Headscratchers / Star Trek: The Next Generation S4E17 "Night Terrors"

• The aliens' dream message sure does assume that their rescuers will have two eyes and therefore recognize the metaphor of the binary stars as eyes. Good thing there are so many Rubber-Forehead Aliens around!
  • They were evidently restricted to make the message fairly simple. They also seemed to be restricted to making it fairly abstract considering they couldn't just say "two stars, need hydrogen" (possibly this helped get around language barriers in the absence of the universal translator, maybe their method of telepathy is naturally imprecise or maybe this is just a function of communicating through dreams). Any message in such a way is going to have to make some assumption that the receiving ship will conceive of the universe in a reasonably similar way for it to be comprehensible or else the exercise is meaningless. Two eyes seems to be the most common by far for species we've seen, and probably even more so among species who would be telepathically compatible with the aliens and capable of receiving their message. Even if the species encountered didn't have two eyes, given their prevalence in the galaxy they'd probably at least have heard of the concept. Even if they didn't, Troi's dream also featured two bright lights in the sky so it wouldn't have been a huge leap to make the connection to the star system they're in, even if she didn't recognise the connection to eyes (and either way, the messages only started while they were there). So, while the aliens may have been taking a small leap by choosing to refer to eyes that their message wouldn't be understood, it was hardly an unreasonable risk (particularly if they, evidently, didn't have complete freedom to choose any words they wished).
  • Given that this communication is telepathic, translation convention would likely apply even more than normal since, instead of the universal translator, Troi's own mind is doing the translation of the thoughts she is receiving from an alien species she has never encountered before. For example, in "The Ensigns of Command" Troi explicitly stated that even Federation telepaths had little luck understanding the complex Sheliak language. So telepathy does not automatically overcome the language barrier if the species in question are very different.
• Why didn't anybody notice the parallels here with the infection in "The Naked Now"? The Brittain's crew weren't apparently as "happy" as the Tsiolkovsky's, but the initial situation is strikingly similar.
• So ... why didn't someone suggest using the Brittain as a source for the explosion (or use suplies from it for the same), even if only to shoot it down?
• Why the Enterprise didn't use their stock of photon torpedoes. At the one of the higher yields, it's said that one torpedo is the equivalent of a city buster nuclear weapon.
  • From the many times we've seen photon torpedoes strike a target for limited effect, the whole "city buster nuclear weapon" thing is an exaggeration. No-one in Starfleet wants to admit out loud that photon torpedoes are just glowing cannonballs.
• No mention is made of the Enterprise's Vulcan crew members, who should be unaffected as it's been established they can go for weeks without sleep.
• Matter/anti-matter annihilation is the most powerful known energy source, gram-for-gram, far more powerful than any chemical-based interaction - there is no way any A+B chemical explosive could match a decent blob of anti-matter.

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