Besides Tuvax being eliminated in voyager
For me it has to be the end of In The Pale Moonlight
So I will learn to live with it…Because I can live with it…I can live with it.
Computer – erase that entire personal log.
Gives me chills
“It’s a faaake!”
I love the contrast between these two themes
I was going to post the same thing.
I lied, I cheated, I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But most damning thing of all, I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would.
Just… god damn it hits hard. Also Sisko’s change in tone turning the final “I can live with it” into a question.
Toss up between Quark hacking the defiant computer to replicate drinks into his advertising cups or him and rom popping out from a jefferies tube in Sisko’s office… mostly because Sisko had previously just been staring off into space and then immediately goes back to just staring off into space.
I watched DS9 for the first time last year, and that Rom scene had me laughing so hard!
Best ‘best’ is hard to me to say; a lot of people don’t like, but i say “inner light”. As Picard receive the flute back and start playing, the emotional weight of the scene got me good.
The Inner Light was what finally got me into Star Trek.
It’s not like I had never seen an episode, in fact I’d seen lots, but it was comfortable background noise I’d change the channel too as yet another repeat I had no context for aired. Always somehow a filler episode or the second part of a multi-episode arc. I’d written off Trek as pleasantly mediocre and wholly dependent on technobabble despite otherwise being an extremely keen sci-fi fan.
Luckily, on some long forgotten forum, someone described an episode which sounded nothing like the Trek I had seen. As you said, the emotional weight got me good.
For me, it’s This
Captain James T. Kirk : All right. It’s instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we won’t kill today. Contact Vendikar. I think you’ll find that they’re just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they’ll do anything to avoid the alternative I’ve given you. Peace or utter destruction. It’s up to you.
The death of Edith Keelor.
Pretty much the entirety of Waltz from DS9. https://youtu.be/R2HY50xw3WU
Dukat usually appears like he’s trying to be a good person, despite all the terrible things that happened under his watch. But this episode breaks that down until he finally stops lying to himself.
I rewatched that episode just this evening, and completely agree; fantastic scene. Dukat is a delightful villain throughout the series, but this is one of his pinnacles of bastardy.
Imaginary Kira supporting his twisted logic was a nice touch, too; “Being reasonable only made us bolder”
When Mariner and Boimler show up in Strange New Worlds, played by their actual voice actors. Fantastic episode.
This is my personal favorite moment. It’s a distillation of pretty much everything I like about Star Trek in one conversation.
Computer, activate the ECH pip pip pip pip
“I know this ship like the back of my hand.”
Picard on the meme planet.
The court room scene in Measure of a Man when Picard turns around to the viewer “do you?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY
The scene with Guinan in that episode was also quite important
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9TUeapBSQ
The black and white vs. white and black faces in the TOS episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” were quite brillant too.
