[wade8069]

The whole episode would have been so awesome of only for one thing - if they didn't keep cutting back to Picard lying unconscious on the bridge!
It completely ruined any mystery or suspense and it became painfully obvious how the episode was going to end. That decision seriously tainted the episode for me, it was a great emotional episode, it didn't need the mystery revealed immediately or the accompanying intermittent technobabble.

[wade8069]

It seems that I am the only one bothered by this question.

[MrQ1701]

I like the episode the way it was. I think the way you wanted to see would have been kind of cool to, but a bit too much soap opera-ish. Remember "Dallas"? It was all a dream! The point of the episode wasn't to fool the viewer into thinking Picard was stuck in another life, it was to let you know he lived another lifetime. In later episodes he refers to feeling fulfilled regarding having children because of his experience during "the inner light"

[Big D]

Originally Posted by MrQ1701

The point of the episode wasn't to fool the viewer into thinking Picard was stuck in another life, it was to let you know he lived another lifetime.

Absolutely agreed. What's "special" about this story is the way Picard gets to live another life - not just the life of a man long dead, but the life of a people long dead as well. That's the most beautiful part, for me.

Think about it this way - the universe is around fifteen billion years old. How many thousands of civilisations have already been born, flourished to greatness, and then vanished into nothingness within our own galaxy alone? I'm talking about countless trillions of people who will never, ever be remembered by anyone, because their cultures and their worlds were lost to history an eternity ago. No-one will ever know about them, and no-one ever can, because there's literally nothing left of them. Sometimes, I think about how this might well be true in our own real universe - not just in sci-fi entertainment - and it conjures up a feeling that's equal parts wonder and sadness.

In The Inner Light, Picard gets the chance to experience and remember, first-hand, a people whose spark has long since faded. That's an incredible gift not only for him, but for the Ressikans as well. It's also one of the best sci-fi stories Next Gen ever accomplished, in my opinion.

[horatio]

The question is whether the episode would have been better if the audience had shared Picard's perspective during the episode.
I don't think so, it would have added an unnecessary sense of mystery, made the viewers speculate what happened to Picard and thus it would merely have distracted us.

[Zardoz]

For just a TV episode, it's good. Not one of TNG's best episodes, but good.

[FanWriter45]

Big D,

Perhaps not as many as you might think... after the big bang (13 billion years ago, give or take a eon) the universe was composed almost entirely of light elements. The first stars had to form, in order to "boil down" the basic stuff of the explosion into heavier elements... so, carbon, the basis of all known life, didn't really form until comparatively recently. As such, it could very well be that intelligent life might be a fairly new phenomenon in the universe...

[FanWriter45]

Oh, and BTW, I disagree with several of the posters here... I think "Inner Light" is one of the best TNG episodes... It's one of the few that focuses on character, and very human values. The only thing I wish they would have added to it is a scene were they establish that these people actually had a technology that could record and play back experiences... That would have been one of the few things that could have improved it.

I loved this episode so much, in fact, that when my wife and I repainted the entryway to our house, we looked very carefully at the way they painted their homes. Just beautiful!

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

I like that episode the way it is. It's also nice to know that Picard got to experience what it is like to raise a family even if it wasn't "real". (he got to do that again in the Nexus for a short time).

[kevin]

The cuts to Picard never bothered me because the premise wasn't really 'where is he really' - well, not to me anyway.

I was fine knowing that he was living another life, and for me it made the ending more emotional - the realisation he was now the living memory of an entire race now long gone.

I think it's one of TNG's best episodes, if not of Star Trek as a whole.