha" is someone who dresses fabulously, while in the context of sex "being a Samantha" means being a slut. So the would be diplomat tries to say "Your dress looks fabulous" but without the correct contextual clues the universal translator will say "You are such a slut" instead. A conversation becomes an irreducible complexity because taking away one sentence or one word changes the meaning of everything else being said, so it can't deduct what it is they're saying by looking at common phrases nor can it express any new sentences, like what the Enterprise crew would like to say. It's almost like trying to decipher a conversation between two people with cultural references serving as a one time pad, without the key you are totally lost.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Arker]

I think YOU missed the point.

All the supposed reasons why the UT would fail here - would have made it fail many times before.

Some of them, mind you, are good reasons. Good reasons to doubt that a 'universal translator' might ever be invented, that is.

But once you swallow the UT itself, the idea that this one language resists it makes absolutely no sense.

"You're such a Samantha?" We say all the time "You're such a bitch" and it's the same case. To know what it connotes you have to know not just the denotations of the words and the place of dogs in our culture, you have to know something of their behaviour, you really need lots of background to fully understand the nature of the insult. But without that background you can still figure out it's a bad thing to call someone just from context. The UT supposedly works by teasing out those contextual clues to connotation even when the denotation is unknowable - which makes sense, that is how it would have to be done.

But if so, that leaves us without even the slightest suggestion as to why it would not work in this case. All the rationales presented are false on their face.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[rmdingler]

Yes. The famous line from Pulp Fiction: What do they call a big Mac in France?

Learning a language in high school versus using it during a cultural immersion experience.

Slang matters and it becomes dated much too quickly: Stacks of heads chiselin' in the easy> ...wtf?

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[VortexCortex]

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language.

Ah, I see you haven't studied Egyptian Hieroglyphs then, eh? As someone who teaches networks of neural networks concepts such as object recognition, relational significance, temporal ordering significance and I don't understand your ignorance of the problem. Imagine a Chinese speaker and an English speaker separated by a wall impervious to everything but sound. They would never come to know each other's languages unless they both experienced some event at the same time, and gave it a name, much like your parents do to teach infants. The same thing happened between us and the ancient Egyptians, the wall was time and it was impervious to everything except the symbolic hieroglyphs.

The universal translator had encountered a problem it did not understand, so it got as far as it could and spit out the result, perhaps thinking it had decoded the language. It would be similar to me asking my AI system which understands some English to decipher hieroglyphs without analyzing the Rosetta stone. It would stop at the OCR pass and spit out a series of words naming each symbol: water yolk bird falcon. It translated the symbols into meanings as best it could, but could never grok, "You belong to the god Horus" without a common body of knowledge, much as humans couldn't make the translation even given extensive samples of the language. Aliens with no concept of gods would have an even harder time understanding the sentence. "They say we're following an imaginary legendary figure" ...uh, is that good or bad?

To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.

If you want to bitch about something obvious, then it should be that each space faring alien hadn't invented a new self-describing language based on the concepts of mathematics, physical and temporal dimensions and properties of matter. Then described their common tongues in it, for use as a common medium for conceptual exchange between races.

Oh, but what do I know, I'm just a high school drop out who learned everything he needed to know about you humans from being homeless... To me it seems humans invest too much in your divisionist institutions of learning, and not enough in the process of learning itself.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Aqualung812]

Sokath, his eyes uncovered!

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[crossmr]

I think you're missing the point. It's something I thought about for a long time, but it is BS. How could such a society function?
How could you communicate simple daily tasks by talking in such opaque references? How did those people talk in the first place? Language develops to be function, it was not a functional language. How the fuck could they ever build a spaceship trying to communicate like that?

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Zalbik]

This is how all languages work.

Joey and the turkey.

Oh wait, that's not at all how languages work.....

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ildon]

It's not about idioms. It's about meaning. Meaning can be conveyed either through a set of words or a single word. Either way it still requires context and can be translated using that context.

Read this article: http://www.businessinsider.com...

We don't have any trouble turning those literal Chinese phrases into common English phrases, despite the fact that their literal meanings make almost no sense without context or prior knowledge. By the logic in that episode, the TNG Universal Translator would fail to turn Chinese into English. It'd be a useless piece of shit and not work for any language.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[C0R1D4N]

Or that none of the trained Federation linguists and xenoanthropologists could figure it out until Picard spent a weekend with one.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AthanasiusKircher]

Yes, but nearly all languages can be broken down into reusable words.

Yeah, actually that's a myth, and part of the reason why machine translation is still in its infancy. Language is simply NOT composed of atomistic words which contain well-defined meanings, that are then strung together according to some abstract grammatical rules. It just doesn't work like that, and you realize that if you begin to think about it for a moment. Meaning resides in all sorts of contextual information, and most words really can't be pinned down in their exact meaning unless you put them into an actual English sentence. If you string together words based on the "dictionary metaphor" of atomistic meaning, you might get something that sounds like a foreigner speaking terribly, full of errors that would be obvious to a native speaker, but nothing like real fluency.

The "dictionary metaphor" works reasonably well for rare words. "Lugubrious," for example, usually means roughly the same thing in most contexts, because it's a rare word. But even a word like that still has shades of meaning: it always means mournful or gloomy, but if often carries a connotation of exaggeration or excessiveness... though not always.

Now compare a word like that to a common English word like "set," which literally has hundreds of different shades of meaning dependent on context. Do you seriously think a universal translator could determine the meaning without having an understanding not just of an atomistic word "set" and its possible meanings, but the entire phrase around it, probably the entire sentence, and maybe even an entire paragraph?

The idea is that in this language the metaphors wildly change meaning depending on the context in which they were spoken. Say that in the context of clothes "being a Samantha" is someone who dresses fabulously, while in the context of sex "being a Samantha" means being a slut. So the would be diplomat tries to say "Your dress looks fabulous" but without the correct contextual clues the universal translator will say "You are such a slut" instead.

This is simply your failure to imagine a normal English word which could have such a range of meanings (and many do, dependent on context). Many if not most of the words in the core central lexicon (say, the most common 1000 words or so in English) have greatly divergent connotations depending on context. Even in cases where the central meaning of the word is roughly constant, it has all sorts of different implications depending on the idiomatic context you put it in. (And even the tone with which it is spoken, or the body language accompanying it, etc.)

A conversation becomes an irreducible complexity because taking away one sentence or one word changes the meaning of everything else being said, so it can't deduct what it is they're saying by looking at common phrases nor can it express any new sentences

We already really have that, which is why translation based on simply stringing together meanings of individual words fails so badly. It's also the reason why Google has made greater strides in improving translation by forgetting about supposed meanings of individual words and instead trying to match larger patterns and idioms. It's still not perfect, but it's a much better approach than the flawed "dictionary metaphor," which is useful for learning obscure words (which is why dictionaries were originally created), but terrible for understanding the core of any language.

Now, maybe through some sort of magical technology, "universal translation" could be implemented in the future. But it makes absolutely no sense that it would fail only once in this particular episode because of words whose meaning depends on context.

And even if you accept that this language really was more excessive than most, you have to then question: how the devil did those people ever learn to talk? How did they learn who Darmok was, so they they could

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Austerity Empowers]

Actually the reason I really liked this episode is that I had a very smart friend, with a pretty impressive active vocabulary, who cannot seem to speak without at least one or two levels of reference. Even to this day, talking to him is a study in popular culture. He will really say "Staples" and it will mean "that was easy".

Honestly after 20 years, I really don't think he's aware he's doing it.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Austerity Empowers]

In theory, after analyzing the language for long enough, an intelligent translator could produce the correct translation. "Shaka, when the walls fell", used enough in context, could eventually be replaced with "Failure".

The question is how much of some string of phonemes has to be repeated and deduced from context in order to translate even the literals properly. It seems as if the universal translator would have to be able to identify proper noun Shaka (do not translate), noun walls (interpret from context, translate), verb fell etc. from a similar set of operations as those required to get the higher level meaning.

Anyway like most TV sci-fi it was more intellectual than anything else on at the time and hadn't yet degenerated into a space-war saga. There are lots of debates about the viability of universal translation, this was a decent way of cluing in the layman I think. Dig too hard of course and it falls apart.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[dbIII]

Stepping back a bit it's probably just a writer having a dig at the idea of machine translation.
In Star Wars (and one excuse when it comes up in Dr Who) they can get away with it because it's a concious entity that knows a lot of stuff about the other languages and cultures doing the translation. Something like C3PO could translate the Tamarian's language by reasoning out the metaphors but apparently the Trek AI is not supposed to be a full artificial person so cannot.

Even in the early 1960s the author Desmond Bagley had a poke at machine translation with "hydraulic ram" coming back as "water sheep".

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Stumbles]

Well then, everyone should be using a Babelfish.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.

Concrete example: Demonstrate base ten addition by writing the examples (152+27 , 132+45, 174+19, 199+36, 999+1) on the board, vs demonstrate base ten addition by discussing the properties of carrying units, overflow, and adding columns.

Even more conrete example: Demonstrate a triangle by drawing one, vs demonstrate a triangle by decribing it as a three sided figure made by straight line segements whose endpoints are joined cyclically.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Culture20]

The unbelievable part is that the Tamarian's were advanced enough to built interstellar spacecraft and transporters but somehow they weren't smart enough to say to themselves "hmm, you know what, I bet they can't understand us because we only speak in metaphors".

They did, but it came out as "Shaka, when the walls fell."

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[vux984]

how the devil did those people ever learn to talk? How did they learn who Darmok was, so they they could then understand the use of "Darmok" in its multitude of possible varying contexts?

Re-enactments and recordings of those events in the form of TV, plays, and movies.

Its also likely that any two individuals who spent time together would develop their own reference frame.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Culture20]

It probably does, but the adults have evolved past the point of using language that way. For a modern example, imagine a group of nerds who haven't seen each other for a long time. They'll reminisce about days long past referring to common experiences, technical jargon, and Monty Python quotes. Most English speakers will find the conversation incomprehensible.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like explaining Korean to Koreans. Where if you need to spell something out: "il, il-han", "il, il-nal",
To get a better example using english:

I'd just Kenny,in South Park, if I heard him Athiest, from mouth. But he was apple in design and could apple in jobs. [I'd just die if I heard him spew shit from his mouth; But he was sleek and elegant, and could sell sunscreen to fish]
Staples. (That was easy.)

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[jensend]

The problem is: we may think it strange that a universal translator that does such a miraculous job everywhere else would be so nonfunctional with this language, Trekkies will come up with some silly technobabble explanation, but the only real reason is that a universal translator is just a handwaving plot device for writers' convenience, and here for once they found it inconvenient. Their way of dealing with it may be illogical, but tossing the crutch for one episode allows them to explore new ground.

Almost every piece of technology in Star Trek is there for one of two reasons: it made the writers' jobs easier (e.g. universal translator, replicator, the badly overused holodeck) or it made the set designers' and special effects guys' jobs easier, esp. in the original series (e.g. transporter). In each case, these technologies would have vast and far reaching impacts that the series never took into account because it wouldn't serve the items' purpose as handwaving conveniences. You have replicators, but whenever you want to have an object be valuable or difficult to obtain, somehow the replicator just can't get it quite right. You have transporters that can teleport tremendously fragile objects like people instantly across thousands of miles, but whenever you want characters to have an adventure physically retrieving an object, or whenever you want characters to be in real peril off ship, somehow the object is inherently untransportable or the transporters can't get a lock on people.

Fridge logic and dubious explanations abound, yet somehow the show goes on.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AthanasiusKircher]

To me you seem like a philosopher studying epistemology without ever studying cybernetics and learning the fundamental principals of classification and cognition. Perhaps in your pursuit to understand languages you should first understand language itself. Learn by doing: Invent an alien language, then write something in it. Then give it to your peers, and see what they make of it without a translation medium.

This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. You want to learn how natural language works? You study NATURAL language. That's one of the biggest impediments to people working on AI translation -- all of you folks assume that natural languages must work according to some broken metaphors about meaning (like atomistic denotative words, or fundamental laws of syntax which work according to generative grammars or whatever model's in vogue at the moment) that assume that constructed languages work like natural ones. The process of constructing a language requires you to find certain kinds of order that you assume exist in natural languages -- effectively prioritizing the types of structures you think "work" to generate a self-consistent grammar, while ignoring all the exceptions and complexity of natural langauge patterns.

