Or when Geordi and Dr. Crusher need to move them away from a plasma fire.

"my nemesis"

@@miketaterparker I don't know why but I love that little C-plot even more than Riker decapitating Data in the same episode "Disaster" is so good and a good O'Brien episode to boot

Or when they’re full of T’Pol’s addiction rock.

Lol!

Yeah that was memorable

Yes, ladies. You're BOTH quite correct.

That was a good episode. Wish we had a chance to see him do more front line war reporting during the dominion war.

That episode was based on Red Badge of Courage.

That’s your favorite?? I watched it once and it made me cry and feel so sad that I’ve never been able to watch it again

That wasn’t dark. It was. Heart felt father and son episode and it makes me cry too.

@@MartianManHunter_ It was dark because Jake "lost" his father in the main timeline so in a way that episode became his future.

You forgot Ds9 In the Pale Moonlight. SHOULD have known wormy Garak was going to f it up.

Tony Todd as older Jake…

hold still while I remove your eye without the use of pain killer's I will rip your apart for money🤣🤣

'Duet' was fantastic I could still watch it today and it still sucks me in.. Excellent writing but Harris Yulin as Maritz took it over the top, his delivery sends shivers down my spine "What you call genocide I call a day's work!!"

And yet... it had hopeful undertones. Because of Maritza's willingness to sacrifice himself for the greater good, Kira was able to overcome her indiscriminate hatred of all Cardassians. For that reason I don't think it's a contender for 'darkest'.

That and Duet. Avery did such a good job in that and the writers managed to realistically capture the era despite the nature of the show. Everything Sisko's alter ego does and say in response to the society he was born into is a tragic truth. One can't but feel bad for him and others repeatably robbed of their future and passions. Duet, people don't cry as much about because it's a person we hated the entire episode until the reveal. We only learn he was an fully innocent and tortured person much like Miles was as a prisoner. The difference is we know O'Brian, we love him. Seeing that character break down in tears unable to cope with horrors of genocide and slavery as an unwilling witness is hard. The first time is a shock, you can't react fast enough to come to your senses. The second time you watch it more intensely and realize just how nearly driven to madness his guilt and suffering has brought him to

V Guyver, Duet as a dark episode. To me it’s one of the most uplifting. Here we have Kira, a life suffered, living on hatred, hit and run tactics and scraping an existence, and she is so certain that this must be the infamous war criminal, and then realizes, maybe for her first time, that there do exist Cardassians who seek out peace and are tortured, embarrassed by their civilization’s history. If not for Duet, when would she be able to....humanize?....any cardassian? Would it not have happened until meeting Tora Ziyal?

@@Keithustus the episode after they retake DS9 from the Dominion and Sisko and a captured Dukat are stranded on a planet and Insane Dukat puts himself on trial and tries to Justify all his war crimes is way darker than Duet.. And for my money is the darkest DS9 episode even darker than "Hard time"

I totally forgot about that superb episode.

It was so heartbreaking. Poor Sisko, in that dreadful time when people's skin colour put them in lesser positions. The WeThe"people was such a lie. Why does no one highlight the lie that all men were created equal.thanks to trek, skin colour was less of an issue.

True, but almost no one then even knew what episodic television could be. Meanwhile they a bit started attempting that with Voyager, and the wheels fell off immediately. At least it gave us BSG.

He probably HAD therapy for it and maybe had a Vulcan meld practitioner help him compartmentalize it!

And yet babylon 5 managed an entire storyline from start to finish

Space Antidepressants are way more powerful than Zoloft. Dr. Bashir's Space Drugs! Just a Hypo-A-Day and the Sadeness goes away!

That's true, though there's probably an in-universe explanation for it like super therapy and ultra-antidepressants or whatever. We're talking about the same universe with things like time anomalies just being an expected thing with tech and protocols to detect and deal with it or 3D printed spines.

O'Brien was kind of the only one who was real. Dax, Garak, Quark, Odo and Kira all were used to playing different roles in different situations. The only other coming close to O'Brien was Sisko and he got enough beating from the writers (while the acting was outstanding as well). *edit* forgot Bashir. He was playing a lifelong role as well.

Why was it so important to keep O'Brien non-com? Sisko could have given him a field commission (the way he did for Kira).

Word.

​@@leomarshall4059 I would imagin O'Brien wouldn't want it.

