One of the most talked-about episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation was the fifth-season episode “Darmok.” It introduced the Children of Tamar, a species who communicated only in metaphor and allusion. The Universal Translator translated their words, but they still had no meaning, unless you understood the references. A Tamarian captain named Dathon, played by the late great Paul Winfield, kidnapped Picard and put them together to try to communicate.
It’s one of the great TNG episodes, but was only ever followed up on in tie-in fiction. Until now.
SPOILERS AHOY!
Shaxs’ replacement as chief of security and tactical officer on the Cerritos is Lieutenant Kayshon. Like another person in that position on a Star Trek show, Kayshon wears a sash, in his case with a dagger in it, which is in keeping with what we saw in “Darmok,” as all the crew on Captain Dathon’s ship wore that.
I was looking forward to seeing him in action and trying to communicate with the crew, but once we got past the initial greeting—”Rapunke, when he joined the Seven”—Kayhson then starts talking in regular old English like everyone else, with only occasional forays into Tamarian metaphor.
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On top of that, the episode takes him out of action almost instantly, as the away team mission he leads sees him turned into a cute Tamarian stuffie. Now, for the record, I totally want a Lieutenant Kayshon stuffie please and thank you, but watching the episode I was mostly thinking, “Ah, so that’s how they’re avoiding the issue of him talking.”
If you’re not up to the challenge of having an abstruse security chief who’s hard to understand, don’t put him in in the first place.
His introduction also annoyed my inner fan=dweeb, as Kayshon said that the Universal Translator doesn’t always catch it when he goes metaphorical, and that is a swing and a miss. The whole point of “Darmok” was that the UT didn’t help—they were hearing Dathon and the other Tamarians in English. The translator was doing its job. The problem was their mode of communicating, not the words. So the UT doesn’t enter into it, it’s Kayshon himself who has to learn, in essence, a new language.
In addition to introducing Kayshon, we get two returning Cerritos crew: Lieutenant Jet from “Cupid’s Errant Arrow” and Counselor Migleemo from “Crisis Point.” The counselor doesn’t play a big role in the story, though I love his jaunty wave to Kayshon as the security chief enters the bridge.
Jet, however—who was once described by Boimler as “like a Kirk sundae with Trip Tucker sprinkles”—plays a bigger role, as he’s been reassigned to beta shift, and is therefore working alongside Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford. Mariner and Jet immediately start in with trying to show who’s the bigger badass, initially with a tiresome upping of the communal sonic shower to show how tough they are, then with competing plans on the away team. (And yes, Kayshon needs to be taken out of the action so that Jet and Mariner can argue over who has the better plan, but I still think it was a lazy way to avoid letting the Tamarian have too much dialogue.)
For all that the one-upping between Jet and Mariner gets very tired very quickly, it does end nicely, as both of them realize they’re being idiots and decide to ask Tendi and Rutherford what they think. The pair are shocked to even be acknowledged, and then quickly come up with a much stronger solution.
And that makes the whole episode worth it, because finally Mariner isn’t the one who saves the day. This show has twisted itself into a pretzel to make Mariner always be the one to be the hero, often to the detriment of the story (as recently as last week), so to have Tendi and Rutherford do it instead is a huge relief, and makes the episode that much stronger.
The away team is mostly on their own because Freeman has received her command evaluation, which says that she micromanages too much, so she decides to be hands-off with this away mission, only to discover that everything went horribly wrong and her security chief got turned into a stuffie. So it’s back to micromanaging for her. This subplot is yet another case of Lower Decks inserting 21st-century office plots into the 24th-century Starfleet, and it still doesn’t work.
Much more successful is the inevitable return of Boimler to the Cerritos, and I have to give massive amounts of credit to executive producer Mike McMahan and the episode’s scripter Chris Kula for the solution to the “problem” of Boimler being transferred at the end of season one: a transporter duplicate! In order to save the Titan away team he’s part of, Boimler technobabbles a solution that results in him being duplicated the same way Captain Riker did in TNG‘s “Second Chances.” With two Boimlers, Riker can only keep one, so one of the Boimlers is sent back to the Cerritos.
The best part of this is that, when Boimler arrives, Tendi has to pay Rutherford, as the latter guessed that he would be transporter cloned and be returned. Because, “It just seemed like a Boimler thing to happen.” And dagnabbit, he’s right. Again.
