10 Greatest Star Trek Feel Good Moments

Unless you've been trapped inside the EMH backup module, you will have noticed that Star Trek: Picard's season three has already received a very favourable response from fans and critics alike. Not to jump the phaser, as we're only three episodes in at time of writing, but it is arguably some of the best live-action Trek we've had in years.

It perhaps owes its near instant success to a deft mix of action, character, and just the right amount of pathos (not to forget, a gripping storyline). One such successful appeal to our collective emotions came at the end of the season's second episode Disengage. It was a reveal that we had suspected, but it was beautifully executed, nonetheless. Doctor Jack Crusher, played by our favourite Ed Speleers, is Jean-Luc's son!

No words were needed between Beverly and Picard for the confirmation, merely a tacit understanding in the tearful gaze of two long-lost friends, colleagues, and one-time lovers across the beleaguered bridge. Picard is left no room for doubt, and he immediately springs into action: "Belay that! Admiral's orders. […] The boy stays here." "Why are you doing this?" asks Captain Shaw. "Because he's my son" is Picard's laconic, but deeply moving reply. Everyone (even Shaw) rallies around, and the Titan-A flies into the nebula. *Sobs*

This moment is even more poignant given Picard's own harrowing family history. As shown in The Next Generation season four episode Family, Jean-Luc had had a difficult relationship with his brother Robert, but they managed to bury the hatchet. Since his brother already had a son, René, Jean-Luc had also felt that the pressure was taken off to continue the 'family line'. However, in Star Trek: Generations, we learnt that both Robert and René had burned to death in a fire meaning, as Jean-Luc himself put it, there would now be no more Picards. In Star Trek: Picard season two, we also found out that Jean-Luc's mother, Yvette Picard, struggled with her mental health and sadly died by suicide.

With a son in Jack Crusher now comes possibly the future of the Picard family – a lineage or that chance at a 'legacy' Jean-Luc was so quick to dismiss.