Yeah, that scene when he is disembarking and limping, my first thought was "VETERAN".

Ya I think the actor got a lot of praise from veterans for that depiction

Except can't they grow limbs

It really is a good episode for covering ptsd, not just from combat... I've seen/known people who lost their lovers tragically... but I never thought it could happen to me... "I'm SCARED, alright???" ...God that hit me so hard... realizing exactly what was holding me back from opening my heart again. I don't want to feel this pain again, yknow? "if you stay here, you're gonna die...not all at once, but little by little..." >.> sounds like the adult version of Bluey's "you don't have to keep coming back to this place..."

Or a road map out of darkness...

meh captain Lorca deserved to die multiple times for the fun of it

Yea, which makes the beginning of into darkness (was it that one, with the volcano) even more meaningful, the prime directive sucks yet starfleet are aware so the new generation of captains are basically brainwashed to follow it blindly, leading to incidents like you mentioned, some crazy arcs in star trek ill give it that..... The PD is continued insanity imo...

Yea and Tuvix......

Wow, really good point, I never thought about it that way.

I always figured everyone gets exactly the same video. Get beat up, be hungry, kill cellmate, program complete.

Yeah, it also shows greatly how retributive prison system are able to turn good people into bad people. O'brien is a more dangerous man after his sentence than he was before. In what world could anyone want such a prison system? Literally nobody benefits from it.

The worst part is all he did was ask an innocent question

That's astrong, strong take

Thank you! I'm shocked that I had to scroll this far down to see someone mention it. God, the ending: Kirk's "Let's get the hell out of here," then the horns of the soundtrack & the hollow wind. So. Bleak.

@@bradchoi9679 The Naked Time

@@bradchoi9679 Somehow I can't see Captain Space Jesus making the same sacrifice.

Not to mention willing to plunder and leave another Starship defenseless to deal with problems the Equinox created. Just to get home a little faster. Yeah, it was a pretty Dark example of "Star Fleet" officers turning and eating their own.

Closer to third wave experiment.. But yeah

Agreed. I was surprised that Steve didn't mention 'The Wounded', PTSD can lead to a very dark existence.

Not a lot of TNG moments that hit harder than O'Brien and Maxwell singing "The Minstrel Boy". You can tell why they put the money down to sign Colm Meaney for the main cast of the show that turned "The Wounded" into a series-long story arc.

@Leo Peridot Maxwell's situation is made even worse by the fact that he was *right* about the Cardasians. They *were* violating the peace treaty and building up for another attack, and they were probably only caught at it because he went rogue. Section 31 wasn't exactly on the ball in that era.

@@richmcgee434 Section 31 was invented years later in the production history of the franchise, so they couldn't very well be "on the ball" in a script that existed before they did as a concept.

the fucked up part was that his old commanding officer was completely correct about everything and picard only stopped him to maintain peace between the cardassians and the federation

Worf asks Riker to give him an assisted suicide in the episode where he gets himself paralysed, as well.

@@VoiceofGeekdom Yeah, but Worf sucks

Captain Kirk got pushed to the breaking point every other week. In "Requiem for Methuselah", the episode doesn't end with a joke. It ends with Spock sucking an episode's worth of memories out of Kirk's head to prevent a nervous breakdown.

@@Dorian-_-Gray i wonder if that's been the go-to in universe solution for all the horrifically traumatic incidents that seem to have had little to no impact on the characters?

Yeah, but Neelix killing himself would be the only good thing the character ever did.

I actually liked Voyager better then Next Gen and I grew up watching TOG when it was new. I could go into details and comparisons but, in the end, it's just my opinion.

*"Hatchery"* is my nominee for darkest _Enterprise_ episode... though _not_ because of what the folks behind it intended. Archer comes across an undefended, abandoned nursery filled with _literal babies_ of an enemy civilization. He tells his crew, like any good _Star Trek_ captain would, that these are _infants,_ helpless and alone, and just because some of the same species took a potshot at Earth, that doesn't mean they should just _let babies starve to death._ ........then, because it's _Enterprise,_ it turns out the _babies_ sprayed Archer with mind-control goop, and the "right thing to do" was to let them die. *_What?!_*

That episode still shocks me when I watch it

@@Dorian-_-Gray I thought that was thematically intensional in Enterprise. It's making the mistakes that would then be rules and directives later. The Federation literally learns from their mistakes.

