5x02 Darmok

[8.2/10] Sometimes I worry that my own original thoughts have all been subsumed by pop culture ephemera. I grew up with the television as a persistent comfort. I love stories in all forms. It’s hard for me to make it through a whole conversation without at least thinking about how some moment or exchange or phrase connects to something I know and love from fiction. These are my fables, my myths, my examples for how people interact and work through problems, that help grease the wheels of real life, and at times, threaten to squeeze it out.

I don’t know if I could build a whole language around that, but I bet I could come pretty close. Nowadays, I watch pretty much everything with my wife. More than one person has commented that at times it’s like we’re speaking in a different tongue, given how likely we are to use some character name or quote as shorthand for a broader idea, or just make each other laugh with one reference or another.

“Darmok” takes that basic idea -- the way we communicate and connect through stories -- and magnifies it to a fantastic scale, in the proud Star Trek tradition. The Enterprise encounters a ship from The Children of Tama, a race reputed to be unintelligible. Sure enough, when they open a channel, communication is all but impossible. Without any warning our heroes can comprehend, the Tamarians beam Picard and their own captain down to a nearby planet, deploying a scattering field that prevents Riker from simply beaming his commanding officer right back. The move forces Picard to measure his Tamarian equivalent, and Riker to try to rescue his captain.

Revisiting this episode after so many years, it struck me how much “Darmok” follows the rhythms of The Original Series. Seeing the captain of the Enterprise beamed down to a mysterious planet in a one-on-one confrontation with an opposing leader is bound to give fans “Arena” flashbacks. Likewise, the episode uses the standard TOS A-story/B-story split, with a major character stranded or captured and trying to survive, and the rest of the crew working feverishly to find and save their comrade.

Yet, the episode isn’t about confrontation or even one of Star Trek’s trademark “we’re not so different, you and I” epiphanies. It’s about how we bridge the gaps between peoples, and how the stories we tell can bring those peoples together and teach us about one another. The former is true to the spirit of The Next Generation’s ethos, fitting with the series’s bent toward cultural and political understanding and peace. The latter is true to the show in a meta sense, as a series of tales meant to display the human condition across cultures and hopefully bring people together through them.

Granted, to achieve either of those things here, the audience has to stop themselves from thinking too hard about how Tamarian society would actually work. Don’t get me wrong, speaking entirely in call-outs to famous myths and other tales of renown might be enough to get you through a lot of simple social situations. It might even be enough to get you through day-to-day life in a fairly simple society. But the Children of Tama are a space-faring species with technology that surpasses the Federation. It’s hard to envision how they could translate concepts like “We need to shift the absorption rate of the dilithium crystals approximately thirty-two percent and shift the result power through the starboard nacelle in order to aim it at the apogee of the wormhole and dilute its gravitational field enough for us to escape at Warp 3” into metaphor.

But this wouldn’t be the first Star Trek episode to take a concept that itself works better as metaphor or something heightened than as something real, and it wouldn’t be the last. That’s the elegance of it. “Darmok” is itself a fable, a fantastical story of a species with a peculiar syntax nevertheless finding a bond of understanding with their galactic neighbors through two men being stranded together in an outlandish situation. Like the myths Picard reads in the episode’s closing scene, it requires some willing suspension of disbelief, but the story works on a thematic and emotional level, which makes it easy to forgive the allowances it takes.

The emotion rests on the budding friendship between Captain Picard and Dathon, the alien captain who deliberately strands himself with Picard to forge a bond between the two of them. I’ll confess, it’s hard to put myself in the shoes of a first-time viewer for this one: not knowing whether the Tamarians have ill-intent, not knowing how their language works, not knowing what they’re trying to communicate.

But I’d like to think that the viewer’s experience mirror’s Picard’s. At first we’re inclined to be suspicious of Dathon. He’s kidnapped Picard from his ship. He’s bearing a pair of knives and seems to be trying to initiate ritual combat. He speaks in a flurry of proper nouns that make his intent less than clear in situations that bear on his and Jean-Luc’s survival. And yet, as Picard begins to understand his meaning, appreciate his good intentions, and grow attached to his counterpart, so do we.

Much of that comes from the boffo performance of Paul Winfield as Dathon. His is a difficult and, frankly, thankless role for an actor. He has to speak veritable nonsense, and yet communicate character, emotion, determination, friendship, and most importantly conviction through it. When the episode begins, we don’t know what Dathon is trying to say, and even as it progresses, some of his phrases remain opaque, But through Winfield’s intensity, his warmth, his pain, we understand who he is. We countenance him as a well-rounded person with internal thoughts and feelings. Winfield achieves all of this without the benefit of dialogue the audience can comprehend, and it’s a tremendous achievement.

The one downside to the episode’s construction is that, given the high concept premise, it requires a fair bit of exposition. Maybe I’m being unfair to the episode. Seeing Troi, Data, and Riker figure out the Tamarian method of communication through multiple scenes, and having an entire separate event where Picard does the same might not seem as tedious if you’re not already in the know from having seen the episode before. The central idea is still a strong one, but ironically, the mechanics of conveying it to the audience can grow a little tiresome.

Still, it’s worth it to watch the bond between Picard and Dathon blossom. Through the need to survive, mutual generosity, a shared threat that requires cooperation, understanding slowly emerges. That was Dathon’s plan all along, to put he and Jean-Luc the same position the figures from his story were in, in the hopes that it would bring the two of them together the same way it did those men of myth.

Suffice it to say, it works. Through the situation comes comprehension, enough for Picard to communicate to Dathon’s second-in-command and avoid a confrontation. But through the telling of the story comes camaraderie. Dathon doesn’t fully understand Picard’s tale of Gilgamesh, but the telling of it is a form of bonding, a type of comfort and exchange. It soothes Dathon as he convalesces, and brings the two of them together.

In an ideal world, the same is true for Star Trek itself. There’s a (likely apocryphal) story of two Trekkies who spoke different languages falling in love at a con when they found they could nevertheless converse together in Klingon. Most of the time, the unifying communication isn’t that literal, but for many of us, Star Trek is common ground, creating its own set of fables and touchpoints that unite people, help clarify their views of the world, and make human beings a little more comprehensible to each other. As much as phrases like “Live long and prosper” have entered the popular consciousness, there’s ways big and small that Trek has made communicating certain ideas easier. There’s a common well of concepts and characters to draw from that help us to understand one another.

But at the same time, in a much bigger way, Star Trek has bonded folks, brought them together in spaces real and virtual, for their shared love of hearing and telling these stories. One of the few silver linings of a dark, pandemic-filled year for me was finding a group of like-minded Trek fans who gush and bash and love all the same Starfleet stories I do. I’ve never met the vast majority of these people. Many of them come from other countries with different native tongues. And yet, we’re all able to forge those bonds of friendship and even community from the ways we’ve been shaped by those stories, and continue to be shaped by them today.

I hope there’s still room in my brain for original thought with so many pieces of pop culture floating around up there. It’s important to be able to distinguish between the comforts of fiction and the needs and complexities of real life, and it’s important to have an identity apart from the art you consume. But if I were to craft a form of communication founded only on metaphor and storytelling -- if I were to pick a set of tales to be the founding ideas for what we aspire to and how we related to one another -- I can hardly think of a better starting point than Star Trek: The Next Generation, and bold outings like “Darmok” demonstrate why.