The writer responsible for the most celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is launching a new gritty sci-fi series. As reported by Deadline, Morgan Gendel — writer of TNG’s “The Inner Light” — has just secured a deal with Welsh broadcaster S4C, Hiraeth Productions, Canada’s Fun Republic Pictures and Karma Film, to develop a new “eco-thriller” science fiction show currently titled Isolation. The in-development series will focus on an ensemble of characters attempting to combat climate change in the near future, who also encounter an extraterrestrial force capable of direct contact with human minds.
While more specifics of Isolation are under wraps for now — including any casting or release date details — Inverse did reach out to Gendel directly to get a bit of insight as to his creative process for this new series, how it relates to his Star Trek work, and somewhat surprisingly, how it all connects to his love of the Beatles.
“There's a whole ‘Inner Light,’ kind of linkage here, to the extent that both deal with alien technology and the human brain,” Gendel tells Inverse. “And you've got a team thrown together isolated from humanity to one extent or another. Those are not intentional [parallels]. My writing often puts people in a pressure cooker to see what emotions or truths boil out of them.”
“The Inner Light,” which won the Hugo Award that year, is a famous episode of TNG because it didn’t follow familiar tropes of that franchise. At the start of the episode, the USS Enterprise encounters an ancient alien probe, which immediately tethers itself to Captain Picard’s mind. Then, although only a few minutes pass as Picard lays comatose on the floor of the bridge, he lives out an entire lifetime on a planet called Kataan. The “inner light” referenced in the episode is this hidden lifetime that Picard is given through advanced, but ancient, alien tech.
In addition to writing “The Inner Light” for TNG, Gendel also penned the popular episode “Starship Mine,” which was, at one point pitched as “Die Hard on the Enterprise.” Gendel also wrote two DS9 episodes, “The Passenger,” and “Armageddon Game,” and in the former, Gendel’s interest in mindscape-ish sci-fi was also present. “I seem to be kinda obsessed with the brain as a gatekeeper for everything we think we sense and experience,” he says.
Gendel says that Isolation will also have aliens communicating with human minds, but also notes, “This is a vastly different show than anything I've worked on, with a right-here-right-now vibe. Its end-of-the-world stakes are directly tied to the struggle to tame climate change.”
Isolation will combine climate change elements with mysterious aliens for an eco-thriller aesthetic that promises to be utterly unique. But, Gendel admits the title has one more connection to his Star Trek past. The award-winning episode “The Inner Light” shares its title with the George Harrison Beatles song of the same name. And for his new sci-fi series, Gendel admits there’s a link to the John Lennon song, “Isolation.”
“The elephant in the room, always in every room for me in a good way, is the Beatles,” Gendel says. “But, to set the record straight, I had already written ‘The Inner Light’” when it occurred to me that the George Harrison song had a title and lyrics that fit my story. Same thing this time: an exec I was working with suggested the title ‘Isolation’ — still tentative, I hasten to add — and it only took me a few months to remember the John Lennon song; ‘The sun will never disappear, but the world may not have many years.’ Wow!”