@@AdamWarner That'd be nice, but that message isn't found anywhere in that episode, and the incident never comes up again on the show. In the episode, everyone thinks Archer's crazy because he doesn't want to let "enemy" babies die from neglect and starvation, and it turns out, they're right. It's a very "9/11 just happened" kind of messed up, like a lot of Enterprise season 3.

That's a very good point!

For me it was an episode of The West Wing in which after standing near President Martin Sheen during an assassination attempt on him, the staffer is PTSD engulfed thereafter by loud noises without knowing why, culminating months with a hospitalization-level panic attack from the vigor of Christmas music and percussion. Viewers were only shown his perspective until the medical aspects were explained to him upon diagnosis afterward.

Even when I have not been in prison, hard time is an episode that touches me on a very personal level. Spending so many years in isolation, with so many regrets, slowly falling into depression and the loss of the ability to lead a life like before everything became so heavy and dark and see ending everything at once as a way to do the right thing not only for yourself but for those in your life that you have unintentionally hurt with your bad habits... It's just the way I've felt for years.

I was expecting the Molly episode to be mentioned myself

Me too, older Molly does at the end so young Molly can "go home"

I was thinking of the Time's Orphan episode as yet another example of the writers apparently having a fetish for putting O'Brien through some of the worst conceivable stuff.

The creepiest part of that one is where the Pah Wraith (in Keiko's body) is just calmly brushing Molly's hair, with the most creepy psychopathic grin you could imagine...it's not wonder O'Brien did exactly what she said. That was some damn good acting on Rosalind Chao's part. Oh, the goal wasn't to collapse the wormhole, it was to kill the Prophets (wormhole aliens), so the Pah Wraiths (their evil counterparts) could take it over. Since they exist outside of time, they are vulnerable to chroniton radiation, it outright kills them.

I'd say that the darkness of those famous episode is used to make philosphical points that I didn't really see in Discovery, and weren't resolved in a satisfactory way in Picard. So my issue (besides the fundamental difference between a mostly episodic show vs a mostly arc driven show) is a lack of focus that makes the dark tone not really earned the way it was in DS9.

OuterwebsXZ Quite well explained. Old Star Trek just had a lot of different episodes and a lot of those were positive in nature. They were also always quite clear that the core concept is an utopian future, something extremely rare in Science Fiction. Discovery is basically just today with better technology. The focus on one compact story in Discovery has its advantages on overall drama, but it takes a lot from the wild ideas the older episodic series could go with. Ah well, the older Star Trek series have not a lot in common with the Discovery type of series anyway, just way different type of tv. Which reminds me that I should watch more of the Orville for some old school episodic Sci-Fi.

I agree with all three of you above. New Star Trek is not dark, its depressing has it unimaginative borrows literally from other sci-fi.

I'm two episodes into Discovery and not sure if I should continue. There wasn't much character set up before the CGI started, and already I loath the main character. I rejoiced when the captain (she seems cool and probably not dead) sent her to the brig. My Little Pony enemies have better writing than the Klingons' "if we kill people in a dishonourable sneak attack, it will unite our people" At least the court marshal decided that for one count of insubordination she should spend life in jail. It makes up for all those times I thought "you're actually getting away with doing that?" in Enterprise... There's enough "dark and edgy" in the real world. Filmmakers are just doing shock because they are lazy.

My issue with it (as far as I can have, given that I've never watched any of them) is that they very much appear to be shows made by people who don't have a creative thought or idea in their brains. It turns out that that is mostly correct, as the plots and mechanics for huge chunks of the shows are apparently all ideas stolen directly from various video games. It also feels a lot like the people making the show have an active dislike for fans of the series and appear to go out of their way to take things that the fans like about Star Trek and turn them into the exact opposite. Hopeful future where mankind has worked out most of its issues and works together to learn, explore and better themselves? PFFFFT! Fuck all that. We gotta blow shit up and have space fights and action scenes where people's guts get ripped out and heads get chopped off! Everyone's a cursing alcoholic drug-abuser with a bleak, tortured past. Everyone's always angry and make rash, emotional decisions. It's like the negative-land version of the Star Trek universe. If they're gonna do that - and I'd rather they didn't, but if they HAVE to do that - then set it like 300 years in the future from where the TNG era shows left off. Then you can explain away the weird new incongruous technology like the spore drive (ripped off from a video game), or have the Federation be a vapid clone of shitty contemporary political bullshit with a FOX news surrogate. Have a collapsed Federation where some dickheads took over who'd had enough with all of these bickering little scuffles with Romulans and Klingons and Cardassians and they said "fuck it, let's just dominate all of them" and they brought the hammer down. Then fast forward like 100 years beyond THAT point and have a show happen. Make all of that shit the backstory for why things are so fucking weird, backwards and wrong. Then make compelling stories about that shit. Hell, set it on some fucking non-Federation ship. Make the Federation the actual bad guys. Make it a multi-cultural show about some smugglers who are dodging the Federation and trying to make a living and get involved in some larger plot. I mean, they'd basically be ripping off Firefly at that point, but it's not like that would be beneath these people. But THAT would be both compelling and you could use the several hundred years of time as a reasonable excuse for why things would be THAT different.