Getting there was less fun, as Titan‘s bridge crew—a teal-skinned first officer and human tactical and ops officers, none of whom are ever named in dialogue—spend a tiresome amount of time slagging the Enterprise-D, and talking about how easy Riker had it on the ship with their string quartets and holodecks and stuff. Boimler has to remind them that they did things like face the Borg, and then remind them that there’s more to Starfleet than kicking ass. The whole thing just doesn’t work, makes little sense, and isn’t actually funny. (I did like when, after seeing one of the Boimlers off to Cerritos, the first officer answers the question about whether or not they’d ever see Boimler again with, “‘Cause, like, his clone’s here—we’ll see him every day…”)
The question remains now as to whether or not Jet will still be on beta shift. It’s obvious Mariner was treating him as a substitute Boimler, and he’s cast aside pretty quickly by all three once Boimler comes back. Will he try to remain part of the group? Also: will Mariner go back to treating Boimler like crap? And will Boimler—who has now gone on several dangerous missions on Titan—continue to take it?
Random thoughts:
- The two pieces of tie-in fiction that featured the Tamarians include the post-finale Voyager novels by Kirsten Beyer, in which Voyager‘s chief medical officer is a Tamarian named Dr. Sharak, and the short story “Friends with the Sparrows” by frequent Tor.com commenter Christopher L. Bennett in the anthology The Sky’s the Limit, which dealt with post-“Darmok” attempts by the Federation to form relations with the Children of Tamar.
- The main mission is to catalogue the items on the ship of a Collector, which is apparently a community of hardcore, um, collectors. It’s implied by dialogue among Freeman, Ransom, and Migleemo that Kivas Fajo and Palor Toff from TNG‘s “The Most Toys” were also Collectors. The one Collector we meet has a personality that was pretty obviously inspired by Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, albeit with more of a Brooklyn accent.
- After the away team returns to the Cerritos, the Kayshon stuffie is brought to sickbay, where T’Ana assures everyone that he’ll be fine in a day or two. In the meantime, she puts the stuffie on a biobed with a sign that reads, “I AM NOT A DOLL DO NOT PLAY WITH ME.” Migleemo, of course, tries to play with him anyhow, which gets him yelled at by T’Ana. People never read the damn signs, man…
- Riker is delightfully batshit in this, with Jonathan Frakes shouting a lot of his dialogue, and with more of the wonderful music metaphors that only make a little bit of sense. And with a Boimler still on Titan, there’s a very good chance we’ll see more of Captain Riker, which is okay by me.
- Lower Decks gives us a U.S.S. Titan that goes on dangerous missions for Starfleet, which is a perfectly legitimate choice, especially given the only onscreen mission Titan had prior to this was to go to Romulus to help put it back together after Shinzon’s failed coup in Nemesis. The Titan novels published by Simon & Schuster (which is where the design of the ship came from, designed by Sean Tourangeau) took a different direction, having the ship be one of deep-space exploration, and also one with a species-diverse crew. Given that the show is animated, I was hoping for at least the latter part to be used here. (In the novels, the Titan‘s chief medical officer is, basically, a giant dinosaur, for starters.) Alas…
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at Planet ComiCon in Kansas City this weekend, appearing at Bard’s Tower (Booth 1103). Other guests include fellow word-slingers Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, John Jackson Miller, Megan Mackie, Michelle Cori, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore, as well as bunches of actors, cosplayers, and more. More details here.
Oh this is a bummer; I haven’t tried this show but seeing a Worf-d up Tamarian really caught my eye. Its a shame they only half-stick the landing. If anything, I would think having an obvious speech gimmick would make writing dialogue EASIER…but then, probably not for audience comprehension. To which I say, who cares! Everybody loved Kosh!
I liked this one. The season premiere pushed the envelope of credibility where both science and characterization were concerned, but this felt like an entirely plausible Star Trek episode that just had a humorous bent. I like the worldbuilding touch of establishing a Collectors’ Guild as an ongoing thing — it helps flesh out the universe in an interesting way, and it’s nice when the show actually builds new canon rather than just making jokes about old canon.
Although there are a ton of in-jokes in the collection, the biggest highlight — literally — being what can only be the skeleton of the giant Spock clone from “The Infinite Vulcan,” making this LD’s second reference to the now-definitely-canonical-you-can’t-take-it-back existence of a giant Spock clone. I can only hope he died of natural causes before his remains eventually made their way into this collection. Maybe his heart gave out because he was, you know, a 30-foot giant.
