star trek darmok

Shaka, When the Walls Fell

In one fascinating episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation traced the limits of human communication as we know it—and suggested a new, truer way of talking about the universe.

On stardate 45047.2, Jean-Luc Picard leads the crew of the Enterprise in pursuit of a transmission beacon from the El-Adrel system, where a Tamarian vessel has been broadcasting a mathematical signal for weeks. The aliens, also known as the Children of Tama, are an apparently peaceable and technologically advanced race with which the Federation nevertheless has failed to forge diplomatic relations. The obstacle, as Commander Data puts it: “Communication was not possible.”

Picard exudes optimism as his starship courses through subspace. “In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination,” he beams to his senior staff. “I would like to believe that these are qualities which we have in sufficient measure.” But after hailing the alien ship upon arrival, contact with Children of Tama proves more difficult than Picard imagined:

DATHON, the Tamarian captain: Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Umbaya. Umbaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray. (no response from Enterprise, looks at First Officer in frustration) (slowly, deliberately) Rai and Jiri. At Lungha.

In the Star Trek universe, a “universal translator” automatically interprets between any alien language instantly and fluently. Unlike today’s machine-translation methods, the universal translator requires no previous experience with another language in order to make sense of it. Such is the case with Tamarian, at least on the surface, as the Enterprise crew is able to comprehend the basic syntax and semantics of Tamarian utterances. “The Tamarian seems to be stating the proper names of individuals and locations,” offers Data, stating the obvious. But Picard quickly sums up the problem, “Yes, but what does it all mean?”

Picard’s reply to the Tamarians sounds especially staid to the viewer’s ears after having heard the aliens’ exotic prose: “Would you be prepared to consider the creation of a mutual nonaggression pact between our two peoples? Possibly leading to a trade agreement and cultural interchange. Does this sound like a reasonable course of action to you?” His questions cause the Tamarians as much befuddlement as their litany of names and places does the Federation crew. The Tamarian first officer offers the only honest reaction of the lot, a scornful scoff, but he is quickly silenced by his captain:

FIRST OFFICER (laughing): Kadir beneath Mo Moteh. DATHON: The river Temarc. The officers immediately stop their laughter—as if ordered to. DATHON (continuing; for emphasis): In winter. DATHON: Darmok.             The First Officer looks very concerned—objects. FIRST OFFICER: Darmok? Rai and Jiri at Lungha. DATHON (shrugs): Shaka. When the walls fell … FIRST OFFICER: Zima at Anzo. Zima and Bakor. DATHON (firm) Darkmok at Tanagra. FIRST OFFICER: Shaka! (indicating situation) Mirab, his sails unfurled. DATHON: Darmok.

At this point, the Tamarian ship transports its captain, Dathon, along with Picard down to the surface of El-Adrel IV. Dathon has brought along two Tamarian daggers; the bridge scene suggests they carry some ceremonial significance. The Enterprise attempts to retrieve Picard, but the Tamarians have already created a particle-scattering field in the planet’s ionosphere, making teleportation impossible.

On the surface, Dathon tosses one of the daggers to Picard, who misunderstands, thinking he’s being incited to fight. Meanwhile, First Officer Riker makes the same error up in orbit. He attempts to contact his Tamarian counterpart only to be reminded: “Darmok at Tanagra.” “Your action could be interpreted as an act of war,” enjoins Riker. His counterpart laments to his colleagues, “Kiteo, his eyes closed,” before responding to Riker, “Chenza, at court. The court of silence.” He closes the channel.

As night falls on the surface, Picard fails to make a fire while Dathon lounges comfortably around his roaring blaze. Dathon throws Picard a torch, incanting, “Temba.” After first misunderstanding that Temba might mean fire , Dathon clarifies, “Temba, his arms wide.” And Picard begins to fit the pieces together, “Temba is a person. His arms wide … because he’s … he’s holding them apart. In, in … generosity. In giving. In taking. Thank you.”

As morning breaks, Dathon rouses Picard. “Darmok! Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” he entreats, but Picard still doesn’t know what to make of it. An ominous roar is heard from afar, and Picard finally accepts the weapon Dathon had been offering earlier. Picard wants to run (Dathon interprets this gesture with a phrase we’ve already heard, “Mirab, with sails unfurled”) but Dathon shakes his head. “Shaka, when the walls fell.” Picard makes another tentative discovery, “Shaka. You said that before. When I was trying to build a fire. Is that a failure? An inability to do something?”

As the unseen creature nears, Dathon attempts to take control of the situation.

DATHON: Uzani, his army at Lashmir.
 PICARD: At Lashmir? Was it like this at Lashmir? A similar situation to the one we’re facing here? DATHON: Uzani, his army with fists open. PICARD: A strategy? With fists open? DATHON: His army, with fists closed. PICARD: With fists closed. An army, with fists open, to lure the enemy … with fists closed, to attack? That’s how you communicate, isn’t it? By citing example, by metaphor! (demonstrates that he understands) Uzani’s army, with fists open. DATHON: Sokath! His eyes uncovered!

The two proceed with this plan, but just as Picard is about to distract the monster so that Dathon can attack, the Enterprise executes an attempt to retrieve their captain, having found a way to disrupt the ionospheric interference temporarily. Absent Picard’s foil, the strategy fails and the creature pounces upon Dathon, badly injuring him. The transporter effort fails anyway, and Picard rematerializes on the planet’s surface. He runs to Dathon who struggles in pain, “Shaka,” he begins, and this time Picard completes the thought, “when the walls fell.”

While Riker and Laforge attempt to find a way to disrupt the Tamarian polarity coil responsible for the particle beam, Counselor Troi and Commander Data make some progress unpacking Tamarian communications:

RIKER: I’d prefer to find a peaceful solution. If we can talk our way out of this—so much the better. TROI: Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. RIKER: What have you found? TROI: The Tamarian ego structure does not seem to allow what we normally think of as self-identity. Their ability to abstract is highly unusual. They seem to communicate through narrative imagery—by reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mytho-historical accounts. TROI: It’s as if I were to say to you “Juliet. On her balcony.” BEVERLY: An image of romance. TROI: Exactly. Image is everything to the Tamarians.

As their conversation continues, Troi, Crusher, and Data observe that even with this new structural understanding, without a knowledge of the mythical origins of the figures that compose the Tamarian language they have little hope of understanding the sense of their speech. But on the planet’s surface, Picard has the good fortune of a firsthand account that fills in some of the blanks.

PICARD: Our situation is similar to theirs. I understand that. But I need to know more, you must tell me more, about Darmok and Jalad. Tell me, you used the words Temba, his arms wide when you gave me the knife and the fire. Could that mean give ?
 (makes arm motions) Temba ? His arms wide. Darmok. Give me more about Darmok. DATHON: Darmok. On the ocean. PICARD: Darmok on the ocean. A metaphor, for being alone, isolated. Darmok, on the ocean. DATHON: (cries out in pain)
 PICARD: Are you alright? DATHON: (waves him off) Kiazi’s children. Their faces wet. Ughhh. PICARD: Temba, his arms open. Give me more about Darmok on the ocean. DATHON: Tanagra, on the ocean. Darmok at Tanagra. PICARD: At Tanagra. A country? Tanagra on the ocean, an island! Temba, his arms wide. DATHON: Jalad on the ocean. Jalad at Tanagra. PICARD: Jalad at Tanagra. He went to the same island as Darmok. Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra. DATHON: The beast at Tanagra.
 PICARD: The beast? There was a creature at Tanagra? Darmok and Jalad, the beast at Tanagra. They arrive separately, they struggled together against a common foe, the beast at Tanagra, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. DATHON: Darmok and Jalad on the ocean. PICARD: They left together. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean. DATHON: The ocean. (then, in pain as Picard comes closer) Zinda! His face black, his eyes red! (then, shooing Picard away) Kalimash, at Bahar. PICARD: You hoped that something like this would happen, didn’t you? You knew there was a dangerous creature on this planet and you knew, from the Tale of Darmok, that a danger shared, might sometimes bring two people together. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. You and me, here, at El-Adrel.

