Video: Ars picks ten emotional moments from our favorite sci-fi TV shows

If you're reading Ars Technica, there's a good chance that you like science fiction in all its forms. As a storytelling medium, science fiction television has had its ups and downs—from the golden heyday of the 1960s with Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, and others, to the dreck-y nadir of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where every vision of the future seemed made of dreary beige plastic, all the way through the modern renaissance heralded by Star Trek: the Next Generation and carried on today by a huge variety of shows. But at its very best, the science fiction we love has used its explosions and spaceships and wormholes and bumpy-headed aliens to tell us contemporary stories in an unconventional setting—often turning the status quo on its head to provide new insight into the way life and society works.

There’s no such thing as good "lifeless" science fiction—the set and setting only take you so far. For a show to work, it needs believable characters that an audience can latch on to; we need to be able to buy into their motivations so that even if we don’t agree with them, we understand them. The very best science fiction television shows are the ones that succeed in establishing an ongoing emotional connection to the audience—the ones that make us actually care about the characters.

In the video above, I’ve canvassed through four Ars favorites—Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and The X-Files—for ten of our favorite character moments. That’s ten instances where actors transcended the medium and wrung raw feeling out of the audience. I could have gone on forever picking awesome bits out of each show—and I could have included dozens more shows, too!—but I had to draw the line somewhere, so in the end I went with my gut and picked the moments that resonated most with me personally.

It’s totally fine if you disagree—this is the Internet, after all, and arguing about science fiction is one of the oldest and most respected Internet pastimes. If you have other picks for heart-wrenching character moments, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below!