One notable bit of new worldbuilding: Apparently the Federation has (mostly) outgrown our present-day nudity taboos and uses coed showers. That’s a very Roddenberrian touch that I’m surprised didn’t get established decades before. And it was an amusing detail that apparently the sonic showers’ vibrations generate their own diegetic censor-blurring.
Boimler figuring out a solution to the crisis by using his fanboy expertise in past Enterprise missions was clever, and I liked the way he reminded the Titan crew of what Starfleet is really all about. And duplicating him was a fairly clever way to reset him to the Cerritos without undoing his progress.
“The whole point of “Darmok” was that the UT didn’t help—they were hearing Dathon and the other Tamarians in English. The translator was doing its job. The problem was their mode of communicating, not the words. So the UT doesn’t enter into it, it’s Kayshon himself who has to learn, in essence, a new language.”
But we can assume the translator algorithms have been improved in the intervening 14 years, once they finally cracked the logic of the Tamarian language. Although it’s true that the episode plays it as Kayshon trying to remember the right words. Maybe he’s got a translator making suggestions in his ear or in a contact lens display as a supplement for his own use of English.
By the way, after seeing both Stargirl and this in the same week, I have to wonder if Titan‘s first officer is possessed by Eclipso.
Riker is delightfully batshit in this, with Jonathan Frakes shouting a lot of his dialogue, and with more of the wonderful music metaphors that only make a little bit of sense.
Yeah, between this and PIC, it seems like Frakes is relishing the Riker renaissance and the chance to do more a different and more comedic-Number One (something we didn’t get to see Riker really do a whole lot on TNG).
It kinda reminds me of the early episodes of Gargoyles. You could tell he was having a grand time cutting loose as David Xanatos (especially in comparison to the later episodes of TNG where it was clear he burnt out on playing Riker).
I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO MENTION THE INFINITE VULCAN SKELETON! AUGH!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Given the amount of Star Trek references in this series, sometimes very obscure, it seems like they could go meta with a Tamarian character. Ah ha, now see what it feels like for non-Trekkies trying to understand just what the hell we’re talking about!
I had the pleasure of being part of a discussion of whether the Tamarian language would be a viable language with Marc Okrand and fellow linguistic nerds. Consensus was doubtful because it appears to have no way to express science or math. But it is a very clever idea.
Any time I see a Gargoyles reference, that person wins the internet for the day and my heart. I wanted to be David Xanatos when I grew up =)
@7: CLB’s “Friends With the Sparrows” mentioned above definitely gets into how math is expressed by Tamarians.
I worked up a whole set of background notes on Tamarian language for “Friends with the Sparrows,” and they’re available on my website here:
https://christopherlbennett.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/tamarian-grammar.pdf
The portrayals of Tamarians here and in the Voyager novels don’t quite track with how I portrayed their alien way of thinking and looking at the universe, but I figure any species has a range of different psyches and some of them would be better able to adapt to a more typically humanoid way of thinking and communicating than others.
Any time I see a Gargoyles reference, that person wins the internet for the day and my heart. I wanted to be David Xanatos when I grew up =)
LOL, I think we all wanted to be Xanatos.
I love Demona, I love Macbeth, and I loved the Archmage — but Xanatos was, well, Xanatos.
And Frakes played him beautifully. It’s still my favorite of his roles (even over Riker).
I assumed the same as Christopher, that in the years since Darmok the UT has been programmed to translate Tamarian phrases, but I would assume there is sometimes a lag since it first has to render Tamarian into English or whatever the basic language is, then has to reorder the words?
@12/SKO: Logically, there should usually be a lag with translators. Lots of languages have different word order than English, e.g. Japanese often puts the object before the verb and the subject. So you’d really need to hear the whole sentence before you could know how it was supposed to be translated. But fiction glosses over that for the sake of convenience and pacing.
What might have been funnier is if Kayshon was an expert in Earth culture and used human references for the mostly human crew and was quite proud of how fluent he now was but the crew still didn’t understand him
“Thor and his hammer.”
“Isis, seeking her husband.”
“Vishnu, taking his first step.”
That kind of thing, basically how Picard learned to communicate with Dathon in the first place.
I hate the way they have been writing Riker
A doubled Boimler?
I predict this will go just as well as it did for John Crichton!
By the way, does anyone else think that Riker’s speculation that the Pakleds are working for someone else is going to have a payoff down the road? Is the Titan going to be an ongoing presence this season, or at least come back in the finale?