While that can be a fun exercise, it doesn't necessarily teach you much about how natural languages work, beyond what you already know about language before starting the process of creating the new language. It's kind of like assuming that neural networks (i.e., simplistic mathematical algorithms) actually tell us something useful about how the human brain really computes stuff at the basic neuron level. You might be able to get a simple algorithm to spit out similar results to a brain a certain percentage of the time, but it doesn't mean that the underlying mechanisms are anything alike.

If you want to understand language itself, spend more time actually studying language. Throw all sorts of potential models and metrics at all. Try building new theories that presuppose that meaning resides in completely different elements. Run corpus studies to check your models with statistical evidence. Inventing a language according to preconceived ideas about how language MUST work (according to you) and then running tests on your made-up thing is a stupid way to try to learn something about a complex natural phenomenon. It would be like trying to analyze the complete works of Mozart by building some sort of oversimplifed computer model that makes crappy music which doesn't really sound like Mozart, but at least spits out pretty sounds -- and then saying that the best way to learn about how Mozart's music works is to study your crappy computer model.

The GP perhaps is both right and wrong, as you are both right and wrong. Perhaps the problem is our conception that denotative meaning and analogy are fundamentally different processes. The reality is that analogies which become idiomatic (as they clearly are in this Star Trek episode) become effectively denotative, and most actual words in the core of any actual natural language lexicon do not have as precise single denotative meanings as we'd like to imagine. The problem with this episode is not necessarily that SOMETHING like the alien language couldn't exist, but rather that all languages share enough features with it that the universal translator should NEVER function well.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Arker]

Kind of making my point. Without knowing what 'bitch' actually means, without the slightest hint of understanding of the denotation, you still get the connotation loud and clear.

This works, and it's exactly the way the UT is supposed to work. But all the qualities that supposedly set the language apart, and beyond the reach of the UT, are in fact universal qualities shared with every language.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[laird]

I disagree. The point is that the words mean different things depending on what they're a reference to. So "Samantha" does not mean "bitch" in the way that words in normal languages have meanings, because the same word could mean something utterly different depending on the context. Since I didn't watch that show, I can't come up with examples (which kinda supports my point). But let's use Star Trek for examples: "Picard at Farpoint" and "Picard when he saw four lights" and "Picard after the Borg" and "Picard smiling at Lwaxana" and "Picard and Ro" mean utterly different things, because of the context of those stories that gives meaning unrelated to the actual words. So it's impossible to make sense of the word "Picard" without knowing the stories, because there are hundreds of stories that the translator would need to infer. And if the references weren't phrased literally the same way every time, but were more natural references to the stories, then even the phrases would be impossible to decode.

Of course, the universal translator deals with simpler versions of this every week. The premise is that the translator can deal with simpler symbolic translation of words from direct context, but can't deal with the deeper metaphore-based communications. For a popular mass media show, that's a pretty subtle idea. If you're going to quibble about that, you shouldn't bother watching anything on TV - none of it stands up to really deep digging, because they're trying to tell entertaining stories to normal people in 44 minutes (or 22 minutes), not publish defensible scientific thesis. :-)

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AthanasiusKircher]

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.

What's funny is that you think you're disagreeing with the GP when you're actually making his point. Analogies are abstractions here.

Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?

Well, in order to teach kids enough knowledge to get the abstract concept of "Darmok," they need to hear the stories of who Darmok was. Once they have all sorts of specific examples of stories about Darmok, then they could have an abstract conception of the person "Darmok" (with certain personality traits, certain historical events he participated in, certain places he visited, etc.) who could then be used in linguistic utterances with varieties of meanings depending on situation.

In essence, in order to use the alien metaphorical language, you'd have to assume an underlying body of practical knowledge about the proper names and persons evoked in the analogies. Or, in your terms, you'd have to give kids "concrete examples" of Darmok and what he represents, so that they can then understand the "general case" of "Darmok" when his name is evoked in a variety of different contexts.

Unless this species communicates primarily through telepathy or something (which is never implied in the episode), it's hard to imagine how they could "bootstrap" the linguistic meanings for their kids without telling the stories of the mythos in some non-metaphorical language.

And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was. And linguistic utterances like "Darmok at X" or "Darmok in situation Y" would no longer BE metaphors -- they would simply be denotative phrases with specific meanings, having nothing to do with the abstraction "Darmok." Kinda like how we have examples in English of words which may ultimately come from the same root word, but the meanings diverged over time. We don't understand these words any more by looking up the etymology and taking apart the individual parts of the word (except as an abstract exercise -- if the word is common, we just learn it by hearing its context and abstract its meaning from concrete examples). The added suffixes or different morphology of the new words serves to provide the meaning... the original root is no longer necessary and often forgotten.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[laird]

Now add the complexity that they may not say exactly "Shaka when the walls fell" when referring to that story, just as people might refer to a Star Trek episode as "when the Tribbles died" or "when the Tribbles found the poison" or "when the Klingons visited K7" or "the bar fight where no furniture broke" or "how the barman polished Spican Flame Gems in Altarian Glow Water" or "when Sisko met Kirk" or dozens of other references to various scenes in the same story, where the important thing isn't just that they refer to the same story, but that the refer to specific characters, events and motivations. And if the number of stories to refer to is sufficiently large, and the ways of referring to them multiplies that, it's plausible (IMO, of course) that the translator would end up with nothing but one-off references and be unable to make sense of them.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[sjames]

You're over-reading the simplicity of the example. You might be a bit more confused by Old Ben at the Deathstar to mean a victory in spite of an apparent defeat. Or, perhaps "Dewey on election night" for a loss so surprising you initially believe you have won. Parse that phrase any way you want, but unless you know 20th century American history you will be baffled. Even with a magic computer that can map each word to your native language, it's meaningless because the whole phrase and the historical event it refers to must be mapped to some well known story from your own culture.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[xbytor]

We have different "languages": Legalese, Tech speak, memes, Diplomatic speak. I would expect that such would be the case here. The metaphor speak may be their formal form. At least, that's my take on it.

Favorite episodes: The Inner Light, Best of Both Worlds, Family

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[sjames]

Even the most intelligent person may occasionally find themselves speaking slowly and loudly to someone who doesn't speak their language until they catch themselves.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ildon]

I used this in another post and I think it's a really good analogy: http://www.businessinsider.com...

This article is a bunch of Chinese expressions that make zero sense in English when translated literally. But we're able to translate them because of the context in which they are used. All languages have metaphors and idioms like that all over the place. If the universal translator really wasn't capable of using context to figure out meaning, it wouldn't be able to translate any languages at all. That's why the episode is so dumb. If I heard you say "Picard at Farpoint" a few dozen times over the course of a conversation, I could figure out what it meant, even if I never found out what "Picard" and "Farpoint" meant. I'd learn what the phrase meant and ignore the literal translation. Using a phrase to convey a meaning is functionally identical to using a specific word for it. If a person can do it, the Enterprise's computer could do it. The entire premise of the episode is idiotic.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[multimediavt]

Ummm, you say "It's not about idioms. It's about meaning," and then explain how it's about context. It's all about context. Context is key and why words pulled out of context have different meaning. It's also why people who are philologists or armchair philologists enjoy the Darmok episode. To bash that episode only proves how little someone actually knows about language, culture and meaning, the basis of context. The worst episodes of TNG are like the worst of any screenwriting. Most of the 24x7 (that's 24 episodes by 7 seasons) were very well written, some not so much. Hey, even the best home run hitter strikes out every now and then, but you don't poo-poo his career because he had seven strike outs and 120 home runs.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[multimediavt]

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Ok, as an armchair philologist I am going to say that spoken language and the ability to design microprocessors are not mutually essential. Mathematics is more important to processor design than spoken language. If their society's understanding and expression of mathematics is advanced the spoken language is almost irrelevant. We don't express processor designs, nor computer code in spoken language. We use mathematics or an abstraction (insert your favorite programming language here).

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Kaenneth]

What do they call a Yardstick in France?

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Austerity Empowers]

I'm not sure it could be harder than the initial conversion of phonemes to distinct words with their meanings. A typical living language has some 10^5 active words in its language, the translator was amazingly able to solve that problem, even for Tamarian. It was unable to take the next step though, and knowing the words, and knowing their meanings, deduce the shared knowledge behind the references. I'm not saying this is not a hard problem, but doing what the translator already did do is a hard problem, and this seems like a logical extension.

The problem with this episode is that the translator, like transporters and "holodecks" were some bit of technomagic to help pace and make a space based sci-fi show interesting. It's all fine, we're willing to suspend disbelief and ignore the magic as a solved problem. But then trying to have a show about translation and language with that same translator in the middle I think compels us to think along the wrong lines.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[nabsltd]

The fact that the group of people I hung around with when "Darmok" first aired used language similarly may be why we enjoyed it so much. For example, late at night, someone would point at themselves and say "Bonzo", which indicated they were going to bed.

Of course, we might also have just been drunk out of our minds, as we watched TNG and played a drinking game where one of the rules was if any character spoke the episode title, it was two drinks. With this rule, "Darmok" and "The Pegasus" lead to alcohol poisoning.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[camperdave]

... having never seen a whole episode of Star Trek...

The words come through, but I have no idea what they could possibly mean.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ildon]

My point was that if the computer can figure out the context of the other 90,000 languages it runs into, it can figure out the context of language #90,001. Else it wouldn't have been able to figure out the context of any languages, including ones on earth. The entire episode hinges on the dumbest thing ever and it's not even internally consistent with itself. When the viewer can figure out the gist of what they guys are trying to convey just through body language and expression within the first 5 minutes of the episode, it gets pretty ridiculous that Picard and his crew, ostensibly a group of people whose entire job involves contact with bizarre and alien cultures can't figure that shit out for another 45 minutes and it costs a man his life to do so.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[khasim]

My point was that if the computer can figure out the context of the other 90,000 languages it runs into, it can figure out the context of language #90,001. Else it wouldn't have been able to figure out the context of any languages, including ones on earth.

Do not stop there.

If the aliens were not able to communicate with the Enterprise then were they able to communicate with any of the other races they probably encountered?

If so, then why isn't the Federation using that translator tech?

If not, then why haven't the aliens figured out that their language is so unique that other cannot understand it ... and done something about it? Such as including films showing actors acting out the events.

Instead, they lose one of their people just to teach some basic phrases to Picard? Picard cannot order a cup of tea with those phrases. He cannot ask directions to a bathroom.

Both sides are written as too dumb to survive.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Zontar The Mindless]

English has many idioms that refer to our common culturall heritage, but Chinese has far more. You can get by in English without studying idioms specifically. In Chinese, there is no way. You have to learn them or you will fail to comprehend almost every conversation.

Bingo. For an example going in the other direction, I had to explain "cross the Rubicon" to my wife just yesterday, in fact. (Her English is good, but it's mostly everyday/around-the-house English with a big dollop of technical stuff relating to her job as a mechanical engineer--and she's had few opportunities to read much literature. I'm trying to get her started on The Hobbit and then maybe after that something from Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain.)

In any event, I always "got" the premise of that episode, but I don't believe that I really *appreciated* Darmok until I started learning chengyu. And as soon as I started learning some of them, it wasn't long before I thought of it.

(And, since you asked--No, *this* wife sounds *nothing* like Kate Mulgrew, thank $_DEITY_OR_DEITIES_.)

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Opportunist]

But I dare say a civilization whose language(s) rely on such a highly symbolic way of expressing even the most simple of ideas will end up in a bloody war before long. Just think about how many wars were fought on our planet because we misinterpreted the learned gestures of other cultures, and then consider that diplomacy as a whole would have to work through that channel.

Unless you have VERY harmony-seeking societies, your history will be a bloody hell. Like ours, just more so.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Opportunist]

President.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Zontar The Mindless]

Friends don't let friends abuse <tt> tags.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[next_ghost]

The words come through, but I have no idea what they could possibly mean.