As Dathon succumbs to his injuries, Picard returns the favor by recounting the earthly tale of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, doing his best to frame their similar tale in Tamarian syntax, “Gilgamesh and Enkidu. At Uruk.” As Dathon breathes his last, the Enterprise crew finally retrieves Picard, although they had to attack the Tamarian ship to do so, which has retaliated in force. As red alert sounds, Picard enters the bridge and consummates his new linguistic expertise. It’s a scene no fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation will soon forget.

PICARD (as he moves): Hail the Tamarian vessel. WORF (touches controls): Aye, Captain. TAMARIAN FIRST OFFICER: Zinda! His face black. His eyes red— PICARD: —Temarc! The river Temarc. In winter. FIRST OFFICER: Darmok? PICARD: … and Jalad. At Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean. FIRST OFFICER (to others, amazed): Sokath! His eyes open! PICARD (continuing): The beast of Tanagra. Uzani. His army. (shaking his head) Shaka, when the walls fell.             The aliens again face Picard. Picard takes the small             book—the Tamarian captain’s “diary”—and holds             it out in his hand.             The Tamarian First Officer glances at one of his             officers, who touches a console. The book is             immediately DEMATERIALIZED, MATERIALIZING next to the             alien First Officer. He picks it up, showing it to             Picard. FIRST OFFICER: Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. FIRST OFFICER: Mirab. With sails unfurled.             Picard extends the Tamarian dagger toward the First             Officer, offering it back to him. PICARD: Temba. His arms open. FIRST OFFICER: Temba at rest. PICARD (almost to himself): Thank you …

Shaka, when the walls fell is a likeness of failure for the Children of Tama. It’s also not a bad alternative title for the “Darmok” episode, for the Federation never really grasps Tamarian communication, despite their declared success in making contact with the race and forging a path to future relations.

Picard calls it metaphor , and Troi calls it image . For the Federation crew, the Tamarians cite examples that guide their understanding of and approach to the various problems they encounter on a day-to-day basis: as Picard puts it, by citing “a situation similar to this one.” Science fiction often plays with alternate methods of linguistic understanding, and this is familiar territory: The alien is incomprehensible, but in a way that can be overcome through reason and technology.

But there’s a problem: Metaphor and image are not accurate descriptions of the Tamarian language’s logic. A metaphor takes one thing as a symbol for something else: Juliet’s balcony acts as a figure for romance, Darmok and Jalad as a figure for communion through shared struggle. Even though Troi means image as a synonym for metaphor when she says “Image is everything for the Tamarians,” she also implies vanity in Tamarian speech. From the perspective of her declarative speech, the Tamarians are putting on pretenses, covering over a fundamental thing with a decorative one.

The Federation’s desire to see Tamarian speech as a process of copying one form into another is a uniquely earthly one, even when sieved through Star Trek ’s historical futurism. As Troi and her crewmates see it, Tamarian verbalisms depict the world through images and figures, which distort their “real” referents. Troi and Picard can’t help but interpret Tamarian through their (and our) cultural obsession with mimicry: Metaphorical language operates not by signification, but as poetry, by transforming the real in a symbolic mirror.

But for the Tamarians, something far weirder is going on, precisely because their language is not a curiosity for them as it is for the Federation (and for us television viewers). Calling Tamarian language “metaphor” preserves our familiar denotative speech methods and sets the more curious Tamarian moves off against them. But if we take the show’s science-fictional aspirations seriously and to their logical conclusion, then the Children of Tama possess no method of denotative communication whatsoever. Their language simply prevents them from distinguishing between an object or event and what we would call its figurative representation.

Allegory might have been a better term for explaining Tamarian. While metaphor represents one subject as similar to another object, allegory replaces one with another entirely. Allegory’s veiled language is powerful, because allegories effectively freeze time, making a historical or fictional scenario immortal. Allegory is what makes it possible for us to continue to derive lessons from the Old and New Testaments, week after week, homily after homily.

The 20th-century literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin lamented this property of Baroque allegory in particular, suggesting that it swaps out historical myth for present-day concerns. As Benjamin puts it, “Evil as such exists only in allegory … and means something other than it is. It means in fact precisely the nonexistence of what it presents. The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers are allegories. They are not real.” When we talk about evil in the allegorical sense—the serpent of the Garden of Eden, or Sauron’s eye in Mordor—we do so as a replacement for addressing the more ambiguous, palpable instances of evildoing in the present. For Benjamin, the allegorist rejects the world in order to embrace allegory, and in so doing it strips art of politics.

But the Tamarians’ version of allegory, if that’s indeed the right name for it, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it fetishizes myth in the manner of allegory, but on the other hand it musters that myth in the interest of serious sociopolitical action, as evidenced by Dathon’s willingness literally to die in the name of myth. So Benjamin’s concerns about the abandonment of the present don’t seem to apply to the Tamarian situation, offering further doubt that allegory is the best way to describe their communication process.

Despite the episode’s popularity, the Star Trek fan community (being a science-fiction fan community, after all) has issued numerous gripes about “Darmok.” The most interesting of these is a general disbelief in the technological prowess of the Tamarians. How could a race that thinks in allegory ever accomplish faster-than-light space travel? Just imagine the day-to-day work of designing, constructing, or maintaining a complicated machine like a starship. The Tamarians seem to be incapable of saying something like, “Hey Bob, can you hand me the three-quarter-inch socket wrench.” Given this inability to discourse pragmatically, why should we suspend disbelief in the first place?

Yet, if we take the episode at its word, not only is the Tamarians’ technology on parity with that of the Federation, but it might even be more advanced. The Tamarians were able to scramble transport signals across El-Adrel IV’s ionosphere, and their ship was clearly capable of destroying the Enterprise at the end of the episode had Picard not restored diplomatic relations just in time.

But what if the Tamarians abstract worldview is precisely what facilitates advanced technological and social practice, rather than limiting it? Watching the episode carefully, the “Darmok” approach appears to be an afterthought, a new idea that strikes Dathon as he realizes the planned diplomatic approach, Rai and Jiri at Lungha, would gain no purchase with the Federation. Likewise, the first officer’s objections to Darmok are both earnest and unrehearsed—he knows exactly what Dathon is talking about, and he doesn’t like it. But once the captain has asserted his authority (“The river Temarc, in winter”), no further instruction was necessary. The crew transports the two captains to the surface, erects the particle field in the planet’s ionosphere, and fends off the eventual Enterprise retaliation.

The skeptic might point out that these omissions in the teleplay are necessary given the compressed structure of the 45-minute television episode, and that just because we don’t see further instructions take place doesn’t mean they haven’t done. It’s equally possible that the Tamarians had already gone over the Darmok approach during their weeks-long orbit above El-Adrel IV, and that the first officer’s objections are rehearsals of an earlier argument that goes unseen during the action depicted on screen.

Given an absence of evidence either way, why not choose the more aggressive interpretation: Everything that takes place on the bridge of the Tamarian vessel during the episode is encapsulated into the single move, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” So dense and rich is Tamarian speech that these five words are sufficient to direct a whole crew to carry out an entire stratagem over two days’ time, and not by following a script, but by embracing it as a guiding abstraction.

As Troi explained, the Tamarians’ possess a sophisticated aptitude for abstraction. This capacity responds to fans’ skepticism at the Tamarian’s technological prowess. The Children of Tama would not be delayed by their inability to speak directly because they seem to have no need whatsoever for explicit, low-level discourse like instructions and requests. They’d just not bother talking about the socket wrench, instead proceeding to the actual work of building or maintaining the vessel.