“Darmok” is, IMO, one of Trek’s worst episodes. It’s so tedious to watch. And beam-cloning is a dangerous pandora’s box to open. There was a reason that Tom Riker was supposed to be a one-off deal.
So what did Boimler-C do to be demoted back to ensign? Or can your rank be taken from your for arbitrary reasons? Why does Boimler-T get to keep his rank when Boimler-C doesn’t? It’s as stupid a reason as Decker being demoted in TMP just because Kirk was demoted to Captain.
Of course the real world reason is so he doesn’t outrank his friends but that makes no sense “in world”.
(19)
Neither Kirk nor Decker were demoted as such in TMP. Kirk simply took command. Anyone in command of a ship is technically considered a captain.
I think “Darmok” is one of those episodes with few fans in the middle. You either love it or hate it. Personally, I love it. My wife, though, hates it. Which is kind of odd. I love linguistics, but I have no skill in picking up other languages. My wife, however, can absorb one easily. She was on a bad trip to Rumania in college for two weeks. She didn’t know a word of Rumanian and came back competent in everyday conversation. Her first job out of college was comparing lists for a mail order company. She was asked to study an assembler manual to replace someone who had just quit because she “had a science degree” (chemistry). It took her two weeks to become fluent and skilled in assembler programming.
@20/G.Spiggott: “Neither Kirk nor Decker were demoted as such in TMP. Kirk simply took command. Anyone in command of a ship is technically considered a captain.”
That’s the way it should be, but the way it was actually done is that Kirk and Decker were reduced in rank. Kirk went from admiral’s stripes in the first act to captain’s stripes thereafter, and Kirk explicitly said that Decker would have a “temporary grade reduction to commander,” which was also reflected in his sleeve stripes (although oddly his uniform in his first scene apparently had commander’s stripes on the epaulets even before he learned of his grade reduction).
The only time that Star Trek has ever acknowledged the “any commander is a captain regardless of rank” custom was in DS9: “Behind the Lines,” with Dax commanding the Defiant. Every other Trek production has always referred to commanding officers by their actual rank when it wasn’t captain, and has shown characters promoted or demoted to become captains in fact as well as title. Presumably the creators believe it would be confusing to a civilian audience to use “captain” in two differing ways.
@20 – Kirk wore captains braid after taking command. Decker wore commanders braid after Kirk said he’d have to take a “temporary grade reduction to commander”.
Commander braid
Brooklyn accent? Please. What the collector guy had is a Great Lakes accent. He’s voiced by Eugene Cordero, who is from Michigan and was presumably doing the working-class white-guy accent of the community he grew up in.
I also wish they’d been more creative with Kayshon, but in the writers’ defense, they seem to be showing that Tamarian is still not fully translated by the UT. Kayshon is speaking English (he calls it something like “Federation Standard”) but often forgets the word and says something in Tamarian. That’s when you get a metaphorical phrase.
My take on “Darmok” (best Trek episode) is that they aren’t speaking in metaphor in their subjective experience. But for some reason the UT renders their words by translating the underlying ancient meanings of the etymological roots of the words. If the English word “metaphor” were translated that way it would be something like “that which carries across.” Tamarian style might be “Charon, ferrying across the river.”
Derrida’s essay “White Mythologies” suggests all meaning is metaphorical, but familiar words have lost their strangeness and we think we grasp a plain, literal meaning. He quotes an essay by Anatole France that compares words to coins — when we have forgotten the underlying metaphor, it’s like an old coin that has had the markings rubbed smooth. These words are “blank mythologies.” (For some reason the translator chooses “white” instead of “blank” in the title). Tamarian words still have their markings, which puts the Universal Translator on the fritz. But the Tamarians don’t hear themselves speaking in mythic allusions.
I stand corrected, though temporary is the operative word there. It wasn’t a punitive action, that’s what I was getting at.
Still, Star Trek ranking conventions remain a bit baffling to me.
#26 – But there was no reason for either of them to be demoted at all. Sure, Nogura may have made Kirk accept a demotion but there’s no reason for it other than being a dick.
In TSFS, Scotty was assigned as captain of Engineering but that didn’t mean Styles wasn’t the Captain.
At one point, the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) had five captains of rank serving on her but there was only one Captain by position.
So we’ve got two identical Boimlers, one of which kept his rank and the other who was demoted when he left the ship for no reason. He saved the away team. For that, he got demoted.
Given that one Boimler was willing to act in solidarity and the other was not, I’m honestly wondering whether his duplication might actually be one of those “good/ evil” things from “The Enemy Within.”