Picard listening to Tamarians before his camping trip.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AmiMoJo]

We don't have any trouble turning those literal Chinese phrases into common English phrases

Have you ever actually tried this? I have because my girlfriend is Chinese and I don't speak it, and it never works properly. In fact most of the time it doesn't work at all. She keeps talking to me about something Google calls "China powder", which I found out actually refers to pollen (allergy season).

We both speak Japanese as a second langauge and that is how we talk most of the time. It wasn't too bad for her but I had to unlearn a lot of stuff and really get into the Japanese mindset for it to make much sense. It's the classic "why do the Japanese say 'yes' when the mean 'no'?" Of course they don't really, but beginners and machines doing translations are unable to cope with the way they ask and answer questions because it's more than just language, it's culture.

Paraphrasing and translating to common English phrases gives you the gist of what is being said most of the time, but if you were trying to negotiate over something it's often inadequate.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ShanghaiBill]

It's the classic "why do the Japanese say 'yes' when the mean 'no'?"

I don't speak Japanese well, but I do know enough for basic transactions. The last time I tried to order an airline ticket from San Francisco to Tokyo, the conversation with the sales rep went something like this:

me [in Japanese]: I want to buy a ticket on this flight.
her [in Japanese]: That will be difficult.
me [in Japanese]: Can I buy it?
her [in Japanese]: Yes, but it is complicated. The flight is very full.
me [in Japanese]: But can I do it?
her [in Japanese]: It is problematic.
me [in English]: Do you speak English?
her [in English]: Yes, I do.
me [in English]: Can I buy a ticket for this flight?
her [in English]: No.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[serviscope_minor]

I had to explain "cross the Rubicon" to my wife just yesterday, in fact. (Her English is good, but it's mostly everyday/around-the-house English

Is that just an English idiom? I'd assumed it would be known in most places where Roman influence was strong.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?

The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.

And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was.

You mean like Charles Boycott, or Teddy bears, or The Three Princes of Serendip. I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation. The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.

Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.

Amidst all the outright ridiculous scientific technobabble fans are prepared, nay eager, to accept, I find myself surprised to see how many of the same will turn down innovative and well though out linguintic science fiction from the same show.

This reminds me of how a lot of people claim that water on alien worlds is "essential" for life. Sometimes I think there is a dearth of imagination among the scientific classes.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[garutnivore]

The language in Darmok is not at all like Chinese. I learned Chinese, and was quite able to get by in Taiwan and China without having to resort to the classics of Chinese literature. In Darmok it is impossible to communicate anything simple without knowing the history of that culture.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[robsku]

Of course, the universal translator deals with simpler versions of this every week. The premise is that the translator can deal with simpler symbolic translation of words from direct context, but can't deal with the deeper metaphore-based communications. For a popular mass media show, that's a pretty subtle idea. If you're going to quibble about that, you shouldn't bother watching anything on TV - none of it stands up to really deep digging, because they're trying to tell entertaining stories to normal people in 44 minutes (or 22 minutes), not publish defensible scientific thesis. :-)

This... It's always fun to ponder and speculate on how something could be possible in a world of TV show X, or even criticize them, but sometimes I think people take these things way too seriously - like letting relatively minor issues (really, they are minor now matter how big they feel to some - it is just entertainment after all) spoil the whole episode for them.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[robsku]

Agreed, totally - but the whole conversation here shows perfectly why the certain type of nerds are so hard to entertain. Arrogant, all-knowing and lacking the means to enjoy and not take things so seriously, they could be called Sheldon Cooperists.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[carnivore302]

congrats, your site has been slashdotted

Re: Bullshit Made Up Language

[TreecieBoix]

That was always my problem with it, just behind the fact that - you'd think - the universal translator would have no way to figure out the names, locations, and prepositions without being able to relate them to other words in a fully developed language.

Re: Bullshit Made Up Language

[RichardJulesWatt]

Toilet is a euphamism which means to freashen up. It has entirely lost its original meaning in English and now refers to a device. Making love was originally wooing, and being gay is no longer being happy.The plot device in that episode is incredible in those terms, words mean what they currently mean, not what they originally meant.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[multimediavt]

I had to explain "cross the Rubicon" to my wife just yesterday, in fact. (Her English is good, but it's mostly everyday/around-the-house English

Is that just an English idiom? I'd assumed it would be known in most places where Roman influence was strong.

You would assume correctly. Has to do with our common Roman/European roots. It's not an original English idiom, nor is it an English idiom at all, really. Since modern English is a hodge-podge of borrowed words from several different cultures and root languages, and some ridiculous meldings ("television" for instance-half Greek, half-Latin) one could see how some could get confused. The great 20th century philologist, J.R.R. Tolkien, saw Icelandic as the closest thing to what Old English was. Modern English is a mess. It's ok, most people don't know what the words they're saying mean anyway so what difference does it make. I had some idiot the other day in a meeting try to make themselves look cool by using "bifurcated" to describe something that was split in three parts. [facepalm]

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AthanasiusKircher]

The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.

But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."

Recall the scene where the alien captain tells Picard this story. And Picard has to spend time filling in all the gaps, explaining what the alien captain says and puzzling out the implications behind each sentence with 4 or 5 sentences of his own. It makes perfect sense for someone with all the knowledge of a common mythos to understand the meaning of the captain's tale. But a kid who is being exposed to these stories for the first time wouldn't be able to grasp all those implied meanings that Picard was able to puzzle out. If you've spent any time reading books or telling stories to little kids, you know exactly what I mean. You have to "fill in the explanations" for them whenever they encounter new words or situations they've never encountered before. Unless you have specific denotative words or concepts to draw on to build up that language gradually, it's hard to fathom how these people ever explain the stories to their kids.

I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation.

Obviously. That's how real language works. And again, you seem to be agreeing with my point even though you think you are offering some sort of counterexamples. The fact is that little kids learn language through some sort of probabilistic guesswork -- trying out utterances that they have heard in order to accomplish things they want or to tell their parents what they need or are thinking or feeling. They don't learn it through reading dictionary definitions, and certainly not through abstract etymological study. They try out things, and when the language works, they use it again. When it doesn't work, they try something else, or a parent corrects them. There is no sense of an "abstract" meaning a priori.

The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.

Absolutely. Again, you seem to be agreeing with my point. But if that were true of this alien race, things like "Darmok" would cease to have their original means, and utterances like "Darmok on the ocean" would just MEAN "loneliness" -- literally. If you asked an average speaker of the language to explain "Darmok," he'd probably just look at you funny, just like most people would look at your funny if you asked someone for the etymology of most common English words.

Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.

That's the POINT. ALL languages are based on IDIOMS (whose original meanings have generally been lost or are at least are unknown to most speakers). Yet for some reason, this episode insists that rather than using IDIOMS for communication, this alien species communicates through METAPHOR or ANALOGY, implying that they have some sort of abstract understanding of "Darmok" which is then utilized in various contexts to mean vastly different things. If it were based on IDIOMS, then they wouldn't actually know who "Darmok" as an abstraction was, and by itself "Darmok" would probably be meaningless... it's only in "Darmok at Tanagra" or whatever phrase that any meaningful communication could happen.

The idiocy in this episode is not the idea that languages could be

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[freeze128]

Squares, the way mold grows.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AK Marc]

Even toilet has multiple definitions. And the primary one changes based on context (like all words) and greatly based on location. "I'm going to brush my teeth in the toilet" in the US would indicate use of toilet water to brush one's teeth. But in the UK would indicate going to a room with a toilet to brush one's teeth. So the meaning of the word changes based on usage (as all words) as well as the accent of the speaker. We can't do it as people very well, nor can we conceive of how to program a computer to do it. It won't be until strong AI is solved when we'll get such thinking programs that are smarter than us (at which time 99% of doctors will be holograms, as such an AI will be superior to a human doctor for everything except possibly bedside manner.

You could argue that single-word (such as "Samantha") could intelligently be translated by the universal translator successfully, even when used in such an idiomatic construct. But a sentence which depends entirely on the context ("Darmok at Blahblah" might well refer to an entirely different Darmok, or not even to a person at all) is vastly harder, if not impossible, to translate.

When a universal translator is possible, the pattern matching of it would be superior to a humans. If a human could solve it, the UT will solve it faster, even in such an allegorical language.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AK Marc]

The idea was that a universal translator is 100% correct with literal translations, and nuance around them, while 100% incapable of understanding an idiom. A universal translator (learning, and such as shown in the show) would require strong AI. The idea that it's smarter than a human at translating but dumber than a human at translating, at the same time, is a bit silly.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AK Marc]

She keeps talking to me about something Google calls "China powder", which I found out actually refers to pollen (allergy season).

Flower powder is a literal translation of it, but google seems to understand pollen just fine, unless she's using a non-standard word. Not sure how Google could come up with "china powder" from a two-character word. If "powder" was the second word, then what could the first character be? Zhong for china? That means middle, not China.

It's the classic "why do the Japanese say 'yes' when the mean 'no'?" Of course they don't really, but beginners and machines doing translations are unable to cope with the way they ask and answer questions because it's more than just language, it's culture.

Yes, that's the real issue. Just like there's no word for "no" in Chinese. They have a word for "not" but not a word for "no", so literally, "no" in Chinese is translated as "not do" and more figuratively as "can not", but is better translated as "no" though "no" in Chinese is rude. "I would, but I can't" is how one would commonly say "no" when in American English, one would simply say "no".

You have to understand the culture to understand the language. That's why in high school, most of the language classes spend as much time on the culture as the language (at least in my school, that's how it worked).

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AK Marc]

English speakers need a no because the question askers are too direct. If you'd asked for a ticket on the next flight, or a flight at 6:10 p.m. on the 23rd, then she'd have had some options for a positive response for her "no".

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AK Marc]

I'm not sure it could be harder than the initial conversion of phonemes to distinct words with their meanings.

I concur. They handle idioms, which is the same thing. A longer set of phenomes with a different meaning than any one subset alone.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Golf clap.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ildon]

Right, but if I heard it a few times in context I'd figure it out pretty damn quickly. That's my point.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."

I'm not an early educator, so I don't know how children are actually taught what words like "loneliness" or "friendship" mean, but my understanding is that they learn them through stories and picture books. Looking at a simple childs picture book, it's a not a stretch to suggest this is how a sptry like Darmok would be learned.

Except this is terrible. The point is precisely what you identified in English -- we have idioms all over the place, and that's actually how most languages work. So, if the universal translator fails to work for this alien language, it should fail for ALL languages, including English. That's the stupidity in the premise.

I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.

And in the episode, it does actually do this. The problem was that the sentences themselves did not make sense without a deeper context -- without actually having read the Darmok and Jalad picture book. The translator was basically translating "Coloured green ideas sleep furiously" or "Buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo , buffalo buffalo buffalo." or "Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra".

By the way, speaking of Chomsky, his Universal Grammar was challenged recently by the description of the language of a particularly obscure Amazonian tribe which seemingly breaks the rules of Universal Grammar. Once again, I note that, especially compare to some of the standard technoballe in Start Trek (FTL Drives, teleportation, psychics), the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AthanasiusKircher]

I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.

Yeah, see that's your problem. Chomsky's model of language is ridiculous and based on crappy philosophy of mind models which are a half-century out of date. If it were actually true, we'd have been able to do machine translation with near-perfect accuracy by now using grammatical rule sets. Instead, Google has shown us that we could even get better results for translation by looking simply at statistical patterns, rather than algorithms that know anything about grammar or dictionary definitions or whatever. So empirically, I'd say Chomsky's model simply isn't how language or meaning works. I'm not being pedantic... I'm pointing out that real language just doesn't that way, and the best-running alternative models of language these days don't believe that Chomskian "universal grammar" exists. The only way to ever implement decent translation is to realize that meaning does not reside in atomistic words, particularly in the core lexicon of any language.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[AthanasiusKircher]

the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch

By the way, this sweeps away a critical distinction, which is where our disagreement (if there even is one) lies. Idiom usually refer to a set of words or phrase which has lost the independent original meanings of the words that compose it. Like "champ at the bit" -- most people never use the word "champ" in any other context, and many people don't even know what the "bit" is referring to... it's just become a phrase where the individual words have no meaning anymore, but the collective phrase still means something to most people.