You think? Numerous Klingons are scratching their heads and wondering why "The Trouble With Tribbles" didn't make the cut. Being buried in the damn little monsters like Kirk was has got to be a Klingon nightmare. And the TAS "More Tribbles, More Troubles" episode is even worse. Now they're *giant* tribbles, and they're on board your own ship, and when you shoot them they multiply into hundreds or thousands of the little ones. I believe the correct phrase would be "Hu'tegh chaH lItHa' jIH!".

Is that a problem? It seems like a fair way to judge.

From that point on they live as if nothing happened. I remember missing this episode and coming back to it after finishing the series on netflix and it suprised me how this seemingly colossal moment for this character is written out and forgotten about

I'm glad that they didn't have Julian do that. It would've cheapened the payoff.

It could have been much worse if Bashir had done that. Imagine having all those horrible memories fade from your conscious mind and then begin making changes in your unconscious mind. Miles could have had his personality utterly changed in subtle ways and end up killing someone or lashing out for, what appears to be, no reason. What I'm surprised about is that he wasn't prescribed to a telepathic 'memory surgeon' to have his congnitive process evaluated and to have his mind convinced those memories were fabrications. If you recall the famous STOS episode 'Spectre of the Gun', the only way the crew survived was to have Spock mindmeld with each member to convince them utterly that nothing was real. "The slightest doubt would be enough to kill..." Did they ever confront the issue in 'Hard Time' that all of his experience with his cellmate, including Miles murdering him, was a fabrication? There never was a cellmate. There never was a cell. There never was weeks where they were deprived of food. That was all part of the sentence to put remorse into Miles conscious mind.

@@ericstockham7009when i first watched DS9 and discovered the plot of the episode, I skipped it. I hadn’t ever skipped an episode before and I finished the series pretty quickly before getting back to it. Idk why it felt triggering I guess but its the sort of premises that I hate watching, just super mean-spirited and unnecessarily cruel and unjust for no reason and to a complete innocent person. Considering how often we get cop-outs and quick techno-babble solutions even to psychological episodes, i just wish they had done that with this instead of leaving it, i mean the fact they never bring it up again is bad enough, why couldn’t they just fix it. I mean i dont know how O’Brien could ever get over this, its so unfathomably horrifying to think of TWENTY full years of prison with nothing else, no yard-time, no visits, just endless

@@williamromulanhall7256but there was no payoff thats the problem, it never came back, it disappeared entirely from the series. Why the fuck not bring up a solution if it never lasts beyond the episode, it doesnt affect O’Briens behaviour at all

I had to sit through six seasons of Terry Ferrell trying to act. Tears of the Prophets is always a nice change of pace. At least until Ezri appears. If only they could have found anyone who could actually do the job to make Jadzia believable. Great character wasted.

And then Sisko gets stabbed by a crazy Bajoran cultist at the end of it.

came here to say this and was pleasantly surprised to see that someone else had expressed exactly how i felt about it

Part of "Damage" is that there's really no _"they must raid a friendly ship"_ about it. There _are_ other alternatives. Archer begins to try to negotiate, but gives up as soon as the other captain pushes back. After that, Archer's unwilling to _risk_ tipping off the other captain before he raids the ship for the coil. So he gives up, instantly, on a non-violent solution. That's why it's such a powerful moment, and a powerful callback to earlier in the season.

I forgot about that episode. Yeah, it was pretty dark. I can't remember another captain in Star Trek making a decision like that given a similiar situation. Star trek always made a way out. Though, there was Captain Ransom and the Equinox.

