When I had Covid, I rewatched a few seasons of TNG, and I was surprised at how good a lot of it was. It’s campy and ridiculous and heartfelt to the point of obnoxiousness, but that was the point.
And I loved Darmok. Who cares if the language stuff was squidgy? Something in every single episode was equally squidgy, and you just have to roll with it, or not be a Trekkie.
My favorite episode(s) is the 2-parter Chain of Command. Do you need to ask why? Because Picard gets naked in it. Also, it’s really good.
As for the new show, season 2 was a dog. But season 3 was great. Who knew the Borg could use the transporter as a CRISPR device?
It’s less about a stable situation where you have the sails rigged wrong and more that the wind shifted or you didn’t coordinate the sails with the steering and the wind tipped from one side of the sails to the other, stopping/slowing the ship suddenly, potentially swinging the sails around violently, putting unusual sudden strains on the mast, etc. So the saying makes even more sense: getting taken by surprise and not responding quickly enough.
I have an out-sized reaction to it because I thought it was eh, and everyone else talks about it like it’s the greatest thing ever. And yeah, there’s always squidgy stuff, but usually those are just ways to keep the plot moving along (like reversing the polarity of a tachyon field), whereas in Darmok the squidgy part was the point of the episode.
That may be a better way to put my feelings about TNG into words.
I have a half-written manuscript and a pile of notes somewhere in my parents’ attic. They were for a rather bland cliché fantasy story (ill princess, find the McGuffins, save the realm) I wanted to write as a kid. One chapter was at least partly inspired by Darmok: a monastery where the monks only communicated by quoting Scripture, book and verse, at each other. So: instead of “Pass the salt,” they would say “IXX;342a.” This was partly a parody of strict christian theological debate, but also heavily inspired by the Trek episode.
Aren’t we cluttering everyone else’s merely “positive” thread with Star Trek’s “awesome”? Should this go to the Nerdery thread? Or a separate Trek Thread?
Yeah, I kept meaning to ask the @moderators to move this to the Nerdery thread, but every time I posted here I had to handle something else right after, so it kept slipping my mind. I’m sorry about that.
In addition to all the things Joey said, which I heartily second, I can believe that the translator can pick up basic words and sentence structure, because it does that. I have a little more trouble believing that an entire species can’t just easily say “Hand me that crayon. No, the red one.” It’s a very weird way to culturally evolve. Yet we see cultural and linguistic evolution on Earth that’s equally weird. Like, why do we conjugate verbs? Koreans don’t do it (except for tense), and they obviously have a highly sophisticated and expressive language, and they aren’t hampered by it, because if you think about it, conjugation is totally pointless. Why do some languages gender everything? Am I missing something because English doesn’t do that?
Anyway, if we are all the result of directed panspermia (The Chase episode), and we all more or less look the same way and have the same goals, then it follows naturally that we’d have similar legends and apocryphal stories, and these would inform our communications to a great degree. Idioms are notoriously the biggest barriers to fluency in another language, and it’s amazing the amount of idiom and cultural story literacy we need to understand other people.
For me, one upshot of the recent Chat GPT advances is that Data on ST:TNG now sounds hopelessly antiquated. Like, apparently he was programmed with 1980s expert system technology. Chat GPT can write passable novels, while Data stumbles through a poem about his cat.
I mean, can you think of a better way to end it? The only way it could have been better is if Whoopi Goldberg had bothered to show up to tend bar. I wonder if they’re considering a series with Captain Seven?
Guinan tending bar for the crew would have been awesome, I agree.
Seven captaining her own ST-series would also be awesome. I still shudder when I remember that character in her fanservice catsuit (same for Deanna Troi). Giving Seven of Nine a ship of her own would slightly begin to make up for that.
I did miss Captain Janeway. I liked her stern attitude softened by her almost motherly care in ST-V.
EDIT: By the way, for more Trek-related goodness, have you (or anyone else following the continuing Star Trek shenanigans on this thread) seen the animated drama fantasy series Gargoyles? It became a bit of an in-joke that if you acted in ST, you should try to get a voice-role in Gargoyles.
I’m seven episodes into SNW and so far they haven’t given Rebecca Romijn (Number 1) this treatment. Apparently they’ve evolved since the days of DS9 and Voyager.
One thing I find funny in both SNW and Discovery is how overwhelmingly female the bridge crews are. It must drive the incels nuts.
Garak was in the running for me as a top character regardless of the amount of screen time. Though my favourite non-regular would have to be Q, hands down.