If Tamarian langauge were composed of stuff like this, the universal translator should be able to deal with it, because the word divisions are artificial divisions of meaning... a phrase could also have a clearly defined meaning, and the translator should be able to get that.

But the episode explicitly claims that the language is NOT idiomatic, but rather based on metaphor, which is a completely different linguistic phenomenon... in that case, the primary meaning of the words is still preserved and understood (Darmok is still understood as a historical figure with a particular biography), and the actual language is constructed ON TOP OF these basic meanings to generate new meanings in metaphorical phrases on the fly. In the idiomatic case, speakers don't need to know anything about Darmok as a person to understand the language; in the metaphorical case, a detailed knowledge of Darmok's biography is required to comprehend the variety of cases his name shows up.

I actually agree with you that we're picking at a relatively small element of a series with all sorts of unbelievable weird things. The problem with this episode is that it deliberately draws attention to one of these magical devices (the universal translator) and then proposes a scenario where it fails which points out that it should fail in ALL cases. It's like an episode where warp drive failed and the entire episode was about warp field physics in such a way that proves that the warp drive could NEVER work. That would simply undermine a major element of the series, rather than adding insight.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[Grishnakh]

Re-enactments and recordings of those events in the form of TV, plays, and movies.

So how does that work? The actor playing Darmok can't just stand up and say "Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean!", they actually have to have some sort of experience which they re-enact, and this has to involve communication between the Darmok and Jalad actors. Is that going to be nothing more than references to even older mythological characters? I just don't see how it's possible to have a comprehensive language that doesn't have terms to refer to abstract ideas, rather than simply references to past events. It's like circular reasoning. You can't teach anyone about the past event without simply referring to it, since you have no way of communicating what happened in that past event using abstract terminology.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[crunchygranola]

Right, this is a bad episode, because unlike all the other episodes of ST:TNG it consists of a scientific premise that isn't based on sound science.

For example pick any other episode of ST:TNG... um, not that one... no not that on either... er, none of these... or those... wait... can someone name one episode that is real science?

This is what ST:TOS is so superior to ST:TNG, in that series you didn't have any made-up pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, right? Right?

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[vux984]

So how does that work?

I watched (Baz Lurman's) Romeo & Juliette last week with my 11 year old daughter and 10 year old son. They didn't know the story, and could -barely- keep up with the dialog (they spoke very fast, and it was in "Shakespearean English") -- but they still followed the movie extraordinarily well.

At the end of it they had questions like "why were they fighting" (which is a good question, never actually addressed... its just the setting.)

They certainly understood that Romeo and Juliette were in love, and couldn't/wouldn't live without each other. If "Romeo & Juliette" was a phrase that meant that, they'd have gotten that by watching the movie. So I think you underestimate the ability for someone to understand something, even if they can't follow much of the dialog.

Further, while a language composed ENTIRELY of metaphor doesn't really work (and the language in Darmok had lots of regular words), a language with metaphors replacing much of the abstract and emotional words could be very plausible.

As many slashdot posters have complained (and in doing so have sort of missed the point) "it makes no sense that the "universal translator" (UT) suddenly fails here".

How can the UT understand "fight like cats and mice" when all it has to work with is a recording of sound, jet fail to understand "like Tom and Jerry" when all its given is a recording of sound? What makes the meaning inherently more discoverable in the former than the latter. I have no explanation for that. It makes no sense. But its beside the point. Its the premise.

It assumes the UT can ('magically') grok basic word meanings, but can't solve idioms and metaphors and slang, and then puts it up against a language with more idiom and metaphor than it can handle so that its output is stilted gibberish In that vein, the episode is good, hard SF even. It sets a premise and then carries on to see how things work out.

I think the Star Trek universe, much like it glosses over why the majority of life is humanoid, (and largely sexually compatible) also presumes that all languages are more or less related in the same way English and German and French are related... and that the UT with all these languages can figure out a 'new one' because despite that fact that it is completely alien and evolved from nothing entirely independantly -- in star trek its also part of a family of other languages with a lot of commonalities etc.

And if so, then pitting the UT against a language with an abundance of metaphors will stump it... because even if it can solve the words, its missing too much of the cultural meaning to make sense. Similarly, I'd love to see the UT pitted against British rhyming slang -- under the same assumptions I give above it would be similarly stumped... returning, at best ... British rhyming slang. Which is nearly incomprehensible.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[heefeneet]

And linguistic utterances like "Darmok at X" or "Darmok in situation Y" would no longer BE metaphors -- they would simply be denotative phrases with specific meanings, having nothing to do with the abstraction "Darmok."

Exactly. The phrase "Jesus wept" is used to describe frustration, but I don't know the story behind it.

Re:Bullshit Made Up Language

[laird]

That's why I said "if the references weren't phrased literally the same way every time, but were more natural references to the stories, then even the phrases would be impossible to decode". To perhaps make this more clear, if there were a dozen references to that episode in a discussion, but each was expressed uniquely, which is how people actually communicate conversationally when referring to a shared context, translation software wouldn't be able to tie the dozen references together. For example, there are numerous phrases to refer to parts of that episode - "When Picard Met Q", "Space Jellyfish", "Tortured Space Being", "Groppler Zorn", "Humanity on Trial", "Data rattles off definitions", "Q kills Torres", "McCoy returns to the Enterprise for the Last Time" or "The first step towards meeting the Borg". If there's never any repeated phrases, just a variety of references to the same shared story, neither a person nor a computer can learn the phrases. They'd have to spend the time to learn the stories, then they could understand the references. Which is what Picard did.

Re:Can I vote for..

[apcullen]

... all of them? Seriously the inclusion of a trained Shakespearian actor (Stewart) was the only saving grace of that branch-off of TOS.

come on... it's not like the series didn't have any redeeming qualities at all... is it?

Apart from shades of grey...

[spike1]

I'd go for the royal. Hated that one.

Re:Apart from shades of grey...

[BitterOak]

Skin of Evil was pretty bad too. That's the one where Tasha Yar was killed by an oil slick. I also wasn't too fond of Manhunt. Bloodlines was a real stinker too, especially disappointing since it came so near the end of the series.

Re:Apart from shades of grey...

[ThatAblaze]

The series premier was by far the worst non-shades-of-grey episode.

Re:Apart from shades of grey...

[dbIII]

Not as bad as the sentimental Tasha Yar funeral episode unless it was the same one.

Re:Apart from shades of grey...

[laird]

Having rewatched Farpoint recently, I'm amazed the series made it to a second episode. There were some elements that were good, or at least could have been good, but the actors hadn't grown into the roles so it was all painful.

Re:Apart from shades of grey...

[tipo159]

'Shades of Grey' was on its own plane of awful. Nothing else comes close. When I try to think of other bad episodes, 'Shades of Grey' just crowds all of the others out.

Re:Apart from shades of grey...

[Warphammer]

One thing I think that's been missing from the commentary about 'how did TNG S1 ever make it' is this: I wasn't that old at the time, but I recall that era being extremely dire for TV sci-fi. We had, well, TOS reruns. And the occasional 13-and-out attempt by network TV to do a genre series. It rode that wave of support for a while, then it started getting good.

Can I vote for..

[MRe_nl]

Blake's 7.

best / worst?

[Amigan]

I've always been partial to "Who watches the watchers" and thought that "Genesis" (final season) was one of the worst..

Re:best / worst?

[AmiMoJo]

The Drum Head is highly underrated, and just as relevant as ever.

Have People Forgotten 'Force of Nature'

[glennrrr]

Because I wish I could.

Re:Have People Forgotten 'Force of Nature'

[freeze128]

How about "Sub Rosa", or worse, "Masks".

Then there is "Aquiel".

My problem

[ArchieBunker]

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?

Re:My problem

[ThatAblaze]

Language is glossed over in the whole series. For a single episode they decided to address that one elephant in the room, and they did it well and in a memorable way.

Re:My problem

[ThatAblaze]

I suppose that my premise, if explicitly stated, is that the show was about exploration, and that most of the episodes were centered on some aspect or issue related to exploration. I imagine they felt that dealing with a language barrier in practically every episode was just too non-immersive for the average audience. However, they addressed it once. I would have been pleased to see them address it more than once, but other episodes were about addressing other things.

The bad episodes are the ones focused on addressing issues that never needed to be addressed at all.

Re:My problem

[fermion]

One technical problem with ST is that there is so much magic. The transporter, the universal translator,the communicators that always work, the warp engine, etc. All these are so the story does not get bogged down in what is essentially a space opera. But there is so much magic that creating suspense, or dealing with certain human situations, such as the difficulty of communication, is hard to create.

Bad segments, the The Motion Picture, do a bad job in dealing with the magic. Good segments, like Darmok, use the strength as a weakness. The society has become so dependent on the universal translator doing the brunt of communication, that they have lost the ability to interpret and comprehend. Picard had to relearn that skill in order to save the day.

It is perhaps indicative that geeks, who do not always value the process of communications, do not appreciate this episode.

Re:My problem

[Zontar The Mindless]

And yet... Some of us managed to watch the episode and derive something positive from the experience, in spite of its imperfections.

Temba, his arms wide/open

[PPNSteve]

Kiteo, his eyes closed!

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh
shaka, when the walls fell.

Re:Can I vote for..

[oldhack]

A snooty nerd, as if you don't get beat up enough already.

Not a good episode

[ildon]

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.

Re:Not a good episode

[jez9999]

Yeah, Darmok is a fun ep to watch, the the plot is a joke.

1) If the universal translator can translate certain things as nouns, verbs, and adjectives ("Shaka, when the walls fell", "Temba, his arms wide"), then their language must surely contain nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The whole plot is supposed to be that it doesn't, and that they use proper nouns for everything.
2) Even if they did use proper nouns as a byword/metaphor for everything, those proper nouns would quickly become improper nouns. Hell may have been considered an actual place, but nowadays a saying like "This place is hell" indicates that it is simply interpreted as an improper noun or an adjective, no matter its etymological roots. The universal translator frequently picks up new alien languages and translates them to perfect English instantly, but it can't figure this out?
3) The viewer figures out full well that the aliens are using proper nouns (along with "when the walls fell" *AHEM*) as metaphors for sadness, failure, generosity, etc. after 5 minutes. Picard figures it out after 10. Apparently, this had all the Federations top scientists perplexed for years. Yeah, right.

Re:Not a good episode

[jez9999]

Data says that Federation vessls encountered Tamarian vessels 7 times over 100 years, each meeting without incident, but that communication "was not possible". Captain Silvestri called them "incomprehensible", and other accounts were similar. So, it seems that the Federation does know about them.

Tapestry

[sunyjim]

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...

Re:Tapestry

[dbIII]

where we see that Pickard only got to be captain because of the risks he took

I liked how Babylon5 took that idea as well. A well balanced "soldier" type that just happened to use a nuke to solve a military problem was mistaken for a "warrior" type by some stay at home wannabe warrior hawks and put in charge of a peace mission they really wanted to mess up. I think part of the message there is that the military is supposed to be about more than following stupid political orders blindly and blowing shit up.

Re:Tapestry

[Dadoo]

I think the best part about "Tapestry" is the fact that they took a two-minute piece of a previous episode, and made a whole new (and very good) episode out of it.

There. Are.

[pinzvidz]

Four. Lights.

Masks - the worst episode ever

[adric22]

period.

Re:Masks - the worst episode ever

[DogSqueeze]

I thought the same thing at first but I've come to enjoy watching it every once in a while because it's so outrageously absurd. The actors must have known that as well and were probably laughing a lot during the production of this episode.

One of my favourites is Frame of Mind (riker/mental hospital). That one had me guessing the first time I saw it..

Worst: when they use magic

[jeffasselin]

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.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[K. S. Kyosuke]

...whereas "life signs detectors" are perfectly fine and plausible?

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[zippthorne]

The writers might think that solved the problem (and there were several transporter duplication episodes....), but I'm not so sure. You'd end up with 100 physicists that all think the same way, so other than getting parallelizable portions of the problem done at the same time, I think it might be the same as one physicist....

