10 Star Trek Moments That Always Make You Smile

10. Pathfinder

Looking back on Star Trek: Voyager, one can never discount the distance between the lost ship and the Alpha Quadrant, but one could also be forgiven for thinking everything was rather close to each other. We blame the constant pristine condition of the ship, but in the same breath, can we get a round of applause for those engineers?

By the sixth season, the ship had made semi-regular contact with home, but they hadn’t the chance to speak directly to Starfleet. Compressed messages were all the rage until a face to face zoom call popped up on the astrometric screen.

Barclay did something that audiences may not have expected. He, based on Earth, achieved what Voyager, and by extension us, had been hoping for. He proved that the ship was never abandoned. They were lost, but at least one person never stopped looking. That first message both broke hearts and lifted them to the ceiling - Voyager was the focus of the show, but the audience may have been watching from a place of many years of Trek. Starfleet would never give up on a lost ship, they believed. 

Pathfinder, and Reginald Barclay, proved it. 

There are many moments of this episode that will tug on the heart strings, but seeing Tom Paris's reaction when he hears his father's voice for the first time in almost six years opens a floodgate of emotions, one only compounded with Janeway's final 'keep a docking bay open for us.'

Catharsis, joy, and hope - all in a single sentence.