Okay, now THAT was funny.
Gotta love those Vulcan baby daddys!
An episode I liked. The one where the high ranking Romulan defects to warn the Federation about a cloaked base thats the start of planned war/invasion. Because he knows a war will be B A D for the Romulans. Turns out he was set up and it was all faked. He did something amazingly noble and sacrificing. Yet, even the characters in the show all seemed to loathe him and his choices to some extent.
Patrick Stewart has remarked it was his favorite as well, The Inner Light was the episode that stood out the most for me, a truly stupendous story crafted into a one hour tv show.
The laugh at the end of Tapestry, and the reason for it.
I don’t know how “Loud as a Whisper” (and it’s spiritual sequel, “Darmok”) got left out of my earlier list – particularly since the former was the one that convinced me that TNG was going to be worthwhile.
And I loved Worf’s remark too. I like to fanwank that he actually got it done, too. (Or if he couldn’t, it was all Riker’s fault.) I can easily say Federation science has having eradicated the causes of deafness among humans a hundred years before, and sign language having so vanished from culture that nobody had realized its tactical usefulness till Worf had his “aha” moment.
I have so many favorites, but the one that’s on top of my list is The Inner Light. Picard had lived a lifetime in 25 minutes and it had a profound effect on him for the rest of the series. It is by far my favorite episode.
The one where a very young Wesley Crusher gets a tiny bit intoxicated and saves the ship with his mommy and her unrequited lover (Jon Luc).
The one where Denise Crosby (Commander Tasha Yar) gets killed.
The one where 7 of 9 (Jeri Ryan) gets nekkid. (Yeah, I know, it’s Voyager.)
I don’t think loathe is the right term. (Well, okay, Worf loathed him, but Worf was explicitly racist about Romulans at that point.) They just didn’t trust him; they thought he might well be in on what scheme the Romulans were hatching, rather than one of its victims.
SecondStone, I think Yar died a lieutenant.
Tapestry and Inner Light are my two favorites by far.
I like the one where Data’s humanity is on trial (Measure of a Man, maybe?)
All Good Things was great as well.
And of course, I love all of those short funny clips where they took quotes out of context, mixed in a little video editing magic, and made the entire crew seem like they were insane. You know the ones I’m talking about?
I promoted her posthumously. I saw the original series a zillion times as a kid in the 70s. I was only able to stomach TNG once.
Oh gawd that sounds funny. I hope someone has a link. And I wonder, has anyone done one of the raging Hitler videos with him bitching about Star Trek in one way or another?
Try “That Jean-Luc Picard” and “Bridge Buffoonery”, my two favorites. They’re done by the same guy who does MS Paint Adventures, I believe.
A vote for Inner Light as well.
The flute playing was really poignant.
This guy does them best- he has a website with dozens more on it. They are hilarious
Thanks guys. Time to spend even more of my life wasted on youtube 
I liked The Offspring, where Data makes a kid. It’s not as good as some of the bests mentioned here, though.
I mostly like the last fifteen minutes or so.
Darmok I couldn’t like because I couldn’t believe the things it was saying about the language of the alien. (Even if such a language could exist, it couldn’t support the development of a spacefaring technology.) (And even if it were all true, the translator should have had no problem handling this.)
That episode was part of the inspiration behind my original, long-time Internet handle (and original SDMB username), “Phase42” (the source for the “42” wasn’t Douglas Adams, BTW, at least not directly; rather, I noticed one day that every time I needed to name a random, large-ish number, usually when I was using hyperbole to describe how many people were in line, or how many things went wrong today, the number I pulled out of the air was always “42-something”. “I swear there were 42 people in line at the convenience store!” “Yeah, I’d like to buy that, but I don’t have $42,000 laying around.” Sadly, almost everybody in the chat rooms assumed it was my age (I was 30 when I picked the handle).
And the deadpan way, after smashing Geordi’s lute, he said, “Sorry.”
I enjoyed the episodes that featured “enemies” and depicted individuals rather than the simple, monolithic “enemy culture”, and we were shown that, just like in real life, they’re ordinary people who are usually pretty decent. The three examples I can think of offhand were all Romulans - the soldier who was trapped with Geordi on that planet and they had to work together to escape, the episode where all the different races were working on the same “mystery” and arrived at a particular planet where they learned they were all descended from the same progenitor race (the Romulan captain Picard talks to at the end), and the episode where Troi was undercover as a political officer on a Romulan ship, and the captain of that ship turned out to be somebody who recognized the problems with her government, but was loyal and earnestly wanted to do what was best for her people. Additionally, I thought that was also the best Troi-centered episode of the series.
Like the Ferengi DaiMon Bok in “The Battle” and “Bloodlines”. His hatred for and drive for revenge against Picard were completely personal things, and resulted in his disgrace both times, first by losing his military commission and being thrown in prison, then by being abandoned by his Ferengi allies when they found out he was taking extrajudicial revenge.
Do you mean from the point when Admiral KillHimWithFire threatens Lal with being separated from her father, and Lal goes to Troi’s quarters to freak out? Said freak-out being made all the worse because she had no idea what emotions were all about? And then has an electronic stroke, forcing Data and the admiral to force emergency positronic surgery, and the admiral realizes what a dick he’s been, and she dies?
Yeah, that got to me too.
I’ll have to disagree with you on that one. Partly because the Picard-Darmok story was compelling in itself, so I could pretend that Picard was just stranded someplace without his translator; but mostly because of the way Patrick Stuart told the story of Gilgamesh. It was perfectly wonderful.
Anyway, I think it was less that the aliens’ language was so metaphoric as to be incomprehensible, as it was that their brains were so different from other humanoids that the translator’s magical technobabble mindreading feature didn’t work.
I don’t think it is technobabel mindreading. There was a DS 9 episode where it takes several minutes of conversation between Kira and the New Alien of the Week to make the translator work.