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[dcollins]

"the notion of converting matter to energy, beaming it somewhere, and re-making the object from it is basically sound."

No, because the interesting part of an object or person is not the matter = energy transformation. It's the complex structure of the matter, i.e., the information, which is entirely lost if it just gets transformed into energy (which you could say is due to entropy).

Think about 3D printing. Destroying a copy every time you send out a file would be stupid and superfluous. The hard part is getting the scanned copy of the structural information. Once you have the structural information, it is inherently copyable and separate from physical instantiations, or the material of the original copy. Pretending that it's useful to send the actual atoms of the original is nonsense, and many times moreso to send the matter deconstructed into homogenous energy.

Much like the Darmok episode itself, this idea is technobabble masquerading as science fiction. It tickles people's sci-fi yearnings without delivering the real goods.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[C0R1D4N]

That is how it gets by something like Heisenberg though, by basically vacuuming up the matter and turning it into energy rather than the cut/paste method of file transfer today that just scans/copies.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Arker]

Sure, that might be a problem.

It's a problem you get to after the initial tech is set and accepted. Yet not a problem that ST ever addressed. See what I am getting at yet?

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[laird]

There's an animated short that addresses this by having the 'transporter' kill the original, through an amusing series of mechanisms. I saw it decades ago, and I wish I could remember the name.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[camperdave]

Can you think of a way to transport a soul that's not 'magic'? :)

Sure. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Anything that doesn't involve destroying the body in which the soul is housed.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[camperdave]

My favourite was "structural integrity failure" which basically means "it's broken"

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[drinkypoo]

...whereas "life signs detectors" are perfectly fine and plausible?

Bayesian filter plus future-tech sensor package equals life-signs detector.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[drinkypoo]

It's much much worse than you say though. *IF* the basic idea behind the transporter were workable, then follow the dominoes. We scan you, then destroy you, then re-assemble you at a remote location. It's not really transport

They actually address this point in, uh, the movie with the Borg coming to blow up Cochrane. Apparently in his day they were working on transporters that did what you say. So they would only be used for cargo. But the transporters of TOS and later are supposed to actually send you. That's how you can be in the buffer in the first place. The transporter system just sort of mediates you.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Dahan]

There's an animated short that addresses this by having the 'transporter' kill the original, through an amusing series of mechanisms. I saw it decades ago, and I wish I could remember the name.

"To Be", by Josh Weldon. (Also available in crappy Youtube quality)

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Dahan]

Whoops, by John Weldon, not Josh.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Zontar The Mindless]

James Blish actually had a much better explanation for how transporters are 'really' supposed to work in Spock Must Die! but for reasons obvious to anyone who's ever read it, that book can never be accepted as canon. Which is a pity.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'm glad that it makes you feel special, but if I wanted to read your posts in a monospace fault, I would edit my user.css accordingly.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[VortexCortex]

...whereas "life signs detectors" are perfectly fine and plausible?

Bayesian filter plus future-tech sensor package equals life-signs detector.

The energy transfers between cells to operate quickly enough are going to be electrical in nature in this universe. So, you can detect electromagnetic variances, then apply some cybernetics to your future-tech sensor and you can detect emotional states, create biological implementation of the hyper sensitive senor via natural selection instead instead of intelligent design and in a universe that explains away forehead aliens as the product of panspermia it's fully plausible to have an empath.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[BitZtream]

You apparently don't understand anything about the Heisenburg compensator (sorry if I misspelled his name :)

Look it up (in star trek context). Transporters can't duplicate living matter due to something related to the Heisenburg uncertainty principle. If the quantum state is lost, so is the life and what you get is just a body, but its lifeless.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Arker]

Which is just a cheap way of smuggling the old concept of the soul in with a dash of new sciency sounding paint. But in fact Heisenburgs principle applies the same to living and non-living matter.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[denzacar]

And the fact that almost nobody in the Star Trek (television) universe is concerned with this fact is bugging me.

Bones McCoy did. All the time.

On the other hand... you did notice they didn't do much church going on that show?
That they were more... what's the word... sciency?

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[denzacar]

James Blish actually had a much better explanation for how transporters are 'really' supposed to work

Would you mind reminding us?

I remember reading through that explanation but not reading the rest of the story as the translation didn't really sit well with me.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[Zontar The Mindless]

I don't have a copy handy--wonder if it's even still in print--but I seem to recall it had something to do with being able to re-create the transportee's quantum states at the target, which caused the transportee simply to start existing there since his quantum states (and thus, he) no longer existed at the point of origin. Blish also said something to the effect that the explanation of direct matter-energy conversion "favoured by the media" was obviously infeasible, given the energies that would be involved.

(I actually used to know a fair bit about quantum mechanics, but have forgotten most of the necessary math. I know I probably can't do tensors any more to save my life. In any case, Blish's explanation seemed a lot more plausible to me at the time than any of the alternatives.)

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[davewoods]

A shorter, cartoon version of "The Prestige".

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[davewoods]

Yeah, they may think the same way, but if each one of them went and studied a more specific branch of physics, then that would skew their thought process enough for it to be useful.

Or, say you did this with the best young surgeon, or someone who is really good at driving an ambulance, or flipping burgers. Okay, no wait, I found the bad side of it... This is just getting robots to do our jobs for us. Sure they may be better at them, but if clones have all of our jobs then what do we do for income?

And then you run into overpopulation, where the non-useful population needs to be culled in order to make room for the million new super-useful people.

At that point, the entire population is super-useful. Every IT guy is a "Dave" that can solve problems without even seeing them, every teacher is a "Mrs Smith" because she has the patience of a saint and the knowledge of every subject. The entire world just turns into a self-replicating populous, with no individuality.

Eventually a splinter group of unique individuals will help the super-president realize the ramifications, and he will kill all the super-usefuls, putting us back where we started, that way there will be a point to it all again.

.... I think I just made an SMBC comic.

Re:Worst: when they use magic

[zippthorne]

That episode isn't a refutation, it's just another example of what the writers think would happen. Also, the lore of the episode includes a fairly long divergence period, which you would obviously not have if you're talking about duplicating a bunch of physicists to solve a pressing problem immediately.

Mods didn't get the joke?

[gentryx]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Re:Cause and Effect

[pinzvidz]

Actually, the episode ran for 44 minutes. :P

One of my favorite episodes

[BitwizeGHC]

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.

Re:One of my favorite episodes

[Culture20]

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/16/

Re:One of my favorite episodes

[colinrichardday]

Can Raskolnikov haz rubles?

Peter Bright: His anus WIDE open...

[Anonymous Coward]

His brown-eye then closed (over another man's pencil).

Re:Can I vote for..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. I think Brent Spiner was just as good.

Anyhow, favourite episode is "Chain of Command" and least liked is any of the Troi or Dr. Crusher episodes.

Re:Can I vote for..

[iluvcapra]

I don't agree with you, but I definitely think it's more probative (and interesting) to talk about people's best and least favorite DS9 episode. Best series of the franchise; TNG at its best is only an average 6th season DS9 episode.

Worst episodes?

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:Worst episodes?

[multimediavt]

I hated pretty much all of seasons one and two.

Actually, if you look at most long running series television shows, the third season is usually the best. The writers, actors and directors seem to hit a stride and it's shades of season three or a downward slide from there on, with few exceptions. My personal feeling is that series shows should not go beyond four seasons. After 100 episodes they tend to take a dive and everyone wants to do something else.

Re:Worst episodes?

[93 Escort Wagon]

My personal feeling is that series shows should not go beyond four seasons. After 100 episodes they tend to take a dive and everyone wants to do something else.

So British series should go for 12-16 seasons? :-P

The Drumhead

[ChadSmith4920]

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.

All the bad episodes have Q in them

[Anonymous Coward]

Q was an incredibly lazy invention of bad script writers. The ultimate deux ex machina.

OK, there were a few other bad episodes :-)

Re:All the bad episodes have Q in them

[Anonymous Coward]

> Q was an incredibly lazy invention of bad script writers. The ultimate deux ex machina.

Q started out as a quasi-omnipotent threat, corrupted by power, like Apollo in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" or Trelane in "The Squire of Gothos." By the end of the series he was Mr. Mxyzptlk.

That said, I really enjoyed watching him when he introduced the Federation to the Borg, when he became human for a day, and when he appeared to Picard in the afterlife in "Tapestry" (although there's some doubt whether that was really Q).

Re:Greatest episodes: whenever Tasha gets killed

[pinzvidz]

Now she needs to be killed at Terminus.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Q-Hack!]

Fez likes them big, Fez likes them small, Fez likes them all.

ALL languages work that way.

[khasim]

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.

For example, someone might say "You're such a Samantha", but if you haven't watched many hours of Sex and the City, you would have no idea what they meant despite knowing all of those words.

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.

Re:ALL languages work that way.

[newcastlejon]

Oops. Fat mod fingers.

Re:ALL languages work that way.

[Hamsterdan]

"The translator in that show has never had a problem with translating such before."

I'm pretty sure when they encounter teenagers, it will...

Not words... Context.

[Rollgunner]

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 !"

Re:Not words... Context.

[Your.Master]

We have to step back and all recognize that the Universal Translator does not actually make sense as it is portrayed. Not least because you often hear Klingons talking, and occasionally a bit of Vulcan or something else, but also because it makes things perfectly lip-synced, etc..

So putting that behind us, why do you think that the Universal Translator operates on a word-for-word basis? I assert that it can't work even in English on a word-for-word basis; not even between two extremely well-known languages with lots of time in between. It would have to take groups of words (which are just groups of sounds still) and translate them. Darmok and Jelaad at Tenegrae (however that's spelt) should be perfectly translatable in that context.

The episode would make more sense if they hadn't established instantaneous error-free communication with hithertofore completely uncontacted species at every turn. It seems a stretch that these guys are the only ones that say "where's the beef?" in the future, when we know that humans of today do it all the time, and that Star Trek loves throwing out idiomatic quotes to confuse Data or whatever.

I still like the episode; continuity has never been a strong suit of Star Trek. I'd prefer if it did have continuity, but in the context of the show it wasn't as stupid as some of the crap they pulled.

Re:Not words... Context.

[sjames]

To be fair, the universal translator was probably a necessary license to avoid having the entire show consisting of puzzled humans and aliens getting frustrated because they can't communicate.

Re:Not words... Context.

[khasim]

To be fair, the universal translator was probably a necessary license to avoid having the entire show consisting of puzzled humans and aliens getting frustrated because they can't communicate.

And that is why it is a bad episode. Because the plot depends upon a failure of a device that is only included in all the other episodes because there isn't enough time or money to be more realistic.

Suppose a plot focused on the absence of seatbelts.

Or a plot focused on a ship where everyone spoke German instead of American English.

Or a plot focused on why the consoles on the bridge are made of plywood.

And so forth.

Re:Not words... Context.

[sjames]

Not necessarily. While they didn't want every episode to be that episode, having one episode be that one was fine.

I'm not so sure an episode where the consoles turn to plywood would be all that interesting.

Re:Not words... Context.

[danlip]

I agree. I hate this episode. I can suspend disbelief about how ridiculous a universal translator is in the first place and enjoy most episodes, but not an episode that specifically calls attention to the universal translator. Most SciFi has some ridiculous elements that exist purely for convenience and should not be turned into plot devices. Except for Doctor Who, which can turn any kitsch into cool.

Re:Not words... Context.

[AmiMoJo]

The UT translates in realtime so would have to work on almost a word-by-word basis. It even seems to work when the sub-space message is heavily distorted somehow.

If it were to work properly it would have to listen to at least a whole sentence, maybe more in most languages. That means a big delay and no realtime translation.

Re:Not words... Context.

[Quila]

It seems a stretch that these guys are the only ones that say "where's the beef?" in the future, when we know that humans of today do it all the time

The point is that they only speak in "where's the beef" phrases. There is no way they could explain the meaning of their phrases using non-metaphorical words like every language we know can.

Basically, the universal translator probably could translate their language if their history were dumped into it for reference.

Re:Not words... Context.

[Grishnakh]

How about an episode where Geordi pipes and and says, "Why the hell do we have so much power routed through the bridge consoles that they actually explode and injure users when the ship is damaged? Relays and data buses were invented centuries ago!"

