The One With Darmok
We didn’t watch television when I was a kid. We had a television, yes, for Olympics and election nights, but most of the time it sat on my folks’ dresser, a boxy gray-black paperweight.My TV-suspicious parents are high school teachers, World History and World Literature, starting with Sumer and Gilgamesh and working to the modern era. When I was a kid, we read books, we played games, we told stories and went to concerts, but we didn’t watch.But I watched sometimes, at friends’ houses after school or on sleepover Saturday mornings—and that was how I first saw Star Trek. I was young, and the Druhots showed my sister and me a Borg episode (I think it was I, Hugh), and I was hooked.I spent the next week convincing my parents to watch with me. “Star Trek is really cool! It’s not like other television! Try an episode, you’ll see!”They agreed, which probably should have unnerved me more at the time. The fate of my televised future hung on a randomly chosen episode of The Next Generation. But what did I know? At the time, I thought they were all good.So, when the Chosen Night arrived, I turned on the TV and showed them—“Darmok”.
For those of you who aren’t Star Trek fans, which, why not?, Darmok is the episode where Captain Picard is stuck on a planet with an alien whose language, at first, appears untranslatable—until Picard realizes he’s communicating in mythological references.And so, at a critical moment, Jean-Luc Picard must connect with his alien comrade by telling tales. And out of all the stories in the world, he chooses the tale of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.We watched Star Trek every week after that.
Check it out:
"Darmok"Star Trek: The Next GenerationSeason 5, episode 2
