10 Emotional Star Trek Moments That Made The Fans Cry

The more Data proclaimed his lack of emotions (pre-chip days), the more we were convinced of his true feelings. To quote a mechanical man with a dazzling derrière from another show, "being a robot's great, but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad". Either way, Data certainly had a knack for producing them in others, as we found out quite clearly when he tried his hand at procreation in The Next Generation episode Offspring.

Much like any parent across the ages, having a child was a vicarious experience for Data as Lal navigated her way through the world. She even picked up a skill that had thus far eluded him: the verbal contraction. So great was this surrogate process that just before her death, it was Lal who offered to feel the parental love — "for both of us" — that Data supposedly could not.

As an audience, we were crying on Data's behalf as he looked his daughter directly in the eyes to tell her he was unable to correct the cascade failure, all to the perfectly framed direction of then first-time director Jonathan Frakes. Everyone else was in tears. Even the belligerent Admiral Haftel, come to take Lal to Starfleet Research, had a lump in his throat as he announced the imminent loss of the young android.

Cut to 35 years later and we were all a bit misty-eyed once more when we found out that "a bit of Lal" went into Altan Soong's golem resurrection of Data (and Lore and B-4).