Are you a Trekkie who wants to see if our picks line up with yours? Or do you just want
some shows that can help you squeeze out a few tears? Either way, here are our nominations
for the saddest episodes of Star Trek ever.
After a long and stressful mission, the crew of the Defiant receives a distress call from
a Starfleet captain shipwrecked on an inhospitable planet. At first, the crew can only hear the
transmissions from Captain Lisa Cusack, but can't respond. Soon, Chief O'Brien's tinkering
establishes two-way communication. With the Defiant still days away and Cusack having
nothing to do but slowly suffocate, Sisko establishes shifts for his officers, including
himself, to sit by the communicator and keep their stranded colleague company.
"But some part of me is always saying 'They may not be here tomorrow.'"
Captain Cusack proves to be a gift to her would-be rescuers. With the crew struggling
under the weight of the Dominion War, Cusack happily gives a sympathetic ear to their problems.
She helps O'Brien see he's keeping his friends at arm's length because he's afraid of growing
too close to people the war may take from him, and lets Sisko see why having his girlfriend,
Kasidy Yates, aboard the Defiant bothers him so much.
When the Defiant finally reaches its destination, the crew is shocked to discover Captain Cusack
has been dead for three years. An energy barrier surrounding the planet somehow allowed for
the Defiant's transmissions to reach her in the past, and hers to connect with them in
the future. They bring Cusack back to DS9 for an Irish wake where the crew gathers to
honor her and to share the lessons their friend taught them.
At first, Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Offspring" seems like it might become
another exploration of the rights of synthetic life. After Data surprises his friends with
the reveal that he's created a new android named Lal, Captain Picard is extremely concerned
about the ramifications. His fears are realized when a Starfleet Admiral demands Lal be taken
off the Enterprise to be placed under the supervision of Starfleet scientists.
Hallie Todd's portrayal as Data's android daughter Lal is sweet, funny, and ultimately
heartbreaking. Like her father, Lal is confused by human behavior but does her best to learn,
doing things like grabbing Will Riker without warning for a kiss or telling Data that she
believes she has mastered the art of humor because so many children laugh at her.
Lal unexpectedly grows beyond Data's programming and develops the ability to feel emotions.
Unfortunately she can't survive them. After being overcome with fear at the prospect of
separation from Data, her systems experience a critical failure. In her final moments,
she thanks Data for her life and tells him she loves him. When he tells her he wishes
he could feel the same for her, she says she will love enough for them both.
Star Trek has lots of ways of forcing illusions on its characters. When it comes to these
illusions, perhaps no other Trek story proves as harmful to one of its heroes as DS9's "Hard
Time."
While visiting the Agrathi homeworld, Chief Miles O'Brien is wrongly convicted of espionage.
Rather than maintaining physical prisons, the Agrathi punish criminals by implanting
memories of incarceration, including hunger, isolation, and torture. When Kira arrives
to pick up Miles, he's only been in their custody for a few hours but he has memories
of twenty years worth of prison.
The Miles O'Brien who returns to DS9 is a changed man. He prefers to be alone, he's
angry, he refuses to see his therapist, and he threatens his best friend Dr. Bashir. He
eventually gets violent, assaulting Quark for taking too long to serve him a drink and
even coming close to hitting his daughter. It's revealed that during most of his time
in the virtual prison, Miles has a kind, patient cellmate named Ee'char. After 20 years in
the cell with him, wrongly believing his friend is hiding food from him, Miles murders Ee'char.
Hallucinations of Ee'char appear to O'Brien on DS9, only disappearing when, on the brink
of ending his own life, O'Brien finally accepts help from Bashir. And it turns out that even
in the future, there's no easy cure for PTSD.
Written by late author Harlan Ellison, Star Trek: The Original Series' "The City on the
Edge of Forever" is a time travel episode that forces Captain Kirk into an impossible
decision.
The trouble begins when a temporarily insane Bones flees into a sentient time portal calling
itself the Guardian of Forever. Shortly after he enters, the timeline is altered so that
Starfleet basically ceases to exist. Kirk and Spock follow through the portal, ending
up in New York City during the Great Depression. Believing they're homeless, the kind and forward-thinking
Edith Keeler helps the pair, and she and Kirk fall in love. Unfortunately, Spock discovers
that Keeler is the subject of the timeline shift. Keeler is supposed to be killed in
a car accident. If she survives, she'll help spread a message of pacifism that keeps America
out of World War II, which in turn leads to Germany's victory.
"She was right. Peace was the way."
"She was right, but at the wrong time."
When the moment comes for Kirk to decide, it's fast and brutal. Kirk and Spock find
Bones, and Edith crosses the street to join them without paying attention to traffic.
When the car destined to kill Edith approaches, Kirk not only stops himself from helping,
but holds onto Bones and stops him from interfering as well.
When the trio returns to their crew, Kirk has no comforting words for his friends and
ignores the Guardian of Forever's invitations for other journeys through time.
One of Trek's first attempts to explore the plight of LGBTQ+ people was in TNG's 1992
episode "The Outcast."
"We use a pronoun that is neutral. I do not think there is really a translation."
The Enterprise encounters the androgynous race the J'naii who need help finding a lost
shuttle and its crew. The Enterprise crew determines the shuttle is in a pocket of what
they call "Null Space." Riker partners with a J'naii named Soren to find a way to get
into the Null Space to rescue the missing crew.
The attraction between Riker and Soren is noticed by Riker's friends and the other J'naii.
Soren confides in Riker not only that she's attracted to him, but that she identifies
as female. For a J'naii to identify as either male or female is forbidden, and others like
Soren are treated as outcasts. If they're discovered, they're undergo a kind of conversion
therapy called "psychotectic" treatment. Riker and Soren's relationship is discovered before
it gets very far. Soren makes a passionate speech in front of the other J'naii and Riker
tries to intervene. He takes responsibility for everything and offers to take Soren with
him. The J'naii refuse.
Ignoring Picard's warnings, Riker and Worf attempt to break Soren free. They easily overpower
the J'naii guards but once Riker is alone with Soren, she's a different person. The
psychotectic treatments are complete, and Soren believes she had been ill and is now
well. Riker desperately professes his love for her, but Soren simply answers "I'm sorry"
and walks away.
In this bittersweet DS9 episode, Ben Sisko is believed killed when struck by a bolt of
energy during an accident on the Defiant. For years after the accident, Ben continues
to briefly appear before his son Jake only to eventually fade away, like a ghost, into
subspace. After returning to Earth, Jake marries and finally publishes his novel Anslem to
wide acclaim. But after he becomes obsessed with saving his father, Jake abandons writing
to pursue scientific study and his marriage falls apart.
Jake determines his father keeps appearing when and where he does because the accident
connected him to Jake, and that the only way to save him is for Jake to die during his
father's next appearance. As an elderly man, Jake awakens to his father smiling at him,
and Jake reveals his plan. Ben is crushed, but it's too late, Jake has already taken
the drugs that will kill him. As he dies, Jake tells his father he's doing it not just
for Ben but for
"The boy that I was. He needs you, more than you know."
As the elderly Jake dies, Ben appears years earlier during the accident on the Defiant,
and ducks the bolt of energy just in time. If you aren't already tearing up, Ben embracing
his young son while crying grateful tears should push you over the edge.
This truly bleak episode opens with the marriage of Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres, but they
don't get to enjoy their honeymoon. The molecular cohesion of Voyager is deteriorating, affecting
both the ship itself and the crew inside. B'Elanna is the first to die.
The crew discovers something shocking. In the previous season episode "Demon," Voyager
had landed on a planet that created a complete duplicate of the ship and all her crew out
of biomimetic fluid. Tuvok and Chakotay determine their ship is the duplicate...and they're
now all dying because of exposure to radiation from their enhanced warp core.
Everything the duplicate crew tries ends in failure. When they try to find solace on a
planet, they're chased off by aliens. The ship and crew deteriorate too fast for them
to make it back to their homeworld, and even an attempt to launch a capsule with all of
their logs fails. Few of the crew are left by the time they detect the original Voyager
on their sensors. They try hailing the ship and the original Voyager responds, but by
the time they get there all that's left of the duplicate ship and crew is formless fluid
floating in space.
Sadly, the episode in which we learn the most about the mysterious Star Trek: Discovery
character Airiam is "Project Daedalus," is also the same episode in which she dies. It
had been clear for a number of episodes that something was taking over Airiam and forcing
her to act against her will, and "Project Daedalus" opens with Airiam reviewing her
memories and deleting many of them, including the tragic loss of her husband just after
they had eloped.
The Discovery crew finally figures out Airiam is being manipulated by Control, Section 31's
threat assessment A.I., but only after Airiam is alone with Michael and Nhan on the ransacked
Section 31 HQ. Airiam nearly kills her colleagues, but regains enough control to insist Michael
kill her by opening an airlock while she's in it. Michael refuses, insisting Airiam can
fight Control, but Nhan takes the choice out of Michael's hands and opens the airlock.
Airiam is shot into space and dies, but before she succumbs, Tily uploads the memory of her
on the beach with her fiance so she can see it one more time.
The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Terra Prime" mainly deals with the Enterprise's conflict
with the group of the same name. Led by John Frederick Paxton, Terra Prime is a xenophobic
extremist group dedicated to removing all aliens and alien influence from Earth. Among
his crueler tactics, Paxton takes DNA from T'Pol and Trip and uses it to create a half-human
half-Vulcan clone infant. He displays it as a propaganda tool, calling it an "abomination,"
and uses it as leverage after he takes T'Pol and Trip hostage.
Terra Prime is defeated, but the baby doesn't survive the episode. Phlox initially believes
the baby's illness and resulting death is due to the inherent incompatibility of human
and Vulcan DNA. But in the final scene a devastated Trip tells T'Pol that the doctor discovered
there was a flaw in the technique used to create the child, and that a human/Vulcan
child might survive. T'Pol reaches out and grabs Trips hand in support, a powerful gesture
considering her species and its philosophies towards emotion.
Shortly after the Enterprise encounters a probe, Captain Jean-Luc Picard collapses on
the bridge and wakes up to a woman named Eline who claims she's his wife, and tells him his
name is Kamin. Understandably, Picard is convinced something deceptive is going on, initially
believing he's on a holodeck. After five years of no rescue from or contact with the Enterprise,
Picard accepts his new life on the planet Kataan, including falling in love with Eline
and regularly trying and failing to master the Kataanian flute. The scenes occasionally
cut back to the Enterprise where only minutes have passed; but on Kataan, years have gone
by for Picard and his new family. Finally, an elderly Picard attends a celebration with
his children and grandchildren, which turns out to be the launching of the same probe
that the Enterprise encounters. The truth is finally revealed, that the probe has given
Picard this vision of a lifetime so someone will remember Kataan and its people.
After the probe deactivates and Picard wakes up, about 25 minutes after it begins transmitting,
the crew retrieves it and Riker brings the package it contains to his captain. Inside
the box is Kamin's flute, which Picard remembers how to play, thanks to decades of a completely
separate life he's lived, and instantly lost.
After returning from a mission where he went over security procedures for upcoming peace
talks on DS9, O'Brien notices everyone is acting strange. Keiko is doing everything
she can to keep their daughter away from him. Sisko is giving his engineers orders without
talking to him first, Bashir is hounding him about getting a physical, and all it takes
is a 30-second conversation with Jake Sisko for Kira to jump in and tell Jake to go see
his father. It gets to the point where O'Brien worries Keiko's trying to poison him.
O'Brien uses his engineering know-how to escape DS9 in a runabout and rush to the Parada system
to warn them and see if he can get to the bottom of things. He reaches the hideout of
the Paradan rebels, and the truth is revealed: The real O'Brien was imprisoned and a "replicant"
copy was made of him and sent back to DS9 in his stead, to disrupt the peace talks.
The Paradan rebels discovered the plan, rescued the real O'Brien, and informed DS9 of the
plot, which explains why everyone was acting strange around him.
The replicant O'Brien, having just arrived on Parada, knows none of this. Critically
injured by one of the rebels, the replicant dies calling out Keiko's name and begging
the real O'Brien to tell Keiko he loves her.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about Star Trek
are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss
a single one.