Re:Not words... Context.

[cwsumner]

Darmok was not about the universal translator. I think you are are wiping your hate for that over the rest of the story.

Re:Not words... Context.

[jwhitener]

Yeah, it is pretty obvious that a realistic scientific explanation about how a computer could rapidly (say months of absorbing language and cultural data from the aliens, while being hand tuned) would be very boring for most TV shows to portray.

I actually appreciate shows that don't bother, like Stargate SG1. Everyone spoke English, with no explanation. Worked for me.

Kevinformatics Graph for TNG

[Anonymous Coward]

http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0092455

The one with the space retards

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean seriously, they had an episode with a bunch of aliens that were a stereotype of the mental challenged.

TNG good and bad

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

Re:TNG good and bad

[zippthorne]

Have you read Ender's Game?

Been twenty five years

[TrollstonButterbeans]

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.

Re:Been twenty five years

[C0R1D4N]

Deep Space 9, Falling Skies, The 4400, Kyle XY, Doctor Who relaunch, Firefly, SG1, Battlestar Galactica, X-Files, Mutant X, The 100, Star Wars The Clone Wars, these are all at least as good as TNG. Some much better.

Re:Been twenty five years

[laird]

Babylon 5 and Farscape were both great, too!

Re:Been twenty five years

[cbhacking]

It's distressing how many of those I've literally never even heard of. I'm not talking about "never say even a trailer for" or "it aired while I was living without TV" or "I heard some people talk about it, but that's it". This is literally the first time I have heard of "The 4400", "Kyle XY", or "Mutant X". Some of the rest (Falling Skies, The 100, and SW:TCW) fall into the categories quoted above.

Besides, you don't even mention Babylon 5! I mean, yeah, it duels with DS9 on more than just when it was running, and it's got flaws of its own, but it is *good*! Fewer wasted episodes (barring season 5, which has a lot of crap for perfectly valid reasons involving them not expecting to *get* a season 5) than any of the Trek series I can think of.

Re:Been twenty five years

[C0R1D4N]

B5 wasnot intentionally excluded, I just tossed that post out before bed, nor was that a list of the only shows, just a sampler to prove the point.

Re:Been twenty five years

[VortexCortex]

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.

I agree. There's so much shallow-war tripe and cop drama BS (even one where PRISM is a good thing, ugh), I feel that kids today could use some more ethical conundrums and imaginative exploration on prime time TV.

I've exposed space fascinated kids to Planetes and Space Brothers with scores of success (the later has world's 1st voice acting from space from the ISS). Too bad we don't have any prime-time shows about striving for peaceful coexistence in the hostile universe. It's too bad, they haven't made a reboot of Star Trek yet.

Re:Can I vote for..

[ThePhilips]

... all of them? Seriously the inclusion of a trained Shakespearian actor (Stewart) was the only saving grace of that branch-off of TOS.

come on... it's not like the series didn't have any redeeming qualities at all... is it?

Forced myself through two seasons.

Nope. No redeeming qualities.

Ditto the original.

Voyager was somewhat watchable: several non-ridiculous characters, some non-ridiculous story, less of the "holodeck" ridiculousness.

Star Trek in general is too much of a soap opera to me to be enjoyable.

Darmok is Awful

[dcollins]

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.

Re:Darmok is Awful

[haruchai]

Darmok truly sucked.

I've seen it several times and with each viewing, I disliked it even more.

Re:Darmok is Awful

[AthanasiusKircher]

I agree, Darmok is probably the single-worst of all Star Trek episodes.

I wouldn't say that. Despite the ENORMOUS plot hole at the center of the story, the acting is good. The scenes with Picard and the other captain on the planet are fantastic. And any TV episode that brings up the Epic of Gilgamesh is probably pretty awesome, in my book.

(Sidenote: for all those people out there who think that language is really just normally composed out of atomistic word meanings, think for a moment about how the universal translator would have to deal with the last clause of my previous sentence: "in my book." What book? Why is it mine? Where does it exist? Try talking for a few minutes without invoking a bunch of idiomatic phrases like that, whose meaning has nothing to do with the individual words. It's really hard.)

For all of these reasons, I absolutely loved this episode when I first saw it on the air (I was much younger then). When I saw it again some years later, I too started swearing at the television at how stupid the central premise it.

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.

Absolutely. The unbelievable part is not that the universal translator fails in this episode -- it's that it ever works in the first place, if it fails so utterly in this one case.

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).

Yeah. To those fans of this episode out there who really think it works, just ask yourself -- how did the children of this race actually learn the original stories of the myths so they could understand who Darmok was in the dozens of different idioms or whatever his name might pop up in? How did parents teach their children how to talk? And even if you accept that somehow kids could learn this through pure proper nouns and metaphor, how would it remain stable for more than a couple generations?

Eventually, "Darmok" would come to settle on a few meanings, just like "his," "arms," "wide," and other denotative words clearly used by this race. Or a new word (probably shorter) would come about to express the specific idiom. I can see this as sort of a ceremonial language learned by adults, but the mechanism by which children learn it or how it remains stable is an utter mystery. (And if they had a more "basic language" to talk to kids, why not try it with the Enterprise?)

Ridiculous plot. Still worthy for the scenes on the planet, though. That's perhaps the lesson of this episode -- it has so many fans because the actors managed to sell a truly idiotic premise with great acting, directing, elements of the set and situation, good dialogue in parts, and incidental elements.

That in itself is kind of a lesson that debunks the entire premise of the episode: even if the central "meaning" of the thing is stupid, we still enjoy and identify with much of the episode because of its context and elements not essential to the central plot. Our understand of things and our reaction to them therefore is dependent on much subtler and broad conceptions of meaning than that presupposed by the central thesis of this episode.

Re:Darmok is Awful

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Wow, all that and you still made the basic it's/its mistake!??

Re:Darmok is Awful

[multimediavt]

See some of my posts above. Yes, language is based on referents, most of which require a great deal of cultural context and why there is no such thing as a literal translation between any language, even those based on the same roots, i.e. the Romance languages. I am sad that so many disliked the Darmok episode. It is actually one of my top 20. I can only hope that you learn more about different languages and cultures and to appreciate how interesting that episode really is.

The (im)pertinent question

[fyngyrz]

What are your picks for best and worst TNG episode?"

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.

Re:The (im)pertinent question

[fyngyrz]

Isn't it great that when asked a question, in answering that question honestly, you can be modded down? ...this is why I surf slashdot at -1. Junk moderation is rampant.

Re:The (im)pertinent question

[Aighearach]

So are junk posts

Re:The (im)pertinent question

[fyngyrz]

Granted; but on Slashdot, the current moderation mechanism isn't a reasonable way to skip them, as you also end up skipping decent to excellent content. As it is my habit to read at -1, I can assure you that the AC posts here are often the gems, and that quite often posts that should at least be at 1 are knocked down, sometimes severely, for "moderator disagrees" and no other reason. Since being knocked down equates to being made invisible, this is a serious problem.

Furthermore, I don't know about you, but I can tell a junk post within a line or two of the content, and so generally waste no significant time with them. The only penalty I experience is a higher scroll rate, and I can't say that bothers me in any significant way. The thing that *does* bother me is when moderators kick people around for the wrong reasons, it truncates otherwise interesting conversation and it may discourage the victim from further posting, and frankly, I resent both of those. Of all the fora I've sampled on the Intertubes, I've found slashdot to be the strongest collection of intellects, insights and interests; it's achilles heel has always been the severely broken moderation system.

As it stands, one of the most common reasons for a hidden post is that it represents a minority view. From my perspective, hiding those is the direct mental equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot. We all know that any forum has its share of assnecks; the outright junk posts are direct evidence of that. ok, but I can deal with them. What Slashdot's moderation system does is gives power to assnecks to actually hide *good* posts, and that I have found to be a far more serious problem than GNAA posts, etc. And remember: I see all the posts, all the time.

It seems extremely clear to me: Better to allow the junk than allow the hiding of good posts. Right now, the only way to do that is to surf at -1.

I do have a suggestion. If the *reader* had the ability to hide a post, say with a "collapse" or "hide" button, and that button collapsed that specific post but not the replies, I think you'd have done as much good as you can. One click and posts *you* don't want to see are hidden, which would bring more content into view. You hiding posts *you* are not interested is a good thing. Random others deciding for you -- clearly, that's not good.

Something even more sophisticated would be to allow moderation as it is, but initially, in order for a post to be hidden, you'd have to click "agree." The system would track the moderators you consistently agree with for downmods, and after a significant number of those with consistent "agrees" and no disagrees, it'd automatically start to hide posts from moderators you've shown that you trust. Because that's the root of the problem: moderators who don't deserve our trust. The current system does not effectively cull them out, nor does it typically repair the damage they do.

Re:The (im)pertinent question

[Aighearach]

I didn't really read what you wrote, but posts that whine about moderation, or tell people how to moderate, are obviously junk posts and worthy of downvotes. And it basically proves whatever else they said probably was from the same perspective, so also probably sucked.

Re:The (im)pertinent question

[fyngyrz]

I didn't really read what you wrote

lol. And yet, that post was modded up. See how that works? Ya just can't trust anyone. :)

Obligatory

[ArcadeMan]

What are your picks for best and worst TNG episode?

Troi: What do you think?

Montgomery Scott

[duke_cheetah2003]

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.

Re:Montgomery Scott

[cbhacking]

Really? I rather liked "Relics", personally. Might be because we got Scotty, we got to see the difference between him and Geordi, and we got to see a Dyson sphere (granted that it was the impractical rigid variant, but c'est la vie). I thought they did a good job on the "man out of his time" work (the old "if you took Leonardo DaVinci out of time and put him in the modern world, he'd flip his shit" idea, over a shorter time span).

Re:Montgomery Scott

[duke_cheetah2003]

That and it sort of gave you a 'sour memory' of Montgomery Scott. Up to that point he was just the 'miracle worker' engineer we'd all come to love and admire, until this episode. Now we see him as a out of place, out of touch relic of the past. It was just not a good thing to do to the character, IMHO. Especially not a good LAST THING to do to the character.

"Shades of Gray"

[Arancaytar]

How... how many of them?

Re:"Shades of Gray"

[camperdave]

How... how many of them?

There are four lights...
... and four darks, and if you count black and white, that makes ten.

Re:"Shades of Gray"

[colinrichardday]

Four. There are four shades of gray!

Darmock was idiotic

[sandbagger]

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?

Re:Darmock was idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine what their logic classes in philosophy would be like? Or their legal system?

Fox News?

Re:Darmock was idiotic

[VortexCortex]

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?

Omahgherd! Like, get real. Their Einstein woulda dun sick numbers, brah. Mebby: I can haz Interwobs? Then BOOM! Iteration sensation placation nation, man!

Yesterdays Enterprise

[Rande]

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!

Re:Yesterdays Enterprise

[gmueckl]

So you want to strap yourself to an exploding console? Neat!

I actually wonder at the many plot devices that placed high power conduits through control consoles. I mean, really? Why wouldn't you design the bridge system as low power system sending control signals to high power equipment in some cabinets a few firewalls away?

Re:Yesterdays Enterprise

[VortexCortex]

Because it would be trivial to wrest control from the bridge...

Whole classes of bad episodes

[tempest69]

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

Re:Whole classes of bad episodes

[cbhacking]

It might be hard to say whether this counts as "focused on" Data, since it's *about* him without actually making his character a central aspect, but The Measure of a Man was *excellent* both as speculative fiction in general and as a chance to give some Star Trek actors a chance to show their stuff.

Decomposition into morphemes

[tepples]

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.

Re:Decomposition into morphemes

[AthanasiusKircher]

A straightforward sentence can be decomposed into morphemes, whose meanings combined produces the meaning of the sentence.

This isn't really true, though naive models of language often operate under this kind of fiction. The reality is that the core lexicon of any language often contains hundreds or thousands of words whose meanings can change in all sorts of subtle ways depending on context. Look up most of the 100 most common words in English, for example, and many of them will have dozens (or in a few cases even hundreds) of meanings, some just minor shades or related meanings, and others greatly varying to the point that it's really counterproductive to think of the word as having a single atomistic "meaning."

