Critical Reception
This episode won the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The award was given at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco. "The Inner Light" was the first television program to be so honored since the original Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" won in 1968. The other Hugo Award-winning Star Trek episodes are "The Menagerie" (the only two-part episode of the original series) and "All Good Things..." (the series finale for The Next Generation).
The episode is considered by fans to be the most touching of the series' episodes, along with the similar Family episode. It is the favorite episode of actors Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and Wil Wheaton, who played Ensign Wesley Crusher. Star Trek writer Susan Sackett notes that it is also her favorite episode even though it's not one she wrote. "The Inner Light" was ranked among the top five episodes in a "viewers' choice" marathon that was broadcast just prior to the premiere of the series finale.
Read more about this topic: The Inner Light (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)