I also absolutely loved Boimler’s speech in this episode (even if it was, admittedly, a little awkward in context), because I think that it’s basically Mike McMahan’s answer to anyone (J.J. Abrams not least among them) who considered Trek to be “boring” because it had too much philosophy and diplomacy and classical music and not enough shooting.
I also think that having Kayshon get turned into a puppet was less about writing around Tamarian speech patterns that it was about creating a situation where Beta Shift need to fend for themselves. Still, it was an unfortunate choice for Kayshon’s introductory episode (and one with his name in the title, no less)
@25, that’s one of the best interpretations of “Darmok” that I’ve read.
I guess the use of metaphor as a means of expressing oneself might have been inspired by Gene Wolfe’s Ascians? An Ascian prisoner communicates with the mc and other patients in a military hospital entirely via government slogans, which – luckily – a fellow patient has learned to interpret.
I guess – providing you and your fellow conversationalist know enough of them – that it’s theoretically possible to have a conversation via phrases like ‘out of the frying pan into the fire!’, ‘a stitch in time saves nine!’ and be understood (ie, the equivalent is possible in English) which reminds me of a story I heard once about a priest in Italy who received a letter from the local mafia so polite and opaque and elaborately worded that he had to get somebody to ‘translate’ it for him (they were threatening to hang him from his own belltower).
Phrases sometimes get shortened, as well e.g. if you’ve never heard before “what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts” you can probably figure out the meaning from the context, but if someone just says “swings and roundabouts” it gets a lot harder. Similar to if people just say “A stitch in time …” assuming you know the rest of it.
Any kind of translator is going to have to make choices. If someone says “The Good Book says …” do you just translate that as “The Bible says …” (if that is the Book they mean) or do you do a literal translation? The literal translation gives more information – you learn what the speaker thinks about the Bible – but only if you already know that is the Book under discussion.
Whereas a literal translation of “Cofiwch Dryweryn” is “Remember Tryweryn”, which tells you absolutely nothing.
@28/Queen Iacomina: “Given that one Boimler was willing to act in solidarity and the other was not, I’m honestly wondering whether his duplication might actually be one of those “good/ evil” things from “The Enemy Within.””
I see it more as just the usual philosophical idea that’s put forth in stories like this, that two identical copies of a person will begin diverging in personality almost instantly as their experiences differ. Given that Boimler was torn between desiring advancement on the Titan and missing his “quieter” old life on the Cerritos, he could’ve gone either way, and so just the slight differences in experience between the Boimler who was beamed to safety and the Boimler who had to fight his way to a shuttlecraft could’ve made the difference in their decisions (although I forget which one is which, if that was even established).
@32/Jeff V: “Similar to if people just say “A stitch in time …” assuming you know the rest of it.”
Yup. It’s noncompositional language, as I mentioned in my research notes that I linked above. It’s a lot like how fans talk to each other in in-jokes and continuity references, since they know they’re both in on the joke and will get the underlying meaning without having to spell it out.
So, what do you gain on the swings and lose on the roundabouts?
I figured that some of the problem with Tamarian was that the Tamarians were insisting on using the highest-toned form of their language for their first diplomatic meeting with the Federation, and the universal translator was stumbling over the formalism. I hesitate to guess how the universal translator would deal with what was once a stock phrase used to close a letter “I have the honor to be your obedient servant.”
Wonderful to see Mariner begin to show some respect for her friends and coworkers.
The problem is that nobody knows how the UT works, not even the writers. Nobody knows what happens when the sound leaves a person’s lips. Some lip service (heh) was paid to the idea that the UT scans brain waves and translates the intention of the speaker into the language of the recipient. This, of course, doesn’t account for lip syncing or when communication is done through technology, like when an alien is hailed on their ship. If the idea is some type of brain wave reader, then the Tamarians speaking in metaphors would still be translated into something that makes sense to the listener. I gave up trying to understand the UT concept and just accepted this literally translated species.
@36/Austin: “The problem is that nobody knows how the UT works, not even the writers.”
It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that it doesn’t matter. The universal translator is a plot device, a convenience to allow a storyteller to avoid the rigmarole of characters having to learn each other’s language or speak through an interpreter, so they can just get on with the story. That’s how it works — by allowing the story to focus on what matters rather than what’s irrelevant. Any handwave about the in-universe mechanics of it is just an excuse to serve that actual purpose, so it’s not important what the explanation actually is. It’s just a means to a narrative end. Some writers try for a degree of verisimilitude and offer a pseudo-technological handwave that glosses over a wealth of realistic obstacles, while others just say “translator microbes” or “TARDIS telepathic circuits” and leave it at that. But in both cases, the purpose is simply to get on with the story.
