TNG: The First Duty, where Picard lectures Wesley. Such a powerful scene.
"The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform."
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.
That episode hits so hard if you think of the idea that Picard sacrificed basically everything for his career. He never married, never had a family or settled down on some backwater planet.
And then for a lifetime - in 27 minutes - he did. He got to have the life he never got to have.
It just. My soul hurts for him. I still don't know if it's sad or beautiful or both but that episode tears my heart out every time.
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.
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.
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.
To me it was when the episode ended with Picard having been assimilated by the borg. When I was watching it it was way too late, and I had a flight that I needed to catch in the morning. I pulled an all nighter because I needed to see what happened next, despite knowing that the next 24 hours would be spent in transit.
To this day, Picard turning towards the camera all borg'ed up right before the end credits is the biggest cliffhanger I've ever seen.
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"
I get a laugh out of Sisko doing a silly child's dance in Lethal Candyland, in that episode of DS9 when they make first contact with a bunch of gambling aliens. "Allamarane! Count to four! Allamarane! Then three more!" It's those little moments in Star Trek where respected actors humiliate themselves for the sake of the plot that are just so great to watch. See also Armin Shimerman as the silvery announcement box in one of the early TNG episodes.
If you don't want the greatest moments of a series spoiled before you watched it maybe don't read a post that asks people what the greatest moments of a series are?