Dang, which I got here sooner, LOL!!
It's a toss-up, but "The Inner Light" is 102% emotional massaging and -800% logic. While the emotional stuff works and works extremely well (it's a very novel concept), that ending, where only one man gets the flute and to hear their thousand year-old story, is all pointless because when he dies so does the memory of this long-lost species, who were so short-sighted they didn't put in a pez dispenser's worth of replicating dime store flutes. That's a HUGE problem that renders the species' conceptualization of immortality just a teensy bit short.
Never mind the probe shuts off once it finds its one recipient of the magic flute that the planet of HR Pufnstuf gave him posthumously...
Of course, "Lessons" is a fantastic story that is more than loosely based on this one... but given the creativity and thought otherwise put into this one, the ending really sucks rocks and gags with spoons.
(Yes, Crusher pretends to be Geordi and calls him a machine by saying she wants to give him a "diagnostic"... At least they address possible health risks.)
What more needs to be said, this scene somehow very quickly trashes the whole episode with its contrived, conscious myopia that wrecks an otherwise fantastic concept. But the story sloughs it off as "Oh, we found our man that can carry our memories. Now our machine that floats infra-luminally across space looking to tell the universe about what we were will shut down. We don't care he's pushing 60s and human males start to push daisies around age 70 unless they're Doctor Fleet Admiral McCoy and that nobody will believe a word he says and think he's a nutter and regardless of that he's not going to tell anyone about them so that's an even bigger episode, but our whole civilization did this satellite with massive and expensive ego trip for precisely and solely just
one person because we're soooooooooo wonderful the universe must know of us because then we'll believe we will live again. But only one man, nobody else should ever know. But we'll live. For 15 or so years. And the satellite only spent 25 minutes with him. Then it makes absolutely no difference. So what's the point? Reminds me of my honeymoon...
And that's why it made my list. And exceptional idea is well-handled for the bulk of the episode, but it's all thrown down the gutter at the very end out of myopia. Why not have the probe continue through space, screwing up the brains of any number of species for a thrill, nowhere near Blueberry Hill? Or Picard destroying it as they don't want Romulans or anyone else to know about this civiliza-- hey, how come Picard didn't go to their homeworld and engage in his xeno-archeology hobby as a sequel? Yet more reasons to have this being the most disliked episode, least disliked, and anywhere else on the dislike scale...
What's left:
Darmok
Ensign Ro
Unification (I)
A Matter of Time
Conundrum
Power Play
Cause and Effect
The First Duty
The Next Phase