@37 – Yes, of course. I know all about the “It works very well, thank you,” response. It’s obviously a storytelling cheat. But it seems odd to ignore an in-universe explanation. It starts to crumble the facade, so to speak. It’s like watching a puppet show; it’s kind of hard to ignore the puppeteer and the strings. These are shows about a space exploring society. Language barriers would obviously be a big problem in the real world. Instead of just flat out ignoring the problem, why not try to incorporate it into the show?
I really enjoyed this episode, more than the first one. I liked Kayshon, and I liked that Mariner remembered she had other people who could solve things. Tendi’s and Rutherford’s solution was very creative, something I’d reward the hell out off in a roleplaying session.
And OMG, all the references and easter eggs, including the giant Spock clone! I don’t mind that Kayshon communicates in standard with only the occasional metaphor, we still get the Tamarian stuff with him interacting regularly with the rest of the crew.
It was awesome that Boimler reminded his crewmates on the Titan what Starfleet is all about, because I don’t like this gung-ho Riker. I might be too attached to the Titan from the book (I was also hoping for characters from the book crew), but that was created as an exploration vessel, and Riker is an explorer.
About the Boimlers, I hope it’s more of an The Enemy Within situation (but not so violent) and they get rejoined, and not an actual Tom Riker one. Oh, and T’Ana has like, one line, and it’s still awesome.
@2 – Chris: Duplicating Boimler does kinda undo his progress, because he’s back were he started, and demoted. Yeah, he still has the experience from his time (months?) on the Titan, but still.
@17 – Chris: Absolutely, we’ll get more Titan. Don’t know how much, though.
@28 – Queen: Exactly, one of them is more sure of himself, even to the point of being selfish. That’s a Chekhov’s Clone. And yes, Kayshon is not a star of the show, as he’s a senior officer. The episode was supposed, despite the title, to center around lower deckers (three of them being main characters).
@32 – Jeff V: I have a neutral opinion on the Bible, and I can use “The Good Book” when writing about the Bible, since I might not want to repeat myself with the word itself. You can’t interpret my opinion from that, only from context.
@38/Austin: “Language barriers would obviously be a big problem in the real world. Instead of just flat out ignoring the problem, why not try to incorporate it into the show?”
They did that in Enterprise‘s first season rather effectively, and in “Darmok” in its way. But you can’t make language the focus of every story about alien contact. Stories need to be told efficiently, especially in a tight format like episodic TV. Anything that doesn’t serve the specific story you’re telling just gets in the way.
@39/MaGnUs: “About the Boimlers, I hope it’s more of an The Enemy Within situation (but not so violent) and they get rejoined, and not an actual Tom Riker one.”
I don’t see how that would be desirable. A permanent split lets them have their cake and eat it too. And it could be interesting to explore such a duplication on a continuing basis, to see how they develop and diverge over time. They might even come to think of each other as brothers.
“Duplicating Boimler does kinda undo his progress, because he’s back were he started, and demoted.”
Not in a larger in-universe sense. There is still a Boimler whose accomplishments have had an impact and who’s fulfilling his career ambitions. It’s just not the specific one we follow weekly. So it’s a reset, but it’s not a complete reset, and that’s better than the alternative.
And having a Lower Decker on the Titan leaves the door open to revisit it on a continuing basis and flesh out its crew more. I like that idea, even if it’s not the Titan crew I wrote.
@30 — thanks, SaraB!
@37, @38 — Star Trek is in constant tension between theatrical storytelling shortcuts (universal translator, transporters, humanoid aliens with costume ears and foreheads . . .) and in-universe rationalizations for those shortcuts. And then someone writes an episode that questions how the rationalization works, and it all begins again.
I like Jet’s explanation for times when the wrong number of pips appear on someone’s collar — it’s just a stray kernel of corn from lunch.
“Duplicating Boimler does kinda undo his progress, because he’s back were he started, and demoted.”
The Boimler who returns to the Cerritos is one who has learned something about himself and what he wants from his career.
My thanks also to ‘rm’ @25. That makes so much more sense! Surely, though, there’s a less metaphoric version of their language that one uses with children who haven’t yet learned the full mythos of their society, which could have been used when addressing Federation folk like Picard?
