I think, with this many decades of hindsight, it is not unfair to claim The Inner Light is TNG's City on the Edge of Forever.

It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.

ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.