[Nate the Great]

A site recommends "Darmok" as the first episode to watch for a person who has never seen Star Trek before in their lives.

Yeah, um, what?

I was going to stick this in the quintessential episode thread, but I didn't want to be mocked for necroposting, and the connection was tangential anyway.

I appreciate what Darmok attempted, the problem is that it raised too many questions about how the Universal Translator was ever supposed to work. If anything, "instant" translation should be extremely crude and mechanical. Let the eggheads over at the Daystrom Institute talk with representatives of each race to get the grammatical rules straightened out and perfected. But no, the UT works perfectly with everything including proper nouns instantaneously, except for this episode when it hiccups all over the place.

Now, just to convince you that I still like the episode, here's the Gilgamesh clip.