@43 My headcanon is that they don’t even think their words are all that metaphorical, but somehow it’s built into the grammar in a way that fools the UT. When we teach a child a word like “religion,” they don’t have to know that it literally means “ropes binding us together,” they just learn that’s the word. There are languages that require the speaker to always note the cardinal directions (that’s not your left arm, it’s your north or south arm depending on which way you are facing). Kids in those cultures don’t think it’s difficult to always stay oriented. And later on they are capable of navigating the South Pacific.
44. Yeah, Irish – as in the Irish language – often defines a location via the points of the compass, plus whether you mean away from that compass point, towards it or in it.
I probably addressed the whole “how do their children learn the language” bit in “Friends with the Sparrows,” but I don’t remember how. It seems like the kind of question I’d probably make a point of answering.
@44, that makes perfect sense; I wish they’d included a line or two of dialogue to that extent on the Enterprise.
@46, I’ll look for that!
I decided to Tasha Yar myself out of this series after the first season, but I’m curious as to how this season will develop, with apparently two Boimlers, one still on Titan, another, predictably, back on Cerritos. And a potentially very interesting new Security Chief/Tactical Officer in Lieutenant Kayshon. Oh yeah, Mariner is still in the show. Okay, I’ll be over here, then.
I’m — not sure how I feel about Tasha Yar being used as a verb…. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Not only did we have the ‘biggest’ Easter egg from The Animated Series we also had the smallest one! Across from Kahless’ fornication helmet was the shrunken city from the planet Terratin!
For my podcast we ended up finding identifying about 60 items, 3 or 4 that are a maybe and then 2 we just can’t place! https://twitter.com/GeekFilter/status/1428748848504086532?s=20 I’ll be updating a refined list soon in the same thread
Having hoped to post something longer, a diabolos ex machina obliges me to settle for something more pithy than comprehensive – does anyone else get the suspicion that Kahless’ shagging helmet is more a kink than any kind of aid to safe sex? (Given the nature of the Klingon cranium, it strikes me as something more like a gimp mask).
On a more serious note, I can only hope that future episodes of this season will continue with the standard set by the first two – I’m also genuinely interested in seeing more of Lieutenant Jet, since his competitiveness & willingness to push back against Mariner as a peer adds something interesting to the dynamic of Beta shift (I’m glad to see Boimler back, but can only hope he’ll get the right of First Refusal when the next Lieutenant-level vacancy opens up on the Cerritos; seeing how that affects his dynamic with Mariner & the gang would be interesting on a storytelling level, but also opens up the field to character development from everyone).
Also, @3. Christopher L Bennett: Please allow me to compliment you on your excellent taste in STAR-y diversions! (-;
Amusingly, these two shows actually crossed my dashboard at almost exactly the same time (and I’ve been doing my best to take them as a double bill, although my schedule doesn’t always allow for this).
@51/ED: Given the way Mariner and Jet were clashing throughout the episode (initially in the shower, no less), I was expecting them to end up in bed together by the end. They avoided that cliche, at least for now. I guess it was less about Unresolved Sexual Tension and more about Mariner just missing the old team dynamic.
The helmet is definitely a kink thing.
@53 MaGnUs
I’m thinking that a sex helmet is actually a pretty practical thing for a male to have in a culture whose fornication ritual involves the female lobbing heavy objects at him. I don’t think that they’ve ever actually shown Lady Lukara, but if she was the mate of Kahless the Unforgettable, I can only assume that she could throw heavy objects pretty damn hard.
This was a clever solution to the Boimler on Titan subplot. Of course Riker would get rid of one of the Boimler twins. He’s let one twin go before. Besides, I wonder how much shame he probably feels over Thomas’ actions on DS9‘s Defiant.
The Mariner/Jet dynamic is fun, it doesn’t get stale, and it’s great that they acquiesce to Tendi and Rutherford for once. More often than not, it seems Mariner never really recognizes those two and only uses them as a sounding board for her own issues, or discussing Boimler.
I don’t have a problem with the Freeman micromanaging subplot myself. As a primetime animated show that has more in common with Rick and Morty than the original ’70s animated show, Lower Decks should get some leeway in how it chooses to tell its stories. Trek should still be able to experiment with the format.
@2/Christopher: While the shower scene was fun, I wasn’t a fan of the way they animated the censor-blurring. It looked as if the episode itself was glitching due to streaming issues.
