“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”
Rebounding significantly from the weak-ass season opener, the second episode of Season Five is one of my favourites of the year. “Darmok” is built around a concept so brilliant it almost renders itself unworkable: a race of people who speak only in metaphor. It’s a lovely idea, but once thought up, it has to be made to work by the writers and the actors. Once you get the gist of what the Tamarians are saying, you realize pretty quickly that their metaphorical alphabet is so rudimentary that their speech would be the equivalent of you or I saying “Fight! Leave! Failure!” to each other in place of whole statements. But I’m willing to give “Darmok” the free pass, because it’s such a grand notion in the first place, and the interpersonal drama on the planet is so expertly played by its leads, Patrick Stewart and Paul Winfield.
The episode has an appreciation for the value of space and silence, playing whole scenes – such as the early sequence at the campfires – without dialogue, as Dathon and Picard observe one another in the wake of their inability to properly speak. This pales in comparison, though, to the later scene – after Dathon has been wounded by the Predator-ish creature that inhabits the planet – where he and Picard actually feel their way through a conversation and ultimately a bit of cross-cultural storytelling. Again, the sequence is captivating because it’s played so quietly, leaning solely on the firelight and the strength of the two actors. For a one-off episode, the relationship that forms between Dathon and Picard remains one of the most memorable in the run of the series, and Picard as the series lead is enriched as a thinker and adventurer in a way that he hasn’t been since “Family.” Stewart’s delivery of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a wonderful monologue.
“Darmok” is the episode where Captain Picard gets his swank leather jacket, a jacket which – unfortunately – becomes noticeably less swank after this installment, when his Han Solo-ish leather shoulders are replaced with a duller suede. It is also, on a related note, around this time that Playmates launched their line of Star Trek: The Next Generation action figures, as marked by the fact that the first wave featured Picard wearing that selfsame swank jacket, evidently with the belief that Patrick Stewart would be wearing the jacket for much of the rest of the series. He doesn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop the Playmates action figure line from being one of the more exciting thins to happen during Season Five (and the toy line ran a fairly ridiculously long time after that – all the way through Voyager). I gobbled up, by mail order (!), the whole first wave that summer, making the Next Gen toys the likely boundary line for me between getting toys as a kid and becoming an adult collector. I’ve still got a few of them; Geordi was always my favourite.
The miscellany: Next Gen gets a bit of an upgrade in a few areas in Season Five; the conference room has been redesigned (removing the Enterprise legacy wall), and there’s a new shuttlecraft, whose design is significantly less appealing (to me) than the other one. Also, “Darmok” briefly introduces Ashley Judd in her first screen role; Judd returns a couple of episodes later to swap DNA with young Wesley Crusher, in what is surely the sexual coup of that boy’s whole life.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.