Yeah... but even though the script writers probably thought they were being really clever with their contrived scenario, it wasn't actually out of character for Archer (in my opinion). No other Star Trek Captain would have even contemplated it, and they would spend the next four weeks trying to return any stolen property if someone on their ship had done it. Unfortunately it's a script writing failure in trying to make Archer's character "edgy"... It just made him (and in corollary: the series) less likeable.

@@balloonsystems8778 I hate to break it to you, but _every_ script is a "contrived scenario." That's what a script _is._

Glad someone is commenting to include this episode. To this day I still can’t square it. Archer, I tell my wife as we were watching, is interesting because he’s probably the worst Star Trek captain, and although this episode clearly fits that narrative, since he couldn’t Kirk-Kobiyashi-Maru his way out of unethical behavior, I more generally mean his shortsightedness, riding blindly from catastrophe to catastrophe, whereas especially with Picard and Sisko things seem more deliberate, more diplomatic. If it’s true the intent of the show was to show the technical and moral challenges of being the first exploratory Starfleet vessel, and have to do so with the introduction of a temporal Cold War, great, sold, as if Archer then couldn’t be Pike/Kirk/Picard, they all would learn from his misadventures. And for that reason I’ll always love Enterprise, allowing for skipping the more deplorable episodes.

Yeah it sucks when the people you use to hate but try not to hate from your gooey gut no more are hellbent genocidal p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶p̶a̶t̶s̶ sociopats with accomplices in the Federation Council and Starfleet Command. All of the sudden Worf and Sisko's war crimes seem like child's play.

Still better than the current US prison system.

O HAI THERE Black Mirror...

There's a pretty good episode of the 90's Outer Limits that deals with this same issue.

@@JB52520 paradise schmaradise. You heard me.

@@ermixonscraziesttheories and that's exactly why it'll never catch on. There's no profit to be made from people living pretend sentences. Prisons are largely for the purpose of companies making profits, not justice or protection. They shouldn't be... but they are. I'm glad the tech won't catch on, it's horrifying. And it's the wrong focus for change - it's not the method that needs replacing, it's the motive rot that wants uprooting from the core outward - who's sent there and why, and for how long and why. You want to reengineer how justice works, that's where you begin.

The one where Neelix and Tuvok got blended together in the transporter and Janeway had to formally execute the resulting person to get back Tuvok and Neelix, that was rough

@@rainkidwell2467 "Tuvix"

"Latent Image", the one where the crew starts editing the Doctor's memories to erase an incident where he was forced to choose who lived and who died and the guilt was tearing his program apart.

Because for a single week the crew was free of Neelix's cooking.

Yea that deserved a mention at least

See... I'm torn with Tuvix (which I think is the point of the episode). Tuvix is a combination of Tuvox and Nelix and, by the end, it's learned that those two crew members can be recovered. So... Is Janeway a murderer for sacrificing Tuvix to bring back TWO officers from which Tuvix was made, or, would it have been murder to let Tuvix live at the cost of those two crew members? If YOUR life was mixed with another forming a third, what would YOU like your friends to do about it? Bring you back to yourself, or bail on YOU for this third entity? I think the Tuvix episode is a double edged sword for Janeway. I think it's easy for us to rag on Janeway for this decision... but, honestly, I don't think it would be as cut and dry if YOU had to make the same moral choice and have to live with the consequences.

Tuvix knows what he did

@@ObsidianBlk Hold on was the episode just a stupid trolley problem.

You are in good company. This episode won science fiction's highest award, the Hugo. S-F's version of the Oscar.

Brilliant performance by David Ogden Stiers in that ep!

That one was truly tragic.

To me those episodes always come across as: hitting people over the head with a message...... Like the one where they find a human boy in an alien society and think he's been physically and mentally abused, but he isn't.

Either beets or self-sealing stem bolts.

Paul Jackson better than that yamok sauce…😂

And expired yamok sauce.

What about self-sealing stembolts?

or vermicula for antedeans. yummm.

Nice. For me it was the pig scene in Willow and the donkey scene in Pinocchio.