I honestly don’t see the big connection to Rick and Morty, beyond McMahan working on both, and having a slightly similar character design style. The humor and pacing is different.
I always felt that their language was more sensible than people gave it credit for because so much of our language is made up of references. If I called you a Benedict Arnold, you’d know the meaning even if a Romulan didn’t. Also, the context would still be useful in scientific terms.
1. People name days after gods of Norse mythology, why not the same for numbers? Units of 1 would be Adams, 2s Eves, 3’s would be Cains. You get my drift.
2. Klingon sex is violent. A helmet is just good protection.
3. I insist the green and blue woman is Christine Vale after some microtattooing.
4. Boimler was totally soft-dissing Picard and DISCO with his comments on serialized action Trek. He doesn’t have the energy for the post-TNG era.
If Christine can die her hair…
@52. ChristopherLBennett: I share your relief – God help us, they’re bad enough as rivals, as exes they’d probably blow up the ship!
@54. Queen Iacomina: Given that Klingon sex tends to be quite robust, it strikes me that doing it gently might actually be the most deliciously subversive kink of all for a certain sort of Klingon – failing that, a helmet might well be used to fake up an impression of fearfulness and vulnerability that draws in a certain type of female Klingon like a sabre bear to a bleeding targ!
… stone me, this means Kahless the Unforgettable was a full-blown submissive!
@57. CT Phipps: I’m not saying the shagging helmet isn’t sensible, I’m just saying that sort of level-headed cautiousness isn’t very ‘Mainstream Klingon’ (hence my determination to brand it some sort of illicit kink). (-;
Someone once talked about underground Klingon tickle dungeons.
Generally speaking, I liked this one. Over the top Riker is a treat and I found the idea of death by flying roomba far funnier than I should have. And Mariner got to learn a lesson! I can actually enjoy the character when the show acknowledges she’s being an arsehole, rather than insisting she’s always right.
Negatively, I wish they’d done more with Kayshon than they did, so many missed opportunities there. I also found the Titan crew a bit much and the ending of demoting and shipping out and demoting Boimler (B) while keeping Boimler (W) was a bit crappy. They were the same person when he saved the day. Though I have to admit, I liked Rutherford winning the bet because of it.
And I’ve got to agree with KRAD, Doctor Ree (from the Titan novels) would’ve been a great visual.
@61/dougie: “And I’ve got to agree with KRAD, Doctor Ree (from the Titan novels) would’ve been a great visual.”
As long as they got it right and realized he’s supposed to be shaped like a therapod dinosaur, with a horizontal body and cantilevering tail. I’ve seen a number of fan artists mistakenly depict Ree as a human-shaped upright biped like a Gorn. The whole point of Titan‘s novel crew was to get away from Trek’s tendency to default to humanoid aliens.
It’s too bad that Lower Decks didn’t go that way with the Titan crew.
I was disappointed with what they did with Kayshon as well, but my reason for the disappointment may be my own personal pet peeve because I’m a language teacher and because, to be honest, I haven’t seen every, single appearance of Kayshon.
When I read Memory Alpha, I read the fact that “The Universal Translator doesn’t always work correctly.” So I imagined someone adapting the Universal Translator with an algorithm or AI to take metaphors and translate them into un-metaphors. It could be done without Kayshon having to learn English, but the episode plays it as if he is trying to learn English. Kayshon could say, in Tamarian, “Zinda, his eyes red” but we’d hear “I’m furious with you” or “I’m furious with her” depending on the context that the Universal Translator picks out. And then sometimes the Universal Translator AI would not recognize a phrase and would have to train itself to recognize that phrase. English — or any language — is full of paraphrases and double meanings, so Kayshon could have seen reactions and said “Let me pick a different phrase, let me say it another way.” That’s what I imagine he did at the beginning of this episode when saying “It is my honor, Captain”
With that all in place, I would have enjoyed Kayshon being almost completely understood, with only the occasional Tamarian phrase coming through. (Kayshon tries to attract the woman at the end, he is completely understood due to a functioning Universal Translator, he gets rejected anyways, and then we can laugh when he says “Shaka, when the walls fell”) There are many episodes where a second security guard is needed, and for me it’s fun to see Kayshon as that second security guard. I did love Kayshon in “The Spy Humongeous” for being a character and not for being a caricature. But like Krad said, most of the time when he appears it’s to make us laugh at the Tamarian language instead of appreciating that there’s a Tamarian in Starfleet and that the language barrier has been overcome.