By contrast, consider how the Enterprise engineering crew attempts to overcome the Tamarian particle interference field in their attempt to retrieve Picard from the surface of El-Adrel IV:

GEORDI: Matrix levels. LEFLER: Annular convergence holding at four three nine point two oh five. Confinement resolution at point five two seven. GEORDI: That isn’t gonna do it. Increase thermal input coefficient to 150 percent. LEFLER (working console): Increasing now … … GEORDI: Shunt the overload to the phase transition sequencers in transporter one. LEFLER: Yes, sir.

While the episode doesn’t provide a Tamarian mythical equivalent, we can speculate on how the Tamarians would handle a similar situation. While I suppose the explicit directive to adjust thermal input by a specified amount might be rendered allegorically (some Tamarian speech is narrower than others), it’s equally likely that the entire exchange would be unnecessary, subsumed into some larger operation, say, “Baby Jessica, in her well.” The rest is just details.

While his declaration that they speak and think in metaphor is most memorable, Picard offers another account of Tamarian during his encounter on the surface. Before encountering the beast, Dathon makes the recommendation, “Uzani. His army. With fist open.” Picard reacts, “A strategy? With fist open …”

“Strategy” is perhaps the best metaphor of all for the Tamarian phenomenon the Federation misnames metaphor. A strategy is a plan of action, an approach or even, at the most abstract, a logic. Such a name reveals what’s lacking in both metaphor and allegory alike as accounts for Tamarian culture. To be truly allegorical, Tamarian speech would have to represent something other than what it says. But for the Children of Tama, there is nothing left over in each speech act. The logic of Darmok or Shaka or Uzani is not depicted as image , but invoked or instantiated as logic in specific situations. In some cases, apparently, this invocation takes place with limited transformation, such as in the application of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra depicted in the episode’s main plotline. In other cases, those logics are used in situations with more play, as when Dathon reassures Picard after the former’s injury, “Kiazi’s children. Their faces wet.”

Here we might distinguish between the invocation of a particular logic and the simulation of a creature, thing, or idea by replicating its image. The simulation of life in art often concerns the reproduction of surfaces: in painting, the appearance of form, perspective, or the rendition of light; in literature the appearance of character or event; in photography and cinema the rendition of the world as it appears through optical element and upon emulsion or sensor; in theater the rendition of the behavior of a character or situation.

While all these examples “simulate” to various extents, they do so by a process of rendering . For example, the writer might simulate a convincing verbal intercourse by producing a credibility that allows the reader to take it as reality. Likewise, the actor might render a visible behavior or intonation that is suggestive of a particular emotion, event, or history that the theatrical or cinematic viewer takes as evidence for some unseen motivation.

A logic is also a behavior, but it is a behavior unlike the behavior of the literary or theatrical character, for whom behaving involves producing an outward sign of some deeper but abstracted motivation, understanding, or desire. By contrast logics are pure behaviors. They are abstract and intangible and yet also real.

If we pretend that “Shaka, when the walls fell” is a signifier, then its signified is not the fictional mythological character Shaka, nor the myth that contains whatever calamity caused the walls to fall, but the logic by which the situation itself came about. Tamarian language isn’t really language at all, but machinery.

Because we don’t know very much about Tamarian history and culture, it’s hard to say much about how their conceptual machinery works. But we do have an earthly metaphor by which we might understand it: computation .

When we think about the kind of representation that computers enact, we typically commit our own Shaka, when the walls fell error. Computational media are generally seen as an extension or acceleration of existing mimetic methods. Take computer graphics as an example. We see computer images as extensions of photographic or filmic representation. In both Hollywood digital video effects (which are offline rendered to achieve high resolution and detail) and in computer games (which are real-time rendered to facilitate player interaction), a variety of algorithms produce two-dimensional depictions of three-dimensional scenes that, at their best, reach a level of credibility that can be mistaken for reality.

This take on computational representation sees the computer as a new method for producing appearances , the images that fascinate the Enterprise crew in “Darmok,” and that fascinate us by means of their broadcast as television. But we err in taking visual appearance as a primary replacement for reality.

In CG films, we don’t notice this problem—computer images just become yet more frames of film. But in computer games, realism is always more than just a visual affair. In a 3-D game, movement through a real-time rendered world can produce a sense of place, not just an image. Yet, the thoughtful player will quickly find an enormous chasm between visual realism and other sorts of realism in computer games. For example, the appearance and sensation of being in Grand Theft Auto ’s Liberty City initially suggests enormous verisimilitude, until the player attempts to enter a building that turns out just to be a Potemkin stand-up, or to interact with a non-player character whose verbal and physical actions amount to a few repeatable lines of stock dialog and a pathfinding algorithm that helps steer her around the player’s avatar.

So, while we think that computer graphics represent the world “as it appears,” instead they mimic the logics of visual verisimilitude themselves more than they do the logics of the real world. The method of producing 3-D computer graphics known as ray tracing works by carrying out linear perspective painting in reverse, rendering light from back to front and hiding areas where that light will not meet the position of the virtual camera due to obstacles. Ray-tracing algorithms produce the rationale of Renaissance perspective, to exact mathematical specification. Computation doesn’t represent the world so much as logics from the world, just like the Tamarian language doesn’t reproduce the figures so much as the processes of its cultural history.

Take SimCity as a parallel example. There have been many editions of this city-construction-and-management-simulation game, but all of them share the same features: tools to zone and construct infrastructure in a physical environment, including roads and rail; housing, commercial, and industrial sectors; electrical and other infrastructure; and services like police and fire, along with taxation, advising, and management tools to run the city on an ongoing basis. Playing the game involves a combination of construction and operation, a dynamic that led its creator Will Wright to compare the experience to gardening.

What city does SimCity represent? Not New York or London or Valenciennes or Albany, for re-creating particular cities proves difficult in the game. Nor does the game simulate the role of mayor (even if its interfaces and paratexts sometimes refer to the player as a mayor), because no mayor has the arbitrary power to create and destroy as the SimCity player does. Nor is it the Platonic ideal of a “city,” because some types of cities are more and less feasible within the SimCity simulation. New urbanist mixed development is impossible, social welfare-style taxation policy is impossible, and rail-based mass transit always leads to faster growth than road-and-freeway automobile transit. In this sense, even though large SimCity cities may “look like” credible urban environments, they don’t bear much resemblance to any actual city. Dense, modernist cities demand mixed-use development and increased infrastructure and services; sprawling middle-American metroplexes rely on slow, historical growth in suburbs that draw commercial activity away from and then back to city centers; neither type of city is possible in the game.

If it mimics anything, SimCity characterizes a particular logic of urban planning, one that most closely resembles the urban dynamics model of Jay Forrester, an inspiration Wright has himself acknowledged. Urban dynamics emerged out of Forrester’s post-war research at MIT in system dynamics, an approach to the interactions between industrial systems and social systems in large organizations. Originally a project integrating management and engineering, by the late 1960s Forrester had the accident of sharing an office with former Boston mayor John Collins.

As a result of this encounter, in 1969 Forrester published Urban Dynamics , a controversial account of urban policy that took the form of a model that Forrester and his students also implemented in computational form. (One example of its controversy: While low-income housing might seem to offer succor to the poor, Forrester’s model suggests that such development creates a poverty trap that stagnates an urban district, forcing it deeper into poverty rather than leading it toward prosperity.) While Forrester’s computational design goals entailed prediction intended to drive policy, Wright’s adaptation of Forrester’s urban dynamics was mostly a matter of convenience: It offered a formal logic for urban behavior that could be abstracted and implemented in the form of a creative work.