I too had friends who died from AIDS. Too many of them. I had two scrares myself where I thought that I had AIDS. The first was when I had thrush. First HIV test was negative. I had a long 6 month-waiting period for the second test. Thankfully it was negative. Still don't know how I contracted it as at the time I hadn't had sex in 6 months. The second time is when a bar tender and I hooked up after the bar I was working in died of AIDS a week after we had sex and I was unaware that he was HIV positive. We were mainly safe because I didn't want to bring anything home to my LTR (we weren't monogamous at the time and we knew of each others hook ups) - the same relationship that I have been in for almost 41 years. Peace

And specifically rejected slave labor... until Star Trek: Picard 😞

"Kai Ratched," I love it! She was so excellent in that role, I marvel at her artistry in being that character.

In (at least one of) the non canon Star Trek novels, a big plot point of the book is that that action ends up totally breaking that kid once she absorbs what had happened, and it turns her against her father and the people he represented. I think that would be a decent plot thread to bring back in Picard, if they ever decided to tie up some of the dangling plot threads from TNG.

"Her belly may be full but her spirit will be empty", that line was absolutely one of my favorites in all of Star Trek.

It just goes to show that Cardassian children had a very harsh upbringing. Remember Garak? Even on his death bed, Enabren Tain denied that Garak was his son. How cruel can you be?

@Smaug the Magnificent Lol that's just Cardassian for "I love you boy." Garak gets it -- he's a devotee of classic Cardassian literature

I know it’s not that kind of show, but any real attempt at personal continuity for characters would have gone a long way toward making the individual episodes matter more. Like, how does a crew that’s half Maquis continue to hew to Starfleet guidelines after years away from the Federation, experiencing weird shit, and expecting not to return for decades?

Tuvix has to be at least the honorable mention. You really feel for him as everyone around him is happily telling him he has to die so some other people he doesn't really know can live.

@@caravaggio2012 And they were sooooo close to a workable script for that: all they had to do was have the Doctor declare that Tuvix would most likely be dead in a year because of genetic instability or whatever, but there was still a little time to bring Neelix and Tuvok back. Then we'd have a genuine moral dilemma, and a semi-justifiable action on Janeway's part.

@@kingbeauregard The Trip's clone, Sim, treatment from Enterprise Similitude Enterprise: S3, Ep10

"Tuvix" just made me laugh, honestly. As Steve's brought up, _Voyager_ tends to assign values, pasts, hobbies, etc. to the cast on an episode-by-episode basis. Not episodic TV, but episodic characters. So when Janeway decides to murder someone at the end of "Tuvix" instead of finding some wisdom-of-Solomon, _"we got our friends back and left Tuvix on some friendly planet!"_ solution, I mean... *_the whole deal with Janeway_* when they announced the show was, _'the first captain who's a sci-fi physical scientist!'_

@@Ares99999 But this was the problem with the series: from that point on, Janeway was a depraved murderer, but the show couldn't mention it.

@@artboymoy Similar to "Year of Hell"...

Agreed. But how in the world were they just 2 years from Federation space, then disentegrated while still in the Delta quadrant?

@@carlapeay208 They had invented an ingenious new warp technology that made them much faster.

What about “Equinox”? Capt. Janeway would’ve let the nucleogenic aliens kill that crewman if Chakotay didn’t intervene.

Yeah, I wont even re-watch that one.

I give Picard a 'by' on that one because the task needed to be done and Ensign Sito was in the best position to make it happen (the 'prisoner' needed to be Bajoran). It's certainly dark, but more 'necessities of command' than cold-hearted manipulation. Look at him right after he says "I wanted to make sure you had a fair chance to redeem yourself" and she leaves the room (31:42). He know's she'll say 'yes' to the mission at that point, and he's miserable because of it.

The captain is wonderful and the captain is terrible. A captain has to make calls that sometimes requires sacrifice of his/her subordinates. This is the burden of command.

I adore that episode! But I think it leans more towards tragic than dark.

Will have to rewatch the episode again, it’s been too long. I always get it confused with the Ro and Guinan as kids episode.

No way!!!

Yeah, 'Rocks and Shoals' always stuck with me as very very bleak, though for me it was the other part of the story. The moment when the Jem'Hadar walk into the trap knowingly, and especially when that absolute ingrate Keevan walks past the bodies with that smirk kinda broke me. That part still makes me shudder with dread.

@@richarddeman374 indeed, I find the two stories compliment each other. You have to be prepared to die and kill for liberty.

