Hi everyone… I was getting ready to do some "research" to do a fic about a particular episode… and I can't figure out which episode I'm looking for!
I do my searches and keep coming up with the wrong episodes. I need some help finding the right one. Which episode is it, where the station experiences a power outage, or his hit by a space wave of some kind, that takes out all of the universal translators, both computer built-ins and on-person devices, so that the Starfleet and Bajoran crew members cannot communicate effectively.
Sisko sits in his office, bumming out because nobody understands what he's saying. Jadzia Dax makes an effort to use Federation Standard with the Starfleet crew, revealing a thick Trill accent, while trying to man the science station to repair the damage cause by the wave. Quark (or was it Garak?) come to the bridge and attempts to translate for Bajoran and Starfleet crew members using his limited knowledge of Federation Standard and a more comprehensive understanding of Bajoran, resulting in some mistranslations that would be hilarious if the situation were not so dire. The Bajorans try to convince Sisko to surrender control of the station to them as he is now a minority language speaker and cannot communicate emergency orders to most of the crew in an expedient way. I think there was some impending enemy scheduled to arrive in a few hours, and Kai Winn might have meddled in the situation a bit too.
Is this a real episode? Or is it one of the many fics that never made it out of my head? It had the same exasperating-situational feel as Civil Defense, but with less of the "Urgent! Act-Immediately-or-Die!" stakes until near the end of the episode.
Any help with identifying this episode would be fantastic. Thanks y'all!
Update 7/20: Thanks to Guest for the suggestion, unfortunately it's not "Babel." I thought it was at first, but it's definitely not. The synonyms sounds similar, but I looked at some clips and it's not that one, there was no virus and no babbling disease. The premise was definitely a translator issue, Dax and Quark were speaking in thick, accented, and sometimes incorrect, Standard. All of the Starfleet crew could communicate with each other and all of the Bajorans could communicate with each other, and there was frustration over the two not being able to understand each other. The Bajorans wanted Sisko to give Kira temporary command over DS9 so that they would have a commander who spoke the same language as the majority of the residents; Sisko resisted that option to stop the possibility that the politicians on board would make the change permanent.