Unlike a painting or an actor’s performance, the game does not re-create outward appearances (crime, high rises, property values, and so forth), but the logics that then produce those appearances. Rather than translating logics into descriptions or depictions, computational representation like that of SimCity translates logics into logics . It embodies a particular take on how cities work through a computer program that makes them work that way. In my book Persuasive Games I call this technique “procedural rhetoric”—the use of computational processes to depict worldly processes.

“Darmok” gives us one vision of a future in which procedural rhetoric takes precedence over verbal and visual rhetoric, indeed in which the logic of logics subsume the logics of description, appearances, and even of narrative—that preeminent form that even Troi mistakes as paramount to the Children of Tama. The Tamarian’s media ecosystem is the opposite of ours, one in which behaviors are taken as primary, and descriptions as secondary, almost incidental. The Children of Tama are less interesting as aliens than they are as counterfactual versions of us, if we preferred logic over image or description.

At the end of “Darmok,” Riker finds Captain Picard sitting in his ready room, reading from an ancient book rather than off a tablet. “Greek, sir?” Riker asks. “The Homeric Hymns,” Picard responds, one of the root metaphors of our own culture. “For the next time we encounter the Tamarians …” suggests the first officer. To which his captain replies, “More familiarity with our own mythology might help us relate to theirs.” A charming sentiment, and a move that always works for Star Trek —the juxtaposition of classical antiquity and science-fictional futurism. But Picard gets it wrong one last time. To represent the world as systems of interdependent logics we need not elevate those logics to the level of myth, nor focus on the logics of our myths. Instead, we would have to meditate on the logics in everything , to see the world as one built of weird, rusty machines whose gears squeal as they grind against one another, rather than as stories into which we might write ourselves as possible characters.

It’s an understandable mistake, but one that rings louder when heard from the vantage point of the 24th century. For even then, stories and images take center stage, and logics and processes wait in the wings as curiosities, accessories. Perhaps one day we will learn this lesson of the Tamarians: that understanding how the world works is a more promising approach to intervention within it than mere description or depiction. Until then, well: Shaka, when the walls fell.

Screen Rant

Star trek tng's darmok is captain picard at his best.

Captain Picard has many memorable moments over the course of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and "Darmok" is one of his best.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) has many stand-out moments over the course of Star Trek: The Next Generation , but the season 5 episode "Darmok" is one of the best. When the USS Enterprise receives a signal from a mysterious species known as the Tamarians, they go to investigate. Though Starfleet vessels have encountered the Tamarians in the past, their manner of speaking has been described as "incomprehensible." This, however, does not stop Picard from wishing to establish communications with them.

Soon after the two ships attempt (and fail) to communicate effectively, both Picard and the Tamarian Captain, Dathon (Paul Winfield), are beamed down to the planet below. This sets up a frustrating exercise for Captain Picard, as he and Dathon must work to understand one another. While Picard often uses his words to avoid conflict, he does not have that option here. This makes it all the more difficult for him to succeed, and all the more satisfying (and impressive) when he finally does.

Darmok Tests Picard's Patience and Ingenuity

In the first scene of "Darmok," Captain Picard remarks : "In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination. I would like to believe these are qualities we have in sufficient measure." This quote becomes the central theme of the episode, as these qualities are ones Picard must use when he finds himself stranded with Captain Dathon on the planet. As Dathon keeps repeating the phrase "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," Picard grows frustrated at his inability to understand. Jean-Luc is weary of Dathon and unsure of his intentions, but after Dathon gives Picard some of his fire, the Captain of the Enterprise begins to realize that they are not enemies.

A classic TNG episode , "Darmok" exemplifies Picard's philosophy of nonviolence and peace. While the crewmembers left on the Enterprise react with fear and frustration (albeit understandably so), Picard and Dathon work together and develop a bond despite their language barrier. Many in this situation might lash out with violence out of desperation, but Picard remains calm and rejects violence at every turn, even when he believes Dathon wishes to fight him. Picard and Dathon learn to demonstrate their growing trust in one another with their actions, even as their ships face off above the planet. Though Dathon loses his life in the end, Picard has learned enough to speak to the other Tamarians and prevent a war.

Darmok Succeeds by Isolating Picard

Many of the problems encountered by the USS Enterprise-D throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation are solved by the crew working together, each using their own strengths. By stranding Picard alone on this planet, "Darmok" forces him to use all of the skills at his disposal to figure out what is happening. He must be patient and use his intellect to decipher what Dathon is trying to say. By the time Picard triumphantly realizes that the Tamarians speak in metaphor, a creature on the planet attacks him and Dathon. The crew on the Enterprise then unknowingly make things worse when they attempt to beam Picard off the planet, preventing him from coming to Dathon's aid.

With Dathon mortally wounded and Picard unable to save him, it seems as though communications between the two groups will break down, and the Enterprise and the Tamarian ship begin firing at one another. Picard arrives back on the Enterprise bridge just in time to successfully communicate with the Tamarians and prevent further conflict. Though Picard is not able to save Captain Dathon's life, his philosophy of peaceful coexistence and nonviolence wins out in the end. "Darmok" is not only a high point for Star Trek: The Next Generation , but it is also a triumph for Captain Picard and everything he - and by extension, Star Trek - stands for.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Cast & Crew

Paul Winfield

Colm Meaney

Chief Miles O'Brien

Richard Allen

Tamarian First Officer

Ashley Judd

Ensign Robin Lefler

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Darmok was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired in 1991 . It featured Captain Jean-Luc Picard meeting an alien whose language consisted of metaphors and references. Joel Mintz considered it to be a "total classic". ( PROSE : Return of the Living Dad )

When Bernice Summerfield first saw it airing in 1994 , she thought it was a documentary . ( PROSE : The Left-Handed Hummingbird )

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The basic synopsis of a hero trapped on a planet with an alien who can only speak in metaphors and references was an inspiration for Russell T Davies ' episode Midnight :

"I've seen lots of Star Trek: The Next Generation , I think it's a lovely show – but there's one episode, the billing for which is so fascinating I've actively avoided ever seeing it. I love the idea so much, I'd rather think about it. Forever. The episode is called 'Darmok,' and the synopsis simply says that Captain Picard is trapped on a planet with an alien who can only talk in metaphors. Wow. That sounds brilliant. How does that work? What happens? How does it end? I've got no idea – not seen it! But it keeps resonating with me. In 2008, I wrote a Doctor Who episode called 'Midnight.' Is it like 'Darmok'? I don't know. But stripped down to its essentials, it's a story about a hero, an alien, and words. That's practically the same billing. Maybe the two shows are profoundly different, but I know for a fact that all those years of wondering about 'Darmok' led me to that script." Russell T Davies [1]

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Recap / Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E2 "Darmok"

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Original air date: September 30, 1991

The Enterprise arrives at the uninhabited El-Adrel system to meet with an enigmatic race of people called the Children of Tama. This is not a First Contact situation; the Tamarians have been contacted before, but the records indicate that previous diplomats found it impossible to communicate with them. The crew of the Enterprise is hoping that they can do it better. When they make contact, the problem the previous teams faced becomes crystal clear: the language of the Tamarians is bizarre gibberish that none of the crew can make any sense of. The translators are double-checked and found to be in perfect working order. The problem is that nearly everything the Tamarians say is a proper noun; the names of people and places without any context that would let the translators (or crew) guess at the meanings being alluded to. Picard makes a futile attempt to establish an alliance with them, but the conversation goes nowhere. Equally flummoxed, the Tamarians have an argument amongst themselves, evidently about the best way to proceed. Then the captain of their vessel holds up two knives, announces, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," and beams himself and Picard to the surface of a nearby planet. The Tamarians’ ship intentionally blocks the Enterprise from beaming Picard back or communicating with him.