I had forgotten that 'Rocks and Shoals' covers both of these stories in the same episode! Definitely a contender for the darkest DS9 script. It paints a picture of two very different types of people willing to give their lives for what they believe in. While they make it clear they don't see an alternative, the Jem'Hadar are certainly being used while matching to their own deaths, whereas the Vedic takes her own life in order not to be used. I'd love to hear the writers of that episode explain their thoughts and motivations for this episode.

"Tuvix" is a good way to make philosophy students fight all night and start again in the morning!

If a transporter can make a duplicate Riker it could have made a duplicate to Tuvix

To be honest id probably have done the same thing (although risks could change that)

I was rooting for Tuvix to live because neither Tuvok or Neelix were particularly endearing to me as characters.

At least the cat made it out safe

Again and again and again....Curse of the Irish!

DS9 is enjoying something of a renaissance in the fandom, most now regard it as the strongest of the 90s era Trek series. So you're not alone, and liking DS9 isn't as unpopular as it once was.

@@KayleighBourquin Is hating Enterprise still popular? It was the first series I didn't see on TV, but I bought all DVD boxsets and viewed them all once. Last year I rewatched them and I couldn't remember most of the plots, not even from the Xindi arc. I also rewatched TNG and DS9, and I could still remember a lot of plots from those.

@@ilex471 Enterprise is extremely cheesy. But it's pretty good cheese.

Me: Same.

Is it Siege? Watching it now.

Well it did get a mention.

I was expecting that or Hard Time to be the Darkest, so I was half right I guess?

I agree with you about In the Pale Moonlight. Yes, Hard Time was a dark ep on a personal level, but In the Pale Moonlight had Starfleet agreeing to manufacture evidence to bring the Romulans into the war against the Founders. That goes against all of Starfleet’s beliefs, and THAT is dark!

Yeah, that is a pretty dark episode. I'm surprised that it's in season 4 though. It has a very season 2 feel to it.

And they walk the audience through the whole process as well. It starts off as "Oh these people with their guns and their weird words are strange and backwards", moves through "Hey maybe they have a point", and then comes full circle to "So it was all lies or propaganda and they were really bad guys too, huh?" Chillingly well written, especially for a Voyager episode.

Yes, "Year of Hell" would have defenitely been worth mentioning.

Native Spacians?

@@kingbeauregard They were Native Somewhere's. It's not like we call 'em Native Americans after the fact that their ancestors lived in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, most of the people born in the US we don't call Native Americans even though they were clearly born in America. So ... I don't know? How many generations back do we require? And what percentage of the ancestors of that generation? Is there even a universally applicable answer to those questions? If we look at, say, for example, an American-Italian, how many generations have to have lived in Italy after immigrating from, say, France, for them to not be American-French instead? How does this work? Is there _any_ rule?

If I recall they were actually Native Americans plucked from earth by an alien race called the preservers known to have placed humanoid races onto different worlds

@@cmoorhead1 Which apparently was a VERY popular thing to do at the time.

@@cmoorhead1 Yes, you are right! and that happened very long ago. The natives in the series, were the descendants of those plucked.

I always hoped Archer told the Xindi to go find the ship and help them home. Another dark episode is Similitude, cloning Trip who would eventually be killed to harvest an organ to heal the real Trip.

Yeah - that summed up (just one of) the big problems with Enterprise. Captain Archer isn't a very likeable character...

Chris Brown, Similitude is fine from an ethical perspective. Archer agreed to make the clone only when Phlox said it would be possible to harvest the tissue without ill effect. Once that became wrong, Archer persuaded and Sim agreed to the procedure. On the other hand, what really ticked me off about the episode is how its teaser is Archer giving a eulogy over what looks like Trip, as if he’s going to die in the middle of season 3.

Surprised this comment was so far down, what a brilliant joke.

Yeah, that's pretty much Old Yeller In Space. I always found TAS: "Time Trap" fairly awful when you think about the escaping Enterprise & Klingons abandoning all the crews of the other trapped ships to their fates - at least some of whom are their own people, and possibly their own ancestral relations. And despite knowing about the phenomenon now there's no mention anywhere of anyone attempting a later rescue despite there being ships from all over the galaxy stuck in that spacetime hole. That's pretty dark, pretty much leaving a bunch of shipwreck survivors adrift for eternity.

Yep. Stupidly unethical in every way, and a biting commentary on the US & USSR fighting by proxy in other nations throughout the Cold War.