My Take. One Episode. Every Series (live). No Apologies. Your Thoughts?
No, I don’t think these are the most popular. They’re certainly not the most quoted. This is one episode from each series that I think best represents what that show was actually capable of at its most honest and arguably the best of Trek. I could be wrong about some of these. I’m probably wrong about at least one. Sound off!
TOS: Balance of Terror
Most people remember this one as a great submarine thriller, which it is, but that’s the surface. What’s underneath is a 1966 network television show telling its audience that the enemy is human, that prejudice is corrosive, and that the man trying to kill you might be your equal in every way that matters. Mark Lenard’s Romulan Commander is one of the finest performances in the entire franchise and he’s in it for maybe twenty minutes, you know? The tragedy of two honorable men on opposite sides of a line neither drew is Shakespearean in the most unshowy possible way. Roddenberry made a lot of promises about what Trek would be. This episode kept them.
TNG: The Inner Light
Here’s something I didnt know. Patrick Stewart fought for this episode. The production was behind schedule, over budget, and there was real pressure to simplify it. Stewart understood what it was and refused to let it become less than it could be. What resulted is essentially a forty five minute argument that a life fully lived, however quiet and however brief, is enough. Picard doesn’t save anyone. He doesn’t outwit anyone. He just lives, loses, loves, and carries it home in a flute. It feels like to me the least Star Trek episode Trek ever produced and somehow the most. I’ve watched it a dozen times and I’m still not entirely sure how they pulled it off.
DS9: In the Pale Moonlight
One of my very favorite eps. Sisko lies. Sisko cheats. Sisko is complicit in murder. And then he decides he can live with it. That last scene, the log entry deletion, is one of the most morally audacious moments in the history of American network television, not just Trek. Here’s what I found out and that doesn’t get mentioned enough. Ira Steven Behr had to fight Paramount almost line by line to keep the ending intact. The studio wanted consequences, wanted Sisko punished, wanted the moral universe tidied up and restored. Behr held the line because the entire point was that sometimes it isn’t. That the good guys win ugly and then have to look at themselves in the mirror. Trek had never gone there before and hasn’t fully gone back since. Which, you know, tells you something. 🤦🏻♂️
VOY: Timeless
Voyager gets a bad reputation, some of it earned if I’m being honest, but Timeless is the show operating at a level it rarely sustained. Harry Kim and Chakotay, fifteen years in the future, are trying to undo a catastrophic mistake that killed the entire crew. What elevates it beyond a standard time travel episode is the weight of genuine guilt carried by Garrett Wang, an actor who didn’t always get material worthy of his ability. The episode also contains one of the more quietly devastating images in Trek history, Voyager frozen in ice on a desolate planet, the crew preserved inside like insects in amber. It’s a ghost story dressed up as science fiction and, iMHO, it hits harder than it has any right to.
ENT: Similitude
Enterprise spent too much time apologizing for existing and not enough time doing what this episode did. Phlox creates a mimetic clone of Trip Tucker to harvest neural tissue that will save the original’s life, knowing the clone has a lifespan of fifteen days. The clone knows this. The clone lives those fifteen days anyway, fully, and then makes the choice the episode has been quietly building toward. It’s a story about the right to exist, the nature of identity, and what we owe each other when the math is brutal and the clock is running. For a show that often felt like it was killing time before the real Trek started, this episode had no interest in killing time at all. It’s the one that makes me wish Enterprise had trusted itself more from the beginning. And I wish we had too.
DIS: Such Sweet Sorrow Parts I and II
I’ll anticipate the eye rolls and I get it🙄, I do. Discovery’s relationship with its own plotting was, let’s say, complicated. But this two -parter contains one of the most emotionally sustained sequences in modern Trek. The crew choosing individually, freely, and at genuine personal cost to follow Burnham into an unknown future is the kind of moment the show spent two seasons earning and actually delivered. It’s also the rare Discovery episode where the emotional register feels proportionate to what’s actually happening on screen rather than running about forty percent hotter than necessary. In a series that occasionally confused volume with depth, this one found the difference. You know what I mean. I think. 😳
PIC: Seventeen Seconds
Ok. PIC. I know. Season three of Picard was a sustained argument that the people who made TNG still had something to say, and this episode is where that argument became undeniable. The revelation about Jack Crusher recontextualizes everything before it while the parallel story of Riker and Picard’s fractured friendship plays out with the kind of quiet specificity that only comes from writers who actually understand these characters. It also contains Terry Matalas essentially daring you to feel something, which after seasons one and two felt less like good television and more like a small miracle.
SNW: The Elysian Kingdom
Hear me out on this one because I know how it sounds. This episode gets dismissed as a whimsical bottle episode, a fairy tale diversion, and it is those things. It’s also a story about a dying child, a father’s grief, and the specific loneliness of being a doctor who can’t heal the person he loves most. M’Benga’s daughter Rukiya exists at the center of an episode that uses its fantasy framing not as an escape from emotional reality but as the only container large enough to hold it. Strange New Worlds sold itself as the fun Trek, the accessible Trek, the one that didn’t take itself too seriously. This episode quietly suggested there was considerably more going on underneath than the marketing implied. It’s the best argument the show has made that it has real depth when it trusts itself enough to look for it. Which, in my opinion, isn’t often enough. But that’s just me.
These are mine. Give me yours!