In adult Tamarian, on the other hand, just about every utterance is an opaque figure of speech.

Which leads to the question of how exactly they learned to talk in the first place. How did they teach children the mythos which would give them all the potential shades of meaning for the word "Darmok" if they had no "basic language" to convey these stories in? Even if you want to argue that some idioms were so common that they were used even to teach children, then that implies that some idioms would become standardized and would really mean something quite specific except in unusual cases -- in essence, the metaphorical meaning ceases to be useful in most contexts, and the denotative meaning becomes the primary one.

If such a "basic language" or at least a set of denotative idioms existed to communicate basic ideas to children, so they could even learn the metaphorical language, it then brings up the question of why the aliens wouldn't try this with the Enterprise when other communication failed.

(Additionally, it brings up a stability problem in the Tamarian lexicon -- it seems unlikely that if a "basic language" to teach fundamental meanings and mythos stories to children existed that the Tamarian metaphorical language would continue as the main communication method except in ceremonial situations or something like that. Surely the "basic language" would creep into everyday speech, and it's hard to imagine if it did, that the universal translator wouldn't be able to pick parts of it up... even accepting the relatively bogus model of atomistic word meanings that you're assuming.)

Re:Decomposition into morphemes

[aardvarkjoe]

One thing that always struck me when I watched the episode was that apparently their language involves repeating one of a selection of a half-dozen sentences that reference this story. How could a species possibly advance to high technology if they were hampered by communication in that way?

The other thing that seems rather ridiculous is that the Federation has never met these aliens before, and yet the Enterprise's computer has the details of their mythological figures.

I actually like the episode, but the details of the aliens' language doesn't bear any sort of close scrutiny.

Opacity

[tepples]

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.

Re:Opacity

[dbIII]

No it's because the writer of the week had a chip on their shoulder about machine translation.
If it had that mode of failure then it would have cropped up before. The plot point IMHO is about the artificial intelligence in the translator not being a "real" intelligence - using a new arbitrary limit to add a new story that doesn't otherwise work in the setting. See also adding a cuddly and friendly borg to the crew.

Pretty much the whole first season

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

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.

Re:Pretty much the whole first season

[multimediavt]

I liked the first episode and I liked the last episode. There was very little of redeeming value in between.

Wow, just wow. How can you dismiss episodes like "The Measure of a Man," where Data's sentience is on trial? One of Picard's best lines in the whole series (start about 38 minutes into the episode to get to), "Your honor, the courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the truth--for all time." Those court proceedings speak to how we as a species treat other life forms, and how "racist" and narrow minded we can be. Science fiction, Star Trek in particular, is mostly made up of morality tales. If you haven't realized that then you've missed a lot. There are many amazingly well told morality tales in those in between episodes. It's a shame you missed them.

Re:Pretty much the whole first season

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

Actually, I mentioned that was why I thought the first season was worse than the second despite the fact that the second had more episodes that raised the bar for truly awful, because it did have some gems.

The first season was kind of a turd sandwich, a couple of nice, solid pieces of rye bread with something unpalatable between them.

The second season was more like the diarrheal explosions of a man who was smuggling diamonds in his stomach. There were some real gems, but you had to pick your way through dreck to locate them.

Re:Pretty much the whole first season

[crunchygranola]

A weak season for sure, but really you are dismissing "Heart of Glory"? It is a crucial introduction to the Klingon culture of honor (and the character conflicts of Worf) that we have all grown to know and love!

Re:Pretty much the whole first season

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

Actually, I think there were a lot of adequate episodes in the first season. Overall, the average episode might even be better than the second season. But, there were no positive outliers like "The Measure of a Man" in the first season.

Re:Troi (The Good Troi Episode)

[shoor]

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.

Avoidance language

[tepples]

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.

Re:Avoidance language

[dbIII]

I'd say don't bother seeing it. You've picked up all that's worth knowing about it from the comments here and nailed a likely possibility behind it already.

Greg Egan played with the concept nicely in the novel "Diaspora". Some characters encountered aliens. The characters themselves were digital simulations of human intelligence. They cloned a copy of themselves to altered to understand and communicate with the aliens, then another that could understand their copy, and so on until they had a chain that could communicate ideas from the original intelligences that encountered the aliens to the aliens. That's how he had his AI translation work (although the AI's were all descended from human intelligences and were all effectively people).

Re:Avoidance language

[AthanasiusKircher]

Tamarian could just have a rule to speak in analogies within strangers' earshot.

While that could be true, it then makes absolutely no sense how this race managed to survive in interstellar space. Unless these people are complete idiots, they'd have to realize that they might need to break that taboo when communicating with someone who doesn't actually know their language already (just as presumably they would have to with their own children to teach them the mythos corpus that the analogies are based on).

The episode implies these people have been flying around interstellar space for a long time. If they haven't yet realized that another race might need to be taught to communicate without those analogies, then they are simply morons. (Which I fail to believe.)

Heck, it brings up the question of how this situation could even come about in a culture. Your suggestion could work in a small community where language is standardized, but what if they encountered people from another village or country or continent on their own planet, who might have subtle or quite significant variations in their underlying "base knowledge" for the language? In that case, either communication between different subgroups of the same language would have to settle on standardized analogies (in which case, they cease to be analogies -- they function as denotative meanings), or else they break the taboo themselves at times.

The only other explanation is that the language is not ALLOWED to form subgroups where meaning could become diversified into sub-languages -- which in that case would require a standardized lexicon for communication, a kind of formal diplomatic language, which would have specific denotative meanings to avoid misunderstandings. And if they had such a thing, with standard meanings, it means they should probably try to use it with the Enterprise, and it therefore makes no sense that the universal translator wouldn't understand it.

The concept of a geek card

[tepples]

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.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Macrat]

Voyager was somewhat watchable: several non-ridiculous characters, some non-ridiculous story, less of the "holodeck" ridiculousness.

A holographic doctor isn't holodeck ridiculousness?

Re:Can I vote for..

[Macrat]

All episodes after the first or second season when they started letting Patrick Stewart actually act.

There are.. FOUR lights!

Re:One nerds opinion

[Chris Mattern]

Measure of Man? Eh. It had noble intentions, but it snapped my suspension of disbelief cleanly in two. First of all, the central conflict driving the plot made no sense. "Data is a toaster, and toasters have no rights." Uh, yeah. Toasters aren't granted commissions in Starfleet, either. Surely Data's status as a sentient being had to have been definitively settled when he was admitted to Starfleet Academy. And then the secondary complications were so contrived as to be ludicrous. The Starfleet legal system seems to have been meticulously designed to provide for maximum melodrama. The case has to be prosecuted by the first officer, no one else? Or else the defendant is automatically convicted? Really? Anybody who enjoys Star Trek can't examine the hand-waving too closely, granted. But in this case, the absurdity piled on absurdity was too much for me to take.

Darmok is Science Fiction about an idea

[shoor]

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'.

Re:Darmok is Science Fiction about an idea

[dgatwood]

It wasn't a bad episode, though in retrospect, it kind of felt like a ripoff of Enemy Mine in a lot of ways (the book, that is).

Re:Darmok is Science Fiction about an idea

[crunchygranola]

So you are looking for the fabled wholly new and original story that is not like anything anyone has ever thought of before?

Good luck with that.

Re:Can I vote for..

[mr100percent]

A holographic doctor is not the same as the tired storyline where there's a holodeck malfunction and the artifical characters threaten the ship. At least with The Doctor they had him grow and develop and mature and be like Data with more personality.

Darmok and Jalad

[globaljustin]

^^^
Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra!

Temba

[globaljustin]

^^^
Temba, his arms wide.

Shaka

[globaljustin]

^^^
Shaka, when the walls fell.

On the ocean

[globaljustin]

^^^
Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean!

Re:Can I vote for..

[justthinkit]

First few seasons were quite lame, I'll give you that. But this is true of many ultimately good shows.

Luckily for me I had avoided STTNG until the STTNG pinball game came out. That hooked me. By then I think there were 5 or more seasons in the can.

There are some soap opera episodes, I will give you that. I constantly cherry-pick from the rebroadcasts. But then who doesn't do this?

I thoroughly enjoy the Data character (in addition to Picard) but I also like many "design" aspects of the series. Resolution usually happens at the end of an episode, "good guys win" (otherwise, what's the point?), intelligent use of special effects.

Best of all the ST series, to me.

Tin Man

[MaWeiTao]

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.

Re:Tin Man

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.

Which in my view made it all the more believable.

(And thank you for mentioning that episode.)

Re:Can I vote for..

[ThePhilips]

There are some soap opera episodes, I will give you that. I constantly cherry-pick from the rebroadcasts. But then who doesn't do this?

Babylon 5 has managed to avoid the soapness by having a story.

Or Stargate and Firefly - by having the episodes explore and develop the environment around the characters.

Every episode brought something new to the table.

I thoroughly enjoy the Data character (in addition to Picard) but I also like many "design" aspects of the series.

Data is probably the worst character of them all. He is just a "plot tool", the lowest form of "plot device": it gets screwed and bent all the time to create a short lived twist of the story. Few such eps later it is just "omg this time Data is {insert plot tool}, lol really?".

Resolution usually happens at the end of an episode, "good guys win" (otherwise, what's the point?), intelligent use of special effects.

The inherit problem with soap operas is that they lack development. IOW by the end of the episode the universe comes back to where it has started. Season ending "cliffhanger" episodes try to change something sometimes (and I personally not a huge fan of cliffhangers in general). But in Star Trek they fail to even do that.

Graph of episode ratings

[belg4mit]

http://graphtv.kevinformatics....

Re:Can I vote for..

[gmueckl]

Almost all characters in TNG got twisted and bent to fit the plot at some point or another. This is really annoying to watch at times. I find it amazing that the actors put up with that and managed to act out these scripts. There's actually some really good acting from almost all main actors in there, but also a good amount of bad acting as well.

Well, it worked.

[Max Threshold]

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.

Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra

[rossdee]

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Re:Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra

[Dachannien]

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the lead pipe.

Re:Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra

[Kaenneth]

Jumping the Shark

Re:Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra

[VortexCortex]

Sharks with friggin' lasers!

Re:Can I vote for..

[Anonymous Coward]

DS9 had too many annoying Bajoran and prophet based episodes and the series didn't get interesting until the 4th season.

Conspiracy

[Charliemopps]

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...

Re:Conspiracy

[multimediavt]

I think that was one where they were thinking of taking the story line in a certain direction, got the reviews and changed their mind. The Borg went over better as an arch enemy rather than some parasitic race trying to take over the Federation.

Re:Can I vote for..

[dgatwood]

... all of them? Seriously the inclusion of a trained Shakespearian actor (Stewart) was the only saving grace of that branch-off of TOS.

come on... it's not like the series didn't have any redeeming qualities at all... is it?

I can think of one really good episode. It involved the captain getting his brain rewired and living an entire lifetime on another planed in a dream induced by an alien probe. Why was it good? Because it focused on one character (played by Patrick Stewart) and really developed him.

The one with Picard leading the kids up the lift shaft was also good.

And I enjoyed the whole "Sometimes a cake is just a cake" episode. I mean, it was absurd, but it was amusing.

Worst episode? Anything with Wesley Crusher. They were almost all painfully written. How many times can a single kid put everybody in mortal danger and then somehow manage to save the day in some contrived fashion?

Re:Can I vote for..

[Anonymous Coward]

I idiots who write shit like this. Stop with the fucking links for every word in a sentence. You are not hip, cool, or witty.

Re:fuck wil wheaton

[Culture20]

So far he's killed ... Generator Rex. Ben 10. Teen titans.

These three were cartoons geared toward a demographic that quickly outgrows their current favorite shows. I happened to like them as an adult, but when they were canceled (or altered as in Ben 10 and Teen Titans), I didn't complain because I knew the target audience had changed.

Re:Can I vote for..

[ThePhilips]

[...] unlikeable cast [...]

So a bald lady and a guys with face painted yellow are likable to you?

To me, at the very least, in the Voyager the lady captain had hairs. Hairs are huge IRL.

