The Inner Light
The Enterprise encounters an alien probe which knocks Captain Picard unconscious with a beam. While he is unconscious Captain Picard dreams he is living on Kataan, the planet from which it is eventually determined the probe originated. He lives out the rest of his life, another 30+ years, on Kataan. He remembers his life before Kataan but slowly grows to accept that there is no going back. He is married, has children and grandchildren, and lives a happy life. This is of course all an illusion induced by the probe. The 30+ years transpire in just 25 minutes in the real world as Captain Picard learns once the probe releases him.
I wasn't terribly moved by this episode until the end. Up to that point I was getting a little bored with it. I didn't anticipate the reason why the probe did what it did or the heartfelt way in which it revealed it's reason to him.
The entire episode from the time Picard falls unconscious until the moment he wakes up is not just about him. There are also a number of scenes on the bridge of the Enterprise as the crew try to break the probe's hold on the captain. Each time the focus returned to Picard another 5 to 10 years seemed to passed in his life.
There was a moment towards the end of the episode where Picard reveals that he knows that Kataan is doomed. For about 30 seconds I wondered if he was going to be the Jor-El of Kataan, the scientist who knows that the planet is doomed but no one believes, but then it was revealed that the others agreed with his conclusion that the planet was doomed.
I may have seen this episode before. I'm not sure. I've certainly heard about it and it lived up to the hype. I doubt that I would call this my favorite episode but it got to me and that's definitely worth something.
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