The Tamarian captain offers one of his knives to Picard. Assuming he wants a fight, Picard refuses it. At an impasse, the two captains make camp for the night. The Tamarian shows no further signs of hostility, but Picard still can’t understand a word he’s saying so it’s impossible to tell if he can be trusted or not. When Picard fails to get a fire going, the Tamarian offers some of his, with the words, "Temba, his arms wide." Picard vaguely understands that these words carry the meaning of accepting a gift, and the Tamarian smiles, seeing that at least the beginning of a connection is forming.

Worf takes a shuttlecraft toward the planet, gambling that the Tamarians are unwilling to take any violent action to stop them. They appear to have gambled wrong, as the Tamarians fire on the shuttlecraft, but only with enough force to cause minor damage that forces them to abort the rescue attempt. Geordi comes up with a way to scatter the Tamarian interference, but says it will take an entire day to implement, and it’s not at all clear whether Picard will be safe for that long. Worf proposes attacking the Tamarian ship, but Riker rejects that, preferring to save it as a last resort. He orders Data and Troi to try to find a way to decode their language so they can somehow talk things out.

Picard wakes up the next morning to find that the Tamarian captain has wandered away. He soon comes running back, again trying to give one of his knives to Picard. Picard refuses to take it at first, but then he hears a noise that sounds like a large animal, and he realizes that the Tamarian wants help in fighting the creature. He takes the knife, and the two square off against the creature, which has formidable skill at camouflage. The Tamarian keeps trying to give Picard instructions, and Picard slowly catches on to what he’s trying to say.

Dathon: Uzani, his army with fists open. Picard: A… strategy, with fists open? With fists open? Dathon: His army with fists closed. Picard: With fists closed. An army with fists open… to lure the enemy. With fists closed… to attack? That’s how you communicate, isn’t it, by citing example, by metaphor !

The ship’s sensors show that Picard is being attacked, so Riker tells Geordi to rush his field-scattering beam and get Picard out of there. He tries, but ultimately fails, and the attempt at transporting prevents Picard from protecting the Tamarian, who gets badly injured by the creature. Nevertheless, the creature runs off. They set up camp again, and Picard asks to know more about Darmok. The Tamarian tells the story: Darmok was a hunter who met another man named Jalad at the island of Tenagra. They fought the beast and left the island together. That was the idea of coming to the planet—to help them come together by facing danger together. The Tamarian asks for a tale in return, and Picard recounts a bit of The Epic of Gilgamesh , a story in much the same vein… except for the fact that in that one, one of the heroes dies.

Tropes featured in "Darmok" include:

• Alien Blood : Tamarians have white blood
• Anthropic Principle : The writers have admitted that the Tamarian language would not be practical for such an advanced society (science, medicine, and a whole lot of other disciplines would be nearly impossible to discuss), but without it, this episode could not have been written, and the consensus is that it's one of the better episodes of the franchise.
• Arc Number : The library computer has 47 entries related to the name Darmok.
• Attack Pattern Alpha : Evasive Maneuver Sequence Delta
• Big "NO!" : Picard screams this when he starts to be beamed away just as the beast mauls Dathon.
• Big "YES!" : Once it finally dawns on Picard just what Dathon is up to, the Tamarian captain doesn't even try to contain his joy. Dathon: Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
• Bittersweet Ending : Picard becomes friends with Dathon, picks up the basics of his language, and establishes the foundation of a trusting relationship with the Tamarians, but Dathon succumbs to his wounds from the battle with the predator on El-Adrel. In the end, the Enterprise and Tamarian part ways, not as allies as the Federation wanted, but at least with the beginnings of understanding and friendship.
• Call-Back : Data describes their trouble speaking to the Tamarians as "analogous to understanding the grammar of a language but none of the vocabulary" note  Knowing what a noun is and where it belongs in a sentence, without knowing any nouns , essentially , which was similar to how Spock detailed the trouble speaking to the probe threatening Earth in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home : Kirk: Spock, could the humpback's answer to this call be simulated? Spock: The sounds, but not the language. We would be responding in gibberish.
• Chekhov's Gunman : One officer assisting Geordi in Engineering is Ensign Robin Lefler, who'll play a bigger role later this season in " The Game ".
• Clothing Damage : Picard gets a slash across his chest from the monster, through apparently not close enough to draw blood.
• "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra": To cooperate
• "Shaka, when the walls fell": To fail, or to misunderstand
• "Zinda, his face black, his eyes red": Used as a threat, as well in describing pain
• "Kailash, when it rises": Acceptable losses
• "Temba, his arms wide": To offer in friendship
• "Temba, at rest": In response to the above, to politely decline
• "Uzani, his army with fists open": To lure an enemy into an ambush
• "Uzani, his army with fists closed": To ambush an enemy after luring them in
• "The river Temarc, in winter": To be silent. May be shortened to just "Temarc!", which can be translated as " Shut up! "
• "Picard and Dathon at El-Ardel": A new term introduced at the episode's end, signifying successful first contact and new friendship
• Dramatically Missing the Point : Worf assumes the alien captain intends a Combat by Champion . Picard assumes the same when Dathon tosses one of his knives to him.
• Picard also does this when he takes Dathon's journal and gives it back to the Tamarians with "Temba, his arms wide". The Tamarians take it (by transporter), and Picard holds up the knife that Dathon gave him as well, repeating "Temba, his arms wide." The second in command instead uses a term we have not heard before: " Temba, at peace ."
• Early-Bird Cameo : Lefler only has about 10 seconds of screen-time and doesn't even get a first name yet. She gets a more formal introduction with a much more substantive role a few episodes later in " The Game ".
• Early-Installment Weirdness : This is the debut episode of Picard's jacket and the only episode in which it has leather shoulders.
• Enemy Mine : An unusually apt example, since the premise here is very similar to the movie Enemy Mine . Here, it's also invoked , as the meaning of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a combination of this and Fire-Forged Friends , and Dathon successfully uses both tropes.
• "Eureka!" Moment : Picard finally figures out that the Tamarians communicate purely through metaphor. The Tamarians use the expression "Sokath, his eyes uncovered!" to refer to realization or understanding.
• Famed In-Story : Picard and Dathon become part of the next Tamarian legend.
• Fire-Forged Friends : This is the Tamarians' diplomatic strategy when casual conversation fails: force the two captains together in a life-or-death struggle as a way of building trust and understanding, inspired by the eponymous Darmok and Jalad of Tamarian lore. Picard shares a similar tale from Earth mythology— Gilgamesh and Enkidu —except in that story, one of the heroes was slain .
• Hard-to-Light Fire : Picard gets a fire going by the rubbing sticks method, only for it to go out again. Dathon, watching nearby from his successfully lit fire, finds it amusing, but on seeing Picard shivering in the cold, tosses him a burning stick from his fire. The gesture starts the ball rolling, teaching Picard his term for either "giving" or "generosity".
• Higher-Tech Species : The Tamarian ship rather casually defeats the Enterprise when the two ships finally come to blows. It can also beam through shields and prevent the Enterprise from using the transporter at all.
• Idiot Ball : At one point, Riker hails the Tamarians and demands them to lower the field, even though he knows that they can't understand their language. This is more acceptable than it seems, as there seems to be no problem with the Tamarians understanding the crew, just the other way; although Riker has no way of knowing this, it could be that he's hoping that something will get through.
• Invisible Monster : The creature on the planet has this ability. Picard and Dathon can only see it by the occasional Invisibility Flicker .
• Let's Split Up, Gang! : Invoked; Dathon wanders off during the night, presumably to draw the creature close . He then gets Picard to stand apart from him to lure the creature into attacking, so they can strike at it from opposite directions.
• Lost in Translation : Invoked in the episode: the Tamarians speak entirely in allegories referencing their people's mythology. The universal translator can translate the words of their speech, but without the context behind their phrases, actual communication proves difficult.
• Milking the Giant Cow : Both Dathon and Picard do this, plus Translation by Volume . Justified given the difficulty and frustration they have with trying to get their message across to the other, leading to a tendency for both parties to ham it up.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero : The first attempt to beam Picard out only makes the situation worse, with the creature mauling Dathon while Picard, trapped in the transport beam, is unable to come to his aid.
• Non-Uniform Uniform : This episode introduces Picard's "captain's alternate" uniform, comprised of a jacket in command colors that he'd wear over a gray shirt. In this episode, the jacket has padded leather shoulders, whereas later episodes gave the jacket suede shoulders . It was made both to help Picard stand out from the rest of the crew and also addressing complaints Patrick Stewart had about how uncomfortable the standard uniforms were.
• One-Word Title
• Our Monsters Are Weird : A... glowing styracosaurus-man?
• Peaceful in Death : As Dathon is dying he smiles and calls Picard "Gilgamesh" letting him know their mission to form an understanding between the two of them was successful.
• Planet of Hats : The Tamarians are a Planet of TVTropers .
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure : Picard has to deal with aliens who communicate by exchanging (their) pop-culture references—none of which Picard has heard of.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning : The first officer invokes it when angry: "Zinda, his face black, his eyes red!"
• Simple Solution Won't Work : After the Enterprise crew figures out the general idea of how the Tamarians speak, Riker asks "If we know how they think, shouldn't we be able to get something across to them?". Data says that they can't because "The situation is analogous to understanding the grammar of a language but none of the vocabulary.", and without the proper context of expressions like "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", they'd simply mutter gibberish back to them.
• Sdrawkcab Name : "Darmok" is (sort of) "comrade" spelled backwards.
• Picard tells the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh .
• In the end, Picard reads the Homeric Hymns .
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare : Brought up when the bridge crew is discussing how the Tamarian language works, and Counselor Troi suggests " Juliet on her balcony " as an analogous example; humans would generally know the underlying story of who Juliet was and what she was doing on the balcony, and thus realise that this reference was intended to suggest a romantic encounter, but it wouldn't make sense to an outsider who lacked that context.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker : The Tamarians are an entire civilization of these. Forget subject-verb-object in any order, the language consists almost exclusively of "proper noun, prepositional phrase."
• Teleport Interdiction : The Tamarians scatter any attempt to use the transporter to rescue Picard.
• Translation by Volume : Used by both Picard and Dathon during their initial attempts at communication. Riker keeps calling the Tamarian ship and trying this throughout the episode, yet it's ambiguous if he's grasped (or cares) that his opposite number doesn't understand him.
• Translation: "Yes" : Some of the Tamarian phrases, though not to a parodic degree. "Shaka, when the walls fell" has the general meaning of "failure," for example. It goes the other way too; for instance, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" packs a hell of a lot of meaning into five words.
• Translator Microbes : A standard Star Trek trope, which this episode deconstructs by introducing a language composed entirely of cultural metaphors. The crew's translators are working fine, but they still can't understand the Tamarians because half their words are proper nouns that mean nothing to them.
• Undying Loyalty : The Tamarian first officer makes it clear he thinks attempting to communicate with the Enterprise is a waste of time and they should leave. However, when Dathon begins the trial with Picard, he does his utmost to ensure they are uninterrupted because it's what his captain wanted.
• Unwanted Rescue : The Enterprise manages to lock on to Picard while he and Dathon are fighting the beast, and without Picard's help, Dathon gets mortally injured.
• This is pretty much a Star Trek version of Enemy Mine .
• Another instance occurs as an Invoked Trope . This is Dathon's plan, recreating the story of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It also seems to be a massive advantage of the Tamarian language; he gets across the entire multi-day plan to his crew just by saying the title.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me : Riker bets the Tamarians won't go as far as shooting down a shuttle, so sends Worf down with an away team. They take out a nacelle with a precision shot, forcing the shuttle to return to Enterprise.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation S4E26 S5E1 "Redemption"
• Recap/Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E3 "Ensign Ro"