Dominance

[SuperKendall]

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. :-)

ummm

[Spiked_Three]

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.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Anonymous Coward]

Voyager had a barking megalomaniac captain, a simpleton first officer, a naive Vulcan, a constantly whiny engineer, a cheesy helmsman, a spineless Chinese guy and an overly optimistic rat-face chef. I can't even remember the other cast members because they were just that forgettable.

Every single Voyager story was cookie cutter and it definitely felt like it. Suddenly the Geordi "Wait a minute, wait just a minute." moments where he figures everything out seem plausible stacked next to the convenient sequence of fortunate events in every Voyager solution.

Voyager was pure shit. It's not deserving of the Star Trek name.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Immerman]

I don't remember the season, several in I think, but it seems like there was a brief window when they started letting Troi become an actual decent character instead of just exposition and eye-candy, but that didn't last long.

Re:One nerds opinion

[ThatAblaze]

The Starfleet legal system seems to have been meticulously designed to provide for maximum melodrama.

It's based on reality. Our legal system would seem exactly the same on TV... you'll have to excuse me now, "the good wife" is on.

Re:What? TNG? Come on Grandpa

[multimediavt]

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 the Darmok and Jalad T-shirt

[Jon Abbott]

Don't forget that there is an awesome Darmok and Jalad T-shirt available here:
http://www.spreadshirt.com/dar...

Re:Can I vote for..

[Zontar The Mindless]

One of my first wife's few redeeming qualities is that she could mimic Kate Mulgrew's/Janeway's voice so well that it was squarely in that nebulous region somewhere between side-splittingly funny and downright scary.

BTW, I liked Chakotay and the Doctor. The rest of the STV characters were pretty flat. It's too bad, really, as Mulgrew is actually a fairly good actress.

Re:One nerds opinion

[colinrichardday]

The case has to be prosecuted by the first officer, no one else? Or else the defendant is automatically convicted?

The judge said that if Riker didn't prosecute the case, then she would render summary judgement against Data.

Re:Stopped caring early on

[ButchDeLoria]

I thought most of the argument happened because of the rereleases getting butchered with editing.

A couple

[Hamsterdan]

-The Inner Light
-Chain Of Command (There are FOUR lights!)
-Best Of Both Worlds

Re:Can I vote for..

[Hamsterdan]

What?

Molari and G'Kar were amazing, Garibaldi and Ivanova witty and sarcastic. It all fell down in Season 5 when they brought Tracy Scoggins in...

Re:Can I vote for..

[cbhacking]

The episode you reference is http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik.... It was already mentioned above as one of the best.

Honestly, while I agree, I'd like to see more comments on the ones that *aren't* in the top 3 or so, because *everybody* metnions those. It's a big echo chamber.

Space-Time features

[zenos-paradox]

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.

There are actually groups of bad episodes

[Opportunist]

...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

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[MooseMiester]

Good points. My favorite is that sometimes they can communicate across the galaxy instantly, and other times messages take weeks to be received - depending on the nature of the plot at that moment.

And lets not forget a ship flying faster than light and shooting photon torpedoes.

The most interesting part of all? You never, ever see a bathroom of any sort.... not even a door to one.

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[Opportunist]

Now you know why everyone keeps running around aimlessly in the corridors. Everyone's just in desperate search of the can.

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[Master Moose]

- Every time Wesley saves the day. I mean, let's be honest here, that's worse than Lassie.

I hate these episodes also, although I believe Wesley's part is just like Lassie and Ewoks, he was there for the kids.

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[Opportunist]

He was neither cute nor cuddly or even fluffy. He was ONLY annoying.

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[greenfruitsalad]

at the beginning of the movie "The First Contact", Picard has a dream about one. and then he wakes up all scared thinking - what the hell was that room?!

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[Master Moose]

Yes, I always smile when I hear Picard's refrain "Shut Up Wesley"

Re:There are actually groups of bad episodes

[crunchygranola]

...

- Every time Wesley saves the day....

Not every time! Remember the episode where he accidentally almost collapses a universe on Mom?

That is "Remember Me", and one I rather like though it is entirely Beverly Crusher's episode.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Aighearach]

Babylon 5 was soapy as hell. People who liked it liked it because it is more... "right wing."

The worst?

[drolli]

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.

Re: Can I vote for..

[ThePhilips]

I haven't said Voyager was "very good".

All I said that, compared to the rest, it was watchable. It had some story. It had developing and changing character. Some characters were plain turn off, but still as a whole, the series left a marginally positive impression.

Original series have turned me off with the typical 60s machoismo.

TNG turned me off by the numerous episodes which had more elements in common with a soap opera or reality show than with a space saga.

I have expected an action or saga-like narrative, but all Star Trek has is a mild drama.

Not quite...

[denzacar]

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...

The Survivors!

[BrendaEM]

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.

Re:reminds me of a joke

[denzacar]

Lying about killing a co-cadet in a training accident.

Any flaw that episode may have is overshadowed by Picard's "First Duty" speech. Which is also the title of the episode.
Training accident is just the window dressing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Can I vote for..

[DMUTPeregrine]

Yes, but it also had "Far Beyond the Stars." That alone pulls the series average way up.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Immerman]

I agree they were fantastic characters, but the question was *likable* - Molari would be fun at a party, and would probably be the most enjoyable company of the bunch, but I wouldn't trust him at my back. Garibaldi on the other hand would be good to have at your back, but was generally portrayed as not being somebody you'd want to spend a lot of time with. Ivanova was someone you wanted to like, but it was pretty late in the series before that wall around her started to come down enough to have the opportunity. G'Kar - well he was probably the most genuinely likable of the bunch, especially once his awakening mellowed some of the rough edges.

These were characters you grew to like despite, or perhaps even because of their foibles - you shared their struggle and growth into better people, and sympathized with their spirals into destruction. For most of the series they were generally not the sort of "likable" people most people would find themselves gravitating to. Certainly they were not painted with the facile brush of "Hollywood likability".

Re:Can I vote for..

[Mateorabi]

"Inner Light", a favorite. It still gets a little dusty in the room when it's on. The flute went for mondo-bucks at auction, and is one of the rare examples of actual continuity in the show. (Beverly remembering they had a freaking Sun Shield a few episodes later. And using it once! Being another rare example) I will say that the Wesley episode with Ashley Judd had....redeeming qualities. And disqualifies Wil Wheaton from complaining, ever, about being Wesley.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

my best and worst

[TreecieBoix]

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....!

I troi to avoid certain episodes...

[doccus]

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...

In Defense of Wesley Crusher

[Shakrai]

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.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Zontar The Mindless]

I am now utterly certain that you do not know my first wife.

Kira Nerys > Susan Ivanova

[Shakrai]

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.

Re: mimic Kate Mulgrew's voice

[TaoPhoenix]

Meta joke of the day: Imagine Kate Mulgrew reciting that post! : )

She was also a regent on Warehouse 13.

deconstructionism

[gzuckier]

"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...

Re:deconstructionism

[Anonymous Coward]

By the 24th century, Postmodernism will be extinct, forgotten. Or at least we can hope.

Re:Can I vote for..

[mjwx]

Or Stargate and Firefly - by having the episodes explore and develop the environment around the characters.

I liked Stargate but it did have a fair few filler episodes. Every series had at least 1 clip episode. Even B5 had filler ep's (Grey 17 is missing immediately comes to mind).

Re:Can I vote for..

[Rakarra]

Forced myself through two seasons.

Nope. No redeeming qualities.

Was it the first two seasons? Because if so I'd agree, they were pretty shitty. Except for that Borg episode, that was pretty good.

They fired/"let go" a good portion of the writing staff between seasons 2 & 3 and brought in Michael Pillar, Jeri Taylor, and Ronald D Moore. It got a lot better after that.

Puerile fantasy

[Occams]

FFS it is just a kids show: intended for 9 year old boys. Get over it!

Re:Can I vote for..

[Rakarra]

I think Kate Mulgrew was the only good actor and only good character on the series.

Unfortunately the writing in the show was so bad she became a legendarily-bad Startfleet captain.
So many examples why... but one of them being that Voyager could have easily returned to Starfleet in the first episode, but she -couldn't- because it would break the Prime Directive. Ok... but then she breaks the Prime Directive casually in episode after episode after that. Ugh.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Rakarra]

I still don't believe the story that Babylon's plot was entirely preplanned, and stick to my theory that Bruce Boxleitner replaced Michael O'Hare because the latter was such an -amazingly bad- actor.

Re:Kira Nerys Susan Ivanova

[dbIII]

Ivanova turns to mush after her lover(s) dies

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.

Ivanova defers to the Minbari dominated Interstellar Alliance at the expense of Earth

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.

Re:Kira Nerys Susan Ivanova

[Shakrai]

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.

Re:Can I vote for..

[Rakarra]

Because I have to respond to every post on this thread (apparently), if you liked those, there are a few more I could recommend:

*) Family (aka, the Best of Both Worlds, Part 3). Almost no sci-fi in this one, Picard spends time with his family on Earth, trying to live with the crushing guilt of his unwilling assimilation into the Borg.

*) Cause and Effect. Others have done this since -- the Enterprise is stuck in a time loop, exploding, then resetting back to about 8 hours earlier, with none of the characters remembering. However, each time through the loop, they remember a little more from the previous times through the loop...

*) Tapestry. Picard dies on the operating table, meets "Q" in the afterlife where they discuss how Picard got that artificial heart which failed. To say the episode becomes "It's a Wonderful Life" is slightly accurate, but doesn't do justice to the execution.

Wesley Crusher was annoying, yes. But really, the deck was stacked against him from the beginning. Here are many of the ways:
*) The writers (especially the early writers) did not know how to write for children. So instead Wesley had a bunch of "child prodigy" stereotypes. Contrast that with Sisko's son Jake in and the ferengi child Nog in Deep Space Nine -- both became really good, believable characters.
*) The writers took a single concept, then threw out a bunch of story treatments with the intention of filming a few of them. One of those concepts was "Wesley saves the Enterprise." Then the writer's strike of (1988? 1989?) happened and a bunch of these story concepts were shoveled into production. Queue a ton of Wesley episodes in a season; that will try even the hardcores' patience.
*) Too much Gene Roddenberry. Wesley became wish fulfillment for Roddenberry. Hell, Gene's middle name is "Wesley," he might have tried to shove too much "bright youngster corrects all the dumb adults" into the character.
*) At least back then, Wheaton wasn't a great actor. Sure, he got terrible dialogue, but he didn't exactly deliver it well either.

He was wisely put on a bus---errrr, shipped off to Starfleet Academy later. His guest star appearances afterwards were sometimes good.

Re: Can I vote for..

[locke.th]

That, possibly, but also that it had a different story format than ST. B5 was planned out from start to finish, whereas ST is a very episodic format, which is why there are inconsistencies.

Re: Can I vote for..

[khelms]

I was an actor once, dammit, now look at me!

Re:Kira Nerys Susan Ivanova

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Kira Nerys Susan Ivanova

[dbIII]

There were some great alien characters (Mollari and G'Kar) but human ones?

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.

Ditto on Chain of Command

[tigersha]

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)

Re:Kira Nerys Susan Ivanova

[Shakrai]

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.

Re:Kira Nerys Susan Ivanova

[dbIII]

It wasn't the best at exploring the human condition, that honor goes to Star Trek

If that's the case then SF is doing a piss poor job at doing that.

A band named themselves after that episode!

[Mad-Bassist]

Of course it's great: some friends of mine run a band here in Portland, Oregon called Tanagra!

Lower Decks

[DarthVain]

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.

Re:Can I vote for..

[crunchygranola]

...

Worst episode? Anything with Wesley Crusher....

There is the episode where Wesley almost collapses a universe on Mom (don't you hate it when that happens?). That was "Remember Me", which I rather like, but it is really Beverly's episode. Wesley just provides the MacGuffin.

Having recently just re-watched all of ST:TNG

[s13g3]

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.

Re:Can I vote for..

[iluvcapra]

Very controversial opinion, FBTS plays a lot like a Moonlighting episode. Then again, my favorite episode is It's Only a Paper Moon (of course allowing the transcendent brilliance of In the Pale Moonlight).