this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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What it means is folks like Uhura and Sato were the most hypercompetent crew members on the whole damn ship, figuring out protocols compatibility on-the-fly.
You kind of see the progression of how communication is handled via the different Star Trek shows.
In Enterprise, Sato has a doctorate and is probably among the few people on Earth who could even approach the position.
In TOS and SNW, Uhura is a specialist, but in the vein of modern military communications specialists. SNW shows Uhura decoding unfamiliar languages, but able to rely on centuries of work in her field so that it is something that someone with a bachelor's degree can perform.
By TNG, a starship with a diplomatic focused mission can fully rely on computer based tools to handle communication. In cases when this breaks down, like Darmok and Jalad at Tangara, there isn't anyone on the crew whose job it is to handle communication issues.
I thought that was part of what Troi did. Don't think it was an official function, but in practice Troi fed info on emotional state to try and support communication (among other things).
Still not sure why there wouldn't be a backup interpreter if you're a ship on a diplomatic mission, and you're often getting fired on with shit that can fuck up your systems.
...oh god, I'm turning into a Trekkie, aren't I? Is this how it starts?!
If they had a full on telepath, the whole episode would have been wrapped up in 5 minutes.
Troi would get called up on to advise on emotions, but she wasn't a true diplomat. When it came to going through the text of treaties, Data would typically be the one to explain it.
I feel like Troi would have been a more interesting character if she was a diplomatic attache instead.
And yes. One of us! One of us!
Especially on a ship as large as the Galaxy-class, which had a crew of thousands.
ONE OF US. ONE OF US.
In Darmok, the Tamarians stranded the captains on the planet and jammed communications. Whether they have a specialist or not, they wouldn't have been able to help Picard, and there wasn't enough context in the ship-to-ship communication logs to figure out their meme-speak anyway. Data and Troi do still figure out pretty quickly that it's a meme-based language, but, again, the lack of context means they don't get far.