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Darmok (episode)

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"Darmok" was the 102nd episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , the second episode of the show's fifth season , first aired during the week of 30 September 1991 . The episode was written by Philip LaZebnik MA & Joe Menosky MA and directed by Winrich Kolbe MA .

• 1.1 Characters
• 1.2 Starships and vehicles
• 1.3.1 Shipboard areas
• 1.4 Races and cultures
• 1.5 States and organizations
• 1.6.1 Children of Tama language references
• 2 Chronology
• 3.1.1 Video releases
• 3.3.1 Timeline
• 3.4 External links

References [ ]

Characters [ ], starships and vehicles [ ], locations [ ], shipboard areas [ ], races and cultures [ ], states and organizations [ ], other references [ ], children of tama language references [ ], chronology [ ], appendices [ ], related media [ ].

• Information about this episode is presented consistently in all volumes.

Video releases [ ]

Connections [ ]

Timeline [ ], external links [ ].

• Darmok (episode) article at Memory Alpha , the wiki for canon Star Trek .
• Darmok (episode) article at Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia.
• 1 Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
• 2 The Chase
• 3 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV Series)

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Episode Preview: Darmok

Beyond Translation: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, part 1

Communication is not just about words, but the context, culture and worldview in which they are embedded. 1 A simple translation of words will fail to communicate the entire message, because it doesn’t include this information. The complexities of communication are manifest in obvious and less obvious ways; sometimes we know what we’re missing, and sometimes we don’t. Here are some examples.

Teenagers can carry on entire conversations at the dinner table or on Facebook by quoting movies their parents haven’t seen. If it goes far enough, the parents realize that something beyond the actual spoken words is being communicated. They may not know what the actual message is, because they haven’t seen the movie; they’re unaware of the culturally-embedded context, which carries meaning beyond the words. If it doesn’t go far enough that the parents catch on, then the kids have communicated a message in plain sight with the parents completely unaware.

Let’s say I’m a college chemistry professor with a poor sense of humor. Let’s say further that there’s an international student with excellent English, but has been very culturally sheltered. It’s Friday, there’s a big test on Monday. At the close of class on Friday, I intone “Study hard, because on Monday… A’ll be bock .” Said student understands the words that have been said, knows what they mean, but doesn’t understand why they were said with a funny accent or why the class laughed. Of course the professor will be back on Monday, why wouldn’t I be? [Edit: fixed to add] If the student has never seen any Terminator movies or Saturday Night Live skits mocking the Governator of Kallifownia, the extra nuance is lost.

Or, to make up a textual example, let’s say that zimbu (not an actual word) should be translated as “marriage,” but then that translation doesn’t tell you anything about the role of marriage in society, the rituals or feelings of marriage. In fact, without any of that other information, you’re left to fill in the gaps with whatever your own feelings and conception of marriage happen to be. You read the translation, but don’t get much of the information and you have no clue that what you’re reading in to it really shouldn’t be there. The dictionary won’t convey any of that information.

DATA: They seem to communicate through narrative imagery by reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mytho-historical accounts. TROI: It’s as if I were to say to you, Juliet on her balcony. CRUSHER: An image of romance. TROI: Exactly. Imagery is everything to the Tamarians. It embodies their emotional states, their very thought processes. It’s how they communicate, and it’s how they think. RIKER: If we know how they think, shouldn’t we be able to get something across to them? DATA: No, sir. The situation is analogous to understanding the grammar of a language but none of the vocabulary. CRUSHER: If I didn’t know who Juliet was or what she was doing on that balcony, the image alone wouldn’t have any meaning. TROI: That’s correct. For instance, we know that Darmok was a great hero, a hunter, and that Tanagra was an island, but that’s it. Without the details, there’s no understanding. DATA: It is necessary for us to learn the narrative from which the Tamarians are drawing their imagery. Given our current relations, that does not appear likely.

Through personal experience, Picard learns to speak their language; That is, he learns not just the words (words he already knows!) but the cultural meaning attached to them.

