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

• Boy, it sure was lucky that Picard decided to wear a jacket around the bridge for the first time ever and for no particular reason immediately before he got unexpectedly transported to the surface of that planet and wound up shivering in the cold!
  • Strictly speaking, I don't know if this qualifies as a headscratcher which implies a question (as in something you're scratching you're head over). Assuming that your headscratcher may be why did he wear his jacket this time, the Doylist explanation for the introduction of the jacket is that Robert Blackman did it in response to a request from Patrick Stewart complaining about how uncomfortable the standard uniforms were (it's merely a coincidence that Picard ended up somewhere it was cold in the episode where it made its debut). The Watsonian explanation is that sometimes people try out different clothing and there will of course be a first time that happens (and it's still a coincidence, albeit a lucky one, if the jacket happened to be a bit warmer than his usual clothing at a time it was convenient to have it).
  • Also, while good for Picard he had the jacket, it doesn't make any dramatic difference to the story, considering the point was that he was freezing and couldn't light a fire.
• Some people have wondered how the Tamarians work with the numbers and mathematics required to build advanced technology considering the idiomatic nature of their language. The Expanded Universe has suggested that they have a music-based system of calculations.
  • SF Debris has his own, pretty plausible theories on how the Tamarian language works. One involves children learning their culture via telepathy, another is that spoken conversation is used as highly-compressed shorthand (similar to the difference between phone texting and spoken English) based on the complexity of their writing. He also thinks the crew's in-universe analysis is wrong in focusing on metaphor instead of direct analogy; Troi's example of "Juliet on the balcony" is too open to interpretation to be useful in this language, he suggests "Juliet with the dagger" as a better example (anyone can stand on a balcony pining for love, "Juliet with the dagger" relates to such a specific kind of despair, agony, and tragedy that only those who've experienced the play will understand precisely what is meant by it).
  • There is also the question of why the Tamarians haven't come up with better ways to communicate with other species. Given that their technology is on par with the Federation, and they have been spacefaring for at least 100 years, one would expect they'd already have some experience with non-methaphoric languages and a better means of getting their message across. If it had been anyone but Starfleet, it's likely their "Darmok" strategy would have started a war.
    • It's plausible that the reason why they tried such a desperate, risky tactic is that they've been trying to break through to another species for years and have never managed. By observing the Federation they could at least observe they preferred peaceful resolutions, and thus finally took this risk with them, hoping that if they could make a breakthrough with the Federation, the Federation would then be able to let other powers know how they communicate.
    • Mind you, it's not like Earth language isn't full of similar analogies like "bull in a China shop." It's possible with other species, they communicated much better because they understood their references or had more time to make the connection.
  • The Tamarians' spoken language is incomprehensible, but for some reason their body language and use of tone is exactly the same as an English speaking human's.
    • A Doylist answer to this would be that the episode was written for a weekly episodic television series and training both actors and background extras to behave in a completely alien way in the time allotted for the episode to be shot is unrealistic. Besides, no one questions the fact that Klingons look and act like Horny Vikings.
  • If the Tamarian language is so very untranslatable due to its use of metaphor, then how come their speech is rendered in coherent words at all? If the Universal Translator can't interpret "when the walls fell" as expressing "failure", then how could it possibly manage to render the phrase's components as "fell", "when", "walls", or "the"?
    • One person suggested the best way to understand their language is to speak a sentence as it would be in Earth: "Commander Riker, a Benedict Arnold has gone John Wilkes Booth on a Ghandi of a Wyoming-like planet. Take your ship to Captain Kirk this guy and don't get bogged down with the Picard-isms but make like Worf to Duras." Once you know the context, its strange but most readers of this site probably understood the meaning.
• Is the Federation so dependant on the translator that they kinda forgot how to learn languages/how to communicate with people they don't share a language with? Picard, knowing the translator does not work for this species, jumps straight to "We would like to establish peaceful relations, perhaps even a trade union", a sentence that'd require a fairly advanced grasp on the language to understand. Instead of, say, pointing at himself and going "Picard", then pointing at Riker going "Riker", etc. Or pulling out a pencil and some paper to show them what he means. Playing charades. Or, could they not have asked a telepath for help, like a full Betazoid (since Deanna could sense their intentions, they don't seem to be immune), or a Vulcan?
  • A Vulcan would be of limited usefulness, since their telepathy requires touch and communicating well enough to get to the point you can try it would mean wouldn't need to. A Betazoid who could read their thoughts might or might not help. If they think the same way they speak, it might still be difficult to draw out the appropriate context for the thoughts to make sense. As for more primitive attempts at establishing baseline commonalities for building communication, the implication is the Tamarians have failed at precisely that many, many times, and this is something of their last, desperate ploy to open meaningful communication with another species. Picard might have tried moving more into those fundamentals, but Dathon wanted to try Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, and set about enacting his plan before Picard could set out enacting his. And Picard was mostly observing the Tamaranians during their discussion, likely in hopes of getting more data with which to effectively communicate.
• How can the Universal Translator translate the Tamarian language at all, like "his face black, his eyes red" or "the river in winter", without understanding the meaning of any of it? I guess the real meta answer is to not dwell on the functioning of the UT too much...
  • I wasn't writing the question to answer myself, but it occurred while writing it that one explanation is that a lot of work may have been done on the Tamarian language before by linguists back at Starfleet or whatever and they had put what they figured out into the UT. Though, this makes the episode less cool and there's no onscreen mention of such having occurred. That still leaves the mystery of how linguists could have figured out the meaning of any of the words. I suppose they could simply be educated guesses.
  • That's part of why the episode works. Whatever it is that the universal translator does to understand new languages (in TOS, Kirk described it as somehow pulling meaning of common concepts out of a new form of communication), it cannot parse the cultural references that are the foundation of Tamaranian language. It can translate the individual words, so "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a comprehensible sentence, but not an understandable one, since who or what Darmok, Jalad, and Tanagra are remains unknown. If the universal translator worked precisely as Kirk described, then it would extract and translate that meaning, perhaps rendering "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" into, say, "Superman and Lex Luthor against Zod." But that mechanism for the working of the UT is part of the Early-Installment Weirdness of TOS, so is probably not applicable.