Poll of the Week: All the Love – Most Memorable Smooches

Love is in the air since Valentine’s Day, everywhere we look around, and over the vast years since it first aired, this space opera in our hearts has given us plenty of on-screen love to wrap our hearts around.
Everyone has their favourite relationship from the series, whether it was Jean-Luc and Beverly who stole your breath away, or you’re a niche fan of Archer and Riaan rooting for them, somewhere along the line Star Trek has pulled on your heartstrings and warmed you up with the smouldering passions displayed.
In First Contact, we’re given a glimpse into Data’s longing for a relationship with someone who truly understood him, and his capabilities of physically reciprocating love — with the Borg Queen, of all people, so maybe it shouldn’t count. She kisses him, he kisses back, disrupting his monologue about the last time he used his advanced bedroom techniques, for the good of all humankind.
In Deep Space Nine, a kiss shared between Ben and Jennifer Sisko is a prompt for the Prophets to inquire about corporeal entities, and why Humans seek out physical contact with one another, thus making the Prophets incredibly jealous for the rest of their days… until they kidnap Sisko for smooches, of course.
Star Trek has also flirted and courted with controversy over the years, showing on-screen love taboo for the times it aired and taken their laurel wreaths as pushing those societal boundaries. First aired in 1968, the Original Series episode Plato’s Stepchildren included the very first interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura, amidst a turbulent political backdrop in the United States of America. Over fifty years later, this is remembered as a pinnacle moment of television, winging its way into the books.
Years later, in 1995, Deep Space Nine would flirt with the same, introducing the former lover of Curzon Dax into the episode Rejoined, once again clanging that bell with a same-sex kiss, paving the groundwork for the later Trek relationship of Stamets and Culber in Discovery.
So, in this month of love, it’s good to remember the relationships — and the smooches — which have made Trek what it is today. Science Fiction has long relied on the relationships built between the characters to demonstrate hope in the world of tomorrow, and Trek has made history doing so.
This week, we want to know…
​Which of these Star Trek kisses made your heart flutter?
Click here to head to the forums now and vote in this week’s poll on which you would choose, or let us know your own! Be sure to leave a comment in the thread!