12 Most Heart-Breaking Star Trek Moments Ever

By John K Kirk /

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5. Picard€™s Other Life - The Inner Light - TNG

This is a 1993 Hugo Award winning episode that can melt the stoniest of hearts. The Enterprise encounters a probe after completing a simple survey mission. As the probe gets closer to the ship, it emits a scanning wave that renders Captain Picard unconscious. When he wakes up, he finds himself on a planet known as Kataan and he has an entirely new life. He is known as Kamin, discovers he is married to a woman known as Eline, is an iron weaver and has friends. While he initially resists this notion, his friends and family affirm to him that he has been sick and is now just beginning to recover. He eventually gives up the idea of trying to find the Enterprise and acclimatizes himself to the new life he has discovered. In the course of his acclimatization, he finds that Kataan€™s sun is emitting increasing levels of radiation and that threatens to render the planet uninhabitable. By this point, Picard/Kamin has raised a family, outlived his wife and has a grandson (interestingly enough, played by Daniel Stewart, Patrick Stewart€™s son). He even learns to play the flute. After years of sending reports to the government, he finally learns that the government has known of Kataan€™s plight all along and are trying to do everything they can to preserve their culture. He is invited to attend a rocket launch that he was not aware of. At the launch, he sees his wife and friend who passed away years before him, as young as they were when he first met them. They explain to him that the purpose of the probe was to find someone who could remember Kataan and preserve its memory to other species in the galaxy. In a fit of weeping, Picard declares: €œOh, it€™s me, isn€™t it? I€™m the one who finds it.€ It is this moment that makes the entire episode. When you consider that in the course of this 45 minute episode, Picard has lived an entire life, raised a family, buried his best friend and wife, seen the birth of a grandson and now has to contend with the extinction of his adopted home€ on top of returning to a life that he had grown to believe was a fever-induced delusion. This episode is an emotional sledgehammer. When you consider all these things that Picard has to assimilate is truly heart-rending. An entire lifetime of memories is now part of his existence, and epitomized in the moment when Commander Riker brings a box that they discovered in the probe to his ready room. When Picard opens it up, he discovers Kamin€™s flute.