Put otherwise, translation is necessary but insufficient. Cultural context must be “translated” as well. We too must “learn the narrative from which [the Hebrews drew] their imagery.”

In part 2, I’ll apply this to the Old Testament with some examples.

BACK TO POST Fn1 Body language represents another important part of communication, but isn’t present in texts.

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23 comments for “ beyond translation: darmok and jalad at tanagra, part 1 ”.

A classic Star Trek episode. Great choice!

There seems to be a penchant for using Star Trek examples to explain difficulties in bible translation . . . I remember an article I was exposed to early on about different genres; the main example was how Data couldn’t get jokes.

This tells you something–something unfortunate–about biblical scholars and their multiple layers of dorkiness.

I think the reason for that is Star Trek provides a lot of cross-cultural encounters, where differing languages and cultures interact, conflict, are misunderstood. It’s popular and easy to reference as example.

For a while, there, my kids and I communicated extensively with snippets of dialogue from The Simpsons, Seinfeld and South Park.

That’s exactly what we find with the Bible: cross-cultural issues and language issues.

You can find the same thing in business books (e.g. don’t do X in Japan, it’s rude) but Star Trek is so much more fun.

Just days before entering the MTC to learn a brand-new language in 1995, I saw this episode. It had a profound effect on how I viewed language, culture, and context. It showed me, in a way that reached out and grabbed me, how communication was much more than just knowing the grammaticaly correct word to say. Upon returning form my mission, I bought the epsiode on VHS and have continued to enjoy it as the years go by.

Looking forward to your follow-up!

Ben, I think you are discussing a level of Communication not always needed. “STOP!” says a lot without much need of context. Emotions communication things without words. This Star Trek episode tells much about how Mormons communicate within their group. They use words only they know the meaning/context of. Also, Correlation ( as H.B.Lee first created it), was a group of words (He picked), that were spoken within the group, that all thought every member agreed to what the words meant, but really didn’t. Members sat silently, putting their meaning/context on the words, and it appeared (The Correlation part), everyone was in agreement as to what was being said.

Yes! My favorite Star Trek TNG episode.

Bob, I’m not sure what you mean by this being “a level of Communication not always needed.” The cultural context is always useful and often needed for understanding any communication. Yes, other clues can sometimes fill in the gaps, but even then, the context usually fills in gaps.

The only time its not really needed is when the cultural context is nearly the same for both the speaker and recipient of a message. Once they differ, cultural context is very important.

Kent Larsen: I guess I am saying not all communications are by words. It seemed you limited your ‘level’ of communication to words (and humans)(?) I think a case could be made that communications began between plants and/or animals before there were words. But I am being too picky for your post__sorry Didn’t Picard teach him Earth’s culture to communitate with him? (Gilgamish?)

This also nicely illustrates why we need Church materials translated into more languages, or maybe into different editions of the same language. Languages like English and French and Russian have many second-language speakers, but those speakers often come from significantly different cultural backgrounds than native speakers.

There’s a philosophy professor at Georgetown (Metaphysics & Phil of Lang mostly), who teaches an entire class from Star Trek clips – it’s brilliant. So’s the series. Right now, we all read Julie M. Smith (#2) as giving a friendly/charming sort of insult to biblical studies people (possibly herself included) for their “dorkiness” in all being familiar with and using Star Trek to make points. It’s not hard to imagine that in one hundred years or so, the meaning of her sentence will change to be more analogous to complimenting the urbane or cultured nature of biblical studies folk because the incredible creativity and overall dramatic value of Star Trek will be universally acknowledged.

It’s a very good episode. However, the liguistic premise as presented in the show is impossible: such an story-reference-based language could not exist as the only language known by the Tamarians. To use Ben’s example, it would be like teenagers communicating only through the subtext of movie quotes from movies they haven’t seen, and the only way they can explain the subtext of the movie quotes mean is through the subtext of other movie quotes from movies they haven’t seen.

There was a story in Analog Science Fiction a few years ago ( “Let the Word Take Me” by Juliette Wade ) that provided an explanation as to how such a language could work: a religious proscription on using anything but the story references outside of a sacred place.

Bob (9) — apparently a little confusion there — its not my post.

Amen, Amira (10).

Eric James Stone, “… the liguistic premise as presented in the show is impossible”. I agree. Story telling cannot stand alone, but is very useful in communicating. I do however drive my wife nuts when I try to communicate something to her using a sports or war example.

Bob- I’m talking about words and text because I wrote this in context of Bible-reading, where there is nothing *but* the text. To sum up, text alone is insufficient without knowledge of context, culture, usage.

Picard tells Dathon the Gilgamesh story, but it doesn’t play a role in the language learning as much as the shared experience does.

Amira- A second amen.

Kevin- Way to be fluent in a second language .

Eric James Stone- Agreed. Such a language could never adequately capture technical terminology or abstracts, or teach anything new, only that which had an analog in a well-known story of the past. (One wonders exactly how these stories were originally communicated to the speaker so that *they* knew them.)

Great episode, great post. I have heard the analogy made before but this post did it better. Ben, telling stories at T&S.

Great article. Of course, Darmok is an episode that made me think a lot and also inspired me (many thanks to Eric James Stone for mentioning my story “Let the Word Take Me”). A language of this nature would need to be learned in some kind of limited context where the original stories could be told, and where the metaphoric allusions could be discussed in a group so their meanings could be passed on, reinforced, shared, and altered. It was the question of how to *learn* such a language that got me to think of the scenario in my story, where the language could only be spoken in a holy place, and it was unforgivable blasphemy to speak it anywhere else (outside the holy place, the people had to ‘protect’ themselves from the language by referring to it obliquely). Still, it was an inspired episode of TNG and well worth an ongoing discussion.

Our daughter met her future husband, Ross, when we moved to Richland, Washington, from Salt Lake City. A couple of months later, Ross’s brother was visiting Salt Lake and standing in line at McDonald’s behind two guys his age who were talking with each other, using quotes from movies like “The Princess Bride”. He asked them, “Are you related to Becky Swenson?” They were surprised, said “Yes, she’s our sister,” and then asked him how he knew that. He said “You talk the way she does”.

Towards the end of my mission in Japan, I was chatting with other missionaries about the process of becoming “civilians” again, and I realized how much of our conversation was laced with Japanese terms, sometimes in Americanized forms with Japanese nouns turned into verbs in an English sentence. As many as a third of the words were Japanese. We actually had trouble occasionally thinking of the English word to translate a Japanese concept. I realized that, except for a few of us (my mother is Japanese and my Dad served his mission in Japan), our parents would be mystified by our conversation–and that also was true for the Japanese parents of some of the Japanese missionaries, whose speech had been corrupted by our Missionary Pidgin.

Words do not “contain” information by themselves. Rather, they evoke information that is already in our minds and memories. Even if the words are the same, the memories they evoke can be vastly different. Even with the common cultural context of the Bible, the same phrases can be understood with divergent meanings, so that a speaker may think she has fully communicated her thoughts to a person of another denominiation, and not realize that the words evoke a very different meaning for the hearer. This problem can be even more intractable than the one encountered by Captain Picard, because the parties to the conversation don’t even realize they have not reached a common understanding of what the speaker meant to say.

EJS, further, Star Trek purports to have some kind of universal translator that works on most unknown languages. Since *all* languages require context and allusiveness to understand–which is Ben S. point–this Star Trek episode is irredeemably stupid.

Adam, while I would say that the episode is flawed, I think one of the things it does is show that Star Trek had begun questioning its universal translator – a very worthwhile move. Universal translators are what I’d call a necessary conceit (necessary to the interactions that Star Trek was portraying, in any case). I was glad to see someone thinking outside the box with “Darmok.”

My understanding of liguistics comes from my study of anthropology. liguistics is 1/4 of that degree. Therefore, my context or understanding of languages is very different from most on the thread. I did not find this Star Trek episode is “irredeemably stupid”. I found it helpful in showing for many ways there are to communicate.

