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Why Darmok Is a Good Star Trek: TNG Episode
An anonymous reader writes: "Last week, the Ars Technica ran an article listing their staff's least favorite Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes. They hit a few of the predictable ones, like Angel One — wherein Riker's chest hair takes center stage — and Up the Long Ladder — featuring space-Irish. But a surprising suggestion came from Peter Bright, who denounced Darmok, a fan favorite. (You remember: 'Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.') Now, Ars's Lee Hutchinson has (jokingly) taken Bright to task, showing how IMDB ratings mark Darmok (5x02) as one of the best episodes of season 5, and among the strongest in the series. He also points out a trend in some of the bad episodes they didn't pick: 'According to the data, the worst episode of TNG by a significant margin is the season 2 finale Shades of Gray, a clipshow episode famously hobbled by the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. We also managed to not pick season 6's Man of the People (the one where Troi falls in love with a brain vampire and gets really old) or season 4's The Loss (the one where Troi loses her empathic abilities and gets really whiny) or season 2's The Child (the one where Troi has dream sex with a space anomaly and gets really pregnant).' What are your picks for best and worst TNG episode?"
manly tears
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
So basically the worst episodes are those featuring Trio.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
I've always been partial to "Who watches the watchers" and thought that "Genesis" (final season) was one of the worst..
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
All I can really think to say about your post, and your understanding of the episode, is "Shaka, when the walls fell".
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.
Darmok was a great episode but I also really like Tapestry where we see that Pickard only got to be captain because of the risks he took http://www.imdb.com/title/tt07...
Four. Lights.
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".
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?
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.
Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?
Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs. Shockley, his arms wide!
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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 !"
Best:
Lower Decks
Worst:
First on the list: Anything with Wil Wheaton doing anything more than staying off the set.
Second on the list: Anything that required Jonathan Frakes's character, Riker, to do anything other than say "Yes, sir"
Third on the list: Anything that required Marina Sirtis' character, Troi, to act like she was an empath
Fourth on the list: Anything with Q in it. Anything at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
All episodes after the first or second season when they started letting Patrick Stewart actually act.
There are.. FOUR lights!
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.
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. :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's the 24th century. Why does it need to be piloted at all by anything other than the computer?
Union rules. Not you don't see Uber or Lyft shuttles either.
And where the fuck is the local Federation OSHA bureaucrat, anyway?
Ironically, that role has been replaced by a computer. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Straczynski had the main arc in mind, but he could not foresee where the show will end up.
So, he had "trap doors" written for all characters. But episodes and characters still had to be written as they went along.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens