Star Trek is known as a franchise that blends sci-fi adventure with thought-provoking storylines,
but the crew of the Enterprise isn't afraid to get a little emotional, too.
As these tear-jerking moments prove, Star Trek doesn't just makes its audiences think—it
makes them cry.
In Star Trek III, Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise have stolen their own ship from
Starfleet and taken it to the forbidden Genesis planet.
The reason?
Dr. McCoy is carrying around the deceased Spock's katra, essentially the Trek equivalent
of a soul, and Kirk is determined to retrieve Spock's body and bring his Vulcan pal back
to life.
Unfortunately, Klingons board the ship and are about to take it over, so Kirk makes the
most difficult choice of his long career, and orders the Enterprise to self-destruct.
After beaming down to the Genesis planet, the crew watches the remains of the exploded
ship slowly burn up in the atmosphere, and if the sight of the beloved starship disintegrating
doesn't make you tear up, their conversation just might.
"My God, Bones, what have I done?"
For both viewers and its crew, losing that ship felt like the loss of a family member,
and the prolonged scene definitely milks the drama of the event for all it's worth — and
gets quite a few tears from the audience in the process.
Star Trek: Voyager took the idea of a "ragtag crew" about as far as it could go, mixing
a crew of thieves and rebels with prim and proper Starfleet officers.
Perhaps no one embodied that idea as much as the alien native of the Delta Quadrant,
Neelix.
He ends up joining Voyager and becoming the ship's resident chef and "morale officer":
both jobs that were thought to be obsolete, but necessary for a crew lost in in the furthest
reaches of space with no easy way home.
Neelix used his natural ingenuity to feed the ship for seven years, and established
himself as the heart of the crew.
When he finally left to rejoin a settlement of his own people, it was secretly one of
Trek's saddest moments.
Neelix tries to quietly walk to the transporter room, but what seems to be the entire crew
is standing in the hallways as a kind of honor guard as he walks through.
Captain Janeway calls the often-silly Neelix "Ambassador," and the ever-serious Vulcan
Tuvok briefly demonstrates that he's finally willing to dance in Neelix's honor.
Seeing the crew like this really highlights the difference that Neelix has made in their
lives, and after he leaves the ship, we see him embraced — a confirmation that Neelix,
who has often been lost and lonely, has finally found his way to a place he can truly call
home.
If you were picking which characters would hook up when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started,
Odo and Kira would probably have been your absolute last choice of couples.
He was the gruff, shapeshifting constable who had worked on the space station when Cardassians
ruled, and Kira was a straight-up former freedom fighter who had dedicated her life to driving
those same Cardassians off of her home planet.
In the episode "Heart of Stone," Kira and Odo end up on a strange planet while chasing
after a rebel.
They split up to find him, and when Odo sees Kira again, she's in a bizarre crystalline
trap that's expanding and threatening her life.
At the same time, mysterious tremors are shaking the planet and threatening them both.
Kira tries to order Odo to leave so that they don't both die, and when she asks him why
he doesn't return to the ship, he finally confesses his true feelings.
"I'm in love with you."
With that out in the open, Kira tearfully admits that she loves him too, and at this
point, audiences are crying right along with her.
Don't get too happy, though.
Before long, the episode twists the knife in our hearts in classic Deep Space Nine fashion:
"Kira" is actually a shapeshifter who, as the rebel, had lured Odo out there to bring
him to his own people: the sinister Dominion.
Odo refuses and retrieves the real Kira, who is completely unaware that Odo's love for
her is so great that he's willing to die for her.
From his one-night stand with Tasha Yar to the trial to determine his right to exist,
Data's attempts at learning to be more human provided some of Star Trek: The Next Generation's
most memorable moments.
None of them, however, were quite as heart-rending as what happened in "The Offspring," a third-season
episode where he attempts to create an android child of his own.
While Lal is more than a little terrifying at first, she quickly becomes endearing, and
by the time a Starfleet admiral shows up to question Data's fitness as a father and whether
the android officer has the right to keep his "child" onboard, we're fully the androids'
side.
Unfortunately, while the admiral is proven completely wrong, it happens in one of the
saddest scenes in the series.
Data's child begins to develop emotions, something Data himself could never do, but her positronic
brain burns out, leading inevitably to her death.
The scene where Data says goodbye to his dying daughter is utterly crushing.
Lal expresses her love, and when Data reluctantly admits he cannot experience that feeling with
her, she vows to feel enough for both of them.
With that, her speech degrades into random words and she dies before our very eyes, leaving
Data once again alone in the universe… well, except for the occasional visit from his murderous
evil brother.
Denise Crosby's one-season run as Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation wasn't really
that notable.
While having a female officer in charge of security was a relatively bold move for 1987,
she was constantly overwritten or underwritten, and wound up dying in the most undignified
way possible when she was casually killed by a malevolent alien puddle named Armus.
That moment was too weird and abrupt to be sad, but the episode made up for it with a
surprisingly moving memorial scene on the holodeck.
Her hologram appears as part of a pre-made program.
She declares that the crew is her family and that they transformed her from an "angry young
girl" to the woman she became.
She even has a personalized message for Captain Picard about how much she admires him.
"I wish I could say you'd been like a father to me but I’ve never had one so I don’t
know what it feels like."
Data comments that even though the ceremony is supposed to be about Tasha, he cannot stop
thinking about himself, specifically, about how empty his life will be without Tasha in
it.
Oblivious to human emotion, he asks Picard if he has missed the point of the ceremony.
Picard responds that this is exactly the point of a memorial, and walks away, leaving us
with the last, lingering notes of the saddest music Star Trek: The Next Generation ever
brought to the screen.
"The City on the Edge of Forever" is one of the most memorable episodes of the original
Star Trek, both for its high concept premise and for giving the show one of its saddest
moments.
Doctor McCoy accidentally overdoses on drugs right as the Enterprise is visiting a planet
with one inhabitant: a talking portal to all of time and space called the Guardian of Forever.
Still freaking out, McCoy jumps through the portal into the past, leaving the crew of
the Enterprise with a huge problem: the Enterprise is no longer in orbit due to something McCoy
has done in the distant past, so Kirk and Spock go back to stop history from breaking.
They end up in 1930s New York.
In classic Kirk fashion, he ends up falling in love with a woman there named Edith Keeler,
but as horrible fate would have it, McCoy's time-breaking act was simply saving Keeler
from dying in an accident.
In the new timeline, Keeler became a pacifist leader and successfully kept America out of
World War II, which ended up giving Nazi Germany enough time to create nuclear bombs and take
over the world.
As a result, Starfleet got seriously messed up.
Soon after, Kirk and Spock are finally reunited with McCoy, and an oblivious Keeler crosses
the street to meet them.
When a truck starts heading toward her, Kirk fights the urge to save her, letting the woman
he loves die.
McCoy is horrified, saying he could have saved her and asking Kirk if he knows what he just
did.
Kirk, meanwhile, can't stop staring at her dead body as Spock replies,
"Do you know what you just did?!"
"He knows, Doctor.
He knows."
The fittingly-named Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Lower Decks" gave us a glimpse of
the junior officers that the show typically uses simply as background characters.
We get a special emphasis on a Bajoran named Sito, an Ensign constantly challenged by Picard
and Worf to get her to stand up for herself.
It turns out that this is their roundabout way of testing whether she was suitable for
an undercover mission behind enemy lines.
Sito agrees to the difficult mission, but never returns home, having died in action,
leading to an incredibly moving speech from Picard.
"She was the finest example of a starfleet officer … a young woman of remarkable courage
and strength of character."
The reaction shots of her various friends as they find out she is dead go straight to
the heart, as does the final shot of Picard: he seems to crumple in his seat, seeming less
like a powerful starship Captain and more like a tired, aging father realizing that
he cannot protect his children,
Ever since Mister Spock first got riled up over Pon Farr, Star Trek has always enjoyed
toying with the emotions of people who aren't supposed to have them.
After spending 13 years as a Borg drone, Star Trek: Voyager's liberated Seven of Nine was
super messed up.
She had no idea how to be human and she was really bad at interacting with other people.
Her social awkwardness was both embarrassing and endearing, and it was also a big part
of why she was such a popular character.
It was a very thoughtful show, after all, so her skin-tight catsuits clearly had nothing
to do with it.
"You became sexually aroused in my body!"
Seven of Nine had a difficult time relating to the people around her, so when she got
the opportunity to take another renegade Borg drone named "One" under her wing, she became
a sort of mother figure to him.
Sadly, the relationship was doomed, of course, and when One accidentally contacted the Borg
collective, he decided that the only way to save Seven and the crew of Voyager was to
terminate himself.
The Doctor tried to save him, but One refused help, despite Seven's gut-wrenching pleas.
"You must comply.
Please.
You are hurting me."
Seven's confusion about One's death and her own feelings is palpable, and really, really
sad.
Just as she's discovering her maternal instincts, she's forced to confront maternal grief.
Of all the emotional moments in Star Trek history, there's one that stands out above
every other one as the most devastating of all time: the crushingly heartbreaking death
of Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn.
It's generally regarded as the single best moment in the best Trek film.
If you're one of the three people left in the universe who haven't seen this one, Spock
sacrifices himself in a radiation-flooded chamber in order to give the Enterprise the
ability to escape from the about-to-explode Genesis device.
Once he's taken a lethal dose of radiation, an incapacitated Spock somehow manages to
struggle to his feet, and still has the presence of mind to arrange his uniform, to make sure
he's up to Starfleet standards in his last moments.
In his final words to his best friend, Spock tells him that sacrificing his own life to
save his friends, his crewmates, and his ship was the only logical choice.
"The needs of the many outweigh…"
"... The needs of the few."
If that didn't have you sobbing, then the funeral that comes after definitely will.
William Shatner's over-the-top acting has been the punchline of plenty of jokes, but
the way his voice breaks when he delivers' Spock's eulogy is genuinely heartbreaking.
Spock would return, of course, but nothing can take the raw emotional power away from
this nearly perfect scene.
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