“Darmok” is one of my two favorite Star Trek TNG episodes (the other being “The Inner Light”). Even with the questions raised about how plausible it is–it’s just a one-hour TV episode after all–it seems to me one of the most profound and powerful attempts to grapple with the nature of communication I’ve ever run into. And it provides an experience for viewers unlike anything I remember encountering elsewhere: as we learn along with Picard how to interpret and communicate with the Tamarians, we have the thrilling experience of UNDERSTANDING what’s being said, of making sense of something that would otherwise have been opaque. The fact the this whole experience also involves adventure, danger, confusion, and finally human sympathy, courage, and self-sacrifice further enriches and deepens it. Like a number of Star Trek episodes, it’s an illuminating parable or condensed image of life.

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Dathon was a Tamarian who held the position of captain on a deep space cruiser during the late- 24th century .

In 2368 , Dathon became the first of his race to successfully establish communications with the United Federation of Planets when his ship rendezvoused with the USS Enterprise -D at El-Adrel IV .

Because the Tamarian language was based upon a series of metaphors, prior attempts to communicate verbally had failed. Knowing this, Dathon beamed himself and Starfleet Captain Jean-Luc Picard down to the planet , where he hoped that some time together would better help them understand each other's languages. At first, Captain Picard believed Dathon had kidnapped him and when the Tamarian offered him his dagger , Picard assumed he wished to engage in combat and thus refused. In reality, Dathon was offering Picard a weapon to defend himself against an electromagnetic lifeform that resided on the planet.

After a short time on the surface, the lifeform attacked the two men, wounding Dathon. Picard was able to fend off the creature and tend to Dathon's injuries. It was during this time that Dathon was able to "teach" Picard how his language worked – using metaphors; proper names and places Dathon cited were references to situations in his history. Armed with this new found understanding, the two were successfully able to communicate on a basic level, which assisted in defeating the creature a second time.

However, this victory came with a price as Dathon was mortally wounded . But his sacrifice was not in vain, as when Picard returned to the Enterprise , he was able to successfully communicate with Dathon's ship and explain how their captain was killed, thereby opening a new era in relations with the Tamarian people. Indeed, his actions immortalized both himself and Picard in the form of a new metaphor: " Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. " ( TNG : " Darmok ")

Appendices [ ]

Background information [ ].

Dathon was played by actor Paul Winfield in his second of two Star Trek appearances. Photo double Bill E. Rogers and stunt double Gerard Williams filled in for Winfield.

Because Winfield was a large man with a great presence, the makeup department realized that building alien features up through separate appliances would enlarge his head too much. So, instead, the department built a single piece that covered the actor's entire head and featured a bony ridge, almost like a central skull spine, over the top of the Tamarian's head down to his nose, which was more like a snout, and bony ridges on both sides of his skull. The three ridges looked like three parallel tracks of bone connected by a set of ridges that ran across the top of his head and down the bridge of his nose. His ears were large, but recessed, and there was a separate appliance for Winfield's upper lip that was modified for the other actors portraying Tamarians on their ship. The Tamarian coloring was added with hand-painted patterns of orange spots in patterns that were unique for each individual Tamarian, although they were all modeled on Winfield's pattern. ( Star Trek: Aliens & Artifacts , p.121)

The script for "Darmok" states the pronunciation of Dathon's name is "DAY-thahn." Additionally, it says of the scene in which Dathon first appears; " displays a TAMARIAN -- CAPTAIN DATHON -- flanked by his FIRST OFFICER, and TWO OTHER OFFICERS. Their uniforms are rich with insignia -- and each wears a small ceremonial dagger across his or her chest. But all look the very embodiment of "well-meaning. " [1]

Apocrypha [ ]

The novel Articles of the Federation references the events of "Darmok" and how the progress made since that time was considered one of the noteworthy accomplishments of Federation President Jaresh-Inyo and his administration.

Dathon is depicted as a cat in a scene from Jenny Parks ' 2018 book Star Trek: The Next Generation Cats . [2]

External link [ ]

• Dathon at StarTrek.com
• 2 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Star Trek Discovery’s L’ak Actor Told Us About Learning His Character's Most Exciting Details At A Point When He Couldn't Immediately Freak Out

I would be losing my mind too.

Warning! The following contains SPOILERS for the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Mirrors." Watch the episode with a Paramount+ subscription before hopping in!

Star Trek: Discovery snuck in a significant reveal in its latest episode, and it answered a question that many fans have wondered for decades. We finally know what the Breen look like, and it turns out we've been looking at one almost the entire season. L'ak has the honor of being the first Breen face for fans to see, and actor Elias Toufexis had a great story of geeking out when he first learned about it.

For those who follow him on X , Toufexis is a massive Star Trek fan, but he didn't find out how significant his role as L'ak in the final season was until he was in a spot where, understandably, wild reactions and jerky movements are discouraged. The actor shared the details of when he first found out he was going to be a Breen and how he felt about it:

When I went to the makeup test I had, I had to go put on the whole plaster where you sit there for 20 minutes and try not to pass out, try not to freak out. But I said, ‘Can I look at what I'm going to look like?’ And they showed me some concept art and I said, ‘What is he?’ And they said, ‘Oh, he's, he's gonna be a Breen.’ And I was like, ‘Breen don't take their helmets off.’ That was the first thing I said, that's a much of a nerd I am. And I'm like, ‘Are you telling me I'm gonna be the first Breen that takes his helmet off?’ …The makeup guys are geeks too. So it's like, ‘Yeah, it's gonna be cool. It's gonna be the first time in Star Trek!’ And so that really got me excited.

I can't express how much I love it when a big fan of Star Trek finds themselves in a role for the franchise. Being the first unmasked Breen may not mean a ton to every actor who would get the honor, but I know Elias Toufexis was as enthusiastic as he stated in the quote above. At the same time, what awful timing to figure it out when you're in the makeup chair and have to contain your excitement physically for a set period of time!

The Breen were first mentioned Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1990, and then six years later, the species would make its debut in the Deep Space Nine episode "Indiscretion" but remained unseen until just recently. According to a quote from showrunner Ira Steven Behr from the Deep Space Nine Companion , Breen were originally fully covered up because he "wasn't in the mood" to design a new alien race.

Fast forward to now, we've seen an unmasked Breen on the run from his species with his lover, Moll (who is nothing like Ahsoka 's Shin Hati ). The couriers are searching for the Progenitors' device in hopes they can exchange it with the Breen for freedom and no longer have to live as fugitives.

I'm getting really excited about this.

Michael Burnham, being the inspiring captain that she is , offered to protect L'ak and Moll from the Breen, but her offer was rejected. The two made their escape, are off to continue to search for more clues and, hopefully, evade the Breen capture.

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It is cool to see Star Trek still surprising fans with reveals decades later, and I wonder if we'll see more unmasked Breen in upcoming Star Trek projects going forward. Perhaps whatever comes out of this conflict with the Breen will play a part in the story of the upcoming Starfleet Academy series , which is also set in the 32nd century. I can imagine we'll see at least one or two members of the Discovery cast there, though Mary Wiseman wouldn't spill the beans when I asked. Hey, you can't blame a guy for trying!

Star Trek: Discovery streams new episodes on Paramount+ on Thursdays. We're officially at the midpoint in the final season, so now would be a good time to remember what we've learned so far and gear up for the final episodes.

Mick Joest is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend with his hand in an eclectic mix of television goodness. Star Trek is his main jam, but he also regularly reports on happenings in the world of Star Trek, WWE, Doctor Who, 90 Day Fiancé, Quantum Leap, and Big Brother. He graduated from the University of Southern Indiana with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Radio and Television. He's great at hosting panels and appearing on podcasts if given the chance as well.

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