The real competency porn in Darmok is in the writing. Picard doesn’t just learn the alien’s strange way of communicating, the audience learns it along with him. It has the same ending as The Big Goodbye, with Picard striding onto the bridge and saying the exact right thing as no one else could, but this time we clearly understand the entire nonsense exchange. It’s just perfectly done.
Saru actually has a similar moment of linguistic badassery in Discovery, not the episode’s climax or anything, but it contributes to how much I appreciate his character as well.
Picard is pontificating about right and wrong; Picard’s got absolutely no declination on his moral compass.
Data and Geordi are solving the sensor readings. These are often my personal favorite.
Some alien character is being more human than usual for them. Spock is the classic, Data, Troi, Worf and even Q get it in TNG, on Voyager it was Doctor or Seven; the human adjacent character looking in toward humanity from the edge.
Something horrifying is going on. TNG and TOS before it leaned farther into horror than people give it credit for.
Just realized I have an appreciation for scenes where the thing is happening and spreading through the ship but no one notices it yet and continue on with normal activities. Especially when it’s a multi-step cascade kinda scenario followed by a catastrophic failure where the crew first needs to solve the “how to survive” problem before moving on to “ok wtf just happened” problem.
There’s a late season episode…I forget the name, Troi is in her standard uniform and they’re in the DS9 Runabout set, where they notice time pausing. And they act like it’s such a weird event. “Oh my god Geordi just stopped mid-sentence like the video has to buffer.”
The thing is, by this time in the series, they shouldn’t be acting shocked, once they resume they should be going like “By the way, I just saw you pause for what I perceived to be 10 or 20 seconds, then resume. I think we’ve got time anomalies.” They’ve seen weird space shit on a daily basis for years by this point, they should be discussing time anomalies like wine, talking about mouthfeel and finish.
The real competency porn in Darmok is in the writing. Picard doesn’t just learn the alien’s strange way of communicating, the audience learns it along with him. It has the same ending as The Big Goodbye, with Picard striding onto the bridge and saying the exact right thing as no one else could, but this time we clearly understand the entire nonsense exchange. It’s just perfectly done.
Saru actually has a similar moment of linguistic badassery in Discovery, not the episode’s climax or anything, but it contributes to how much I appreciate his character as well.
TNG is at its best when:
Just realized I have an appreciation for scenes where the thing is happening and spreading through the ship but no one notices it yet and continue on with normal activities. Especially when it’s a multi-step cascade kinda scenario followed by a catastrophic failure where the crew first needs to solve the “how to survive” problem before moving on to “ok wtf just happened” problem.
There’s a late season episode…I forget the name, Troi is in her standard uniform and they’re in the DS9 Runabout set, where they notice time pausing. And they act like it’s such a weird event. “Oh my god Geordi just stopped mid-sentence like the video has to buffer.”
The thing is, by this time in the series, they shouldn’t be acting shocked, once they resume they should be going like “By the way, I just saw you pause for what I perceived to be 10 or 20 seconds, then resume. I think we’ve got time anomalies.” They’ve seen weird space shit on a daily basis for years by this point, they should be discussing time anomalies like wine, talking about mouthfeel and finish.