The Enterprise encounters an alien probe, which targets Captain Picard with an unusual nucleonic beam and knocks him unconscious. Picard awakens in a small alien village, where everyone sees him as a man named Kamin, and where he lives with a wife, Eline. Though he is initially determined to find a way back to his ship, Picard slowly comes to accept the world around him, and goes on to live for decades in this other life -- a profound experience that is actually being implanted in his mind by the alien probe.
"The Inner Light" is not simply a great episode of Star Trek, it's a great episode of television in general. No real understanding of the series is required to watch it, but its themes are universal -- getting to explore a road not taken in your life, the growing love for family, struggling to survive against impossible odds. It's a powerful demonstration of empathy, as Picard is given the chance to spend a lifetime in another man's shoes. (Shoes that he often leaves for his wife to put away.)
The episode was a favorite among virtually everyone involved with the show. Showrunner Michael Piller praised it (along with "The Measure of a Man" and "The Offspring") for its emotional power. He said the episode "genuinely explored the human condition, which this franchise does better than any other when it does it well." Writer Ron Moore was only disappointed that the show wasn't fully able to honor the fact that this would have been the most profound experience in Picard's life. He noted they were just after a good hour of TV at the time, and later just had to content themselves with a single follow-up episode, "Lessons."
There was even award recognition for the episode, when it received the 1993 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. Sadly, the Emmys would not deign to recognize a sci-fi show -- and a syndicated one at that. This episode received only a nomination for its makeup, which it didn't even win. Makeup designer Michael Westmore, for his part, was more upset for Patrick Stewart, who he thought deserved an Emmy for his performance.
The concept for "The Inner Light" was pitched by an outsider, Morgan Gendel. He was a hardworking freelancer at the time, selling scripts to several series. It took several attempts before he sold this idea. Originally, the story sent Picard, Riker, and Ro Laren into a shared alternate reality, the purpose of which was promotional -- an alien advertisement transmitted directly into your brain. He refined and simplified that idea, ultimately circling on the notion of giving Picard an entire alternate life, though he initially worried that the Star Trek staff would never go so far to allow their main character to be given a wife and kids.
Instead, the idea was embraced, and staff writer Peter Allan Fields was assigned to polish the final script. Though Fields has declined to be interviewed about Star Trek since his retirement, Gendel had only kind words for him (both in the audio commentary included on the Blu-ray season 5 set, and in the many interviews he's given over the years). In particular, Gendel credits Fields with punching up the romance between Picard and Eline, adding details like putting away the shoes, and really selling them as a loving couple. Gendel also noted that his original draft had a few more moments back aboard the Enterprise, with the crew getting hints of what was happening to Picard. He doesn't miss those elements in the finished product.
The script is filled with numerous subtle touches, no matter who put them there. There's the use of the village tree to show the passage of time. There's Picard's slow improvement at the flute, along with the particular detail that at first he practices with "Frère Jacques," until finally accepting his new life and switching to the Ressikan melody. There's also a lovely passing of a torch, as Kamin's son seeks as a vocation what his father only pursued as a hobby.
What the script never had, according to Gendel, was a more specific explanation of the tech involved -- an incredibly wise omission. How was this largely agrarian society able to launch a probe into deep space that was capable of implanting memories in an unknown alien being? Not only would calling attention to this have interfered with the emotional throughline of the story, it would have raised unnecessary, unanswerable questions.
Everyone on the production side of the show brought their A game to this episode. The village of Ressik is arguably the most successful alien environment ever created on the series, because this is not one of the occasions where the show went out in the real world to film. (The brief shot of Picard hiking in the mountains notwithstanding; that was filmed in go-to Trek location, Bronson Canyon.) The village is an indoor set, lit very convincingly -- and ever harsher, in the later scenes where the sun is close to death.
The old age makeup is another tremendous accomplishment. Sure, we now know that Patrick Stewart has seemingly not aged a day in the last 23 years, but one can hardly hold that against the makeup artists, who had to do something to show the passage of time. Their seamless work took six hours to put on, giving Patrick Stewart the earliest makeup call of any actor during the entire run of the show, but it holds up even in the Blu-ray remaster. And Picard/Kamin was not the only character they had to age.
The episode's music is composer Jay Chattaway's finest work on the series. Not only does his underscore tenderly pull your heartstrings without becoming conspicuous, the haunting melody he created for the flute is likely the most memorable music of The Next Generation. Morgan Gendel was prepared for a fight to even include the flute in the story, after Michael Piller initially laughed at the idea; Piller quickly changed his mind before it became an issue. The production even relented on its standing policy of having no music from inside the ship be audible in space, allowing for the fantastic conclusion where the solitary flute accompanies the Enterprise to its next adventure.
Then, of course, there's the acting. Michael Westmore wasn't wrong; Patrick Stewart should have won an Emmy for his work here. Stewart himself called this episode the greatest acting challenge he faced in the series' entire seven-year run, but he rose to it wonderfully. There's one tear-jerking scene after another, from Picard/Kamin finally committing to his new life after five long years, to observing that the things he didn't know he needed now complete his life, to the death of his wife Eline, to the realization that he's the "message in a bottle" for a dead civilization, to discovering his old life wasn't a dream, to clutching the Ressikan flute to his chest in the final scene -- his one and only souvenir of an entire lifetime.
Stewart doesn't have to bear the weight of telling this story alone, though. The guest cast is also exceptional. As Eline, Margot Rose really has the responsibility of making the whole thing work. She has to be "good enough" for the audience to accept that Picard would ever stop searching for the Enterprise. She is that compelling, in every scene from her initial heartbreak that her husband doesn't remember her, all the way until her touching death scene. Character actor Richard Riehle (who you may recognize from Office Space) is also wonderful as Kamin's friend, Batai. And Patrick Stewart's real life son Daniel appears as Kamin's son.
Other observations:
- The Blu-ray version of this episode includes a number of deleted scenes, though each is really just an extension of a few lines within an already-existing scene. Most are trims you'd never miss, but there is a fun episode intro: Picard gripes about sitting through a 12 hour opera with an admiral, both telegraphing the musical hobby he would later adopt, and the fact that sometimes a short amount of time can feel like it passes very slowly. There's also a nice moment after Kamin mourns the full life his grandson won't get to have; his daughter Meribor pipes up to insist that he's her son, and she has seen to it that he has had as full a life as possible.
- Counselor Troi isn't in this episode, which conveniently removes the most likely way the crew could have learned what was happening to Picard while he was under the influence of the probe.
- Writer Morgan Gendel named this episode for the B-side of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna," thinking that the title spoke to the content of the episode. Later on, listening to the song's lyrics in more detail, he'd decide there were even more connections than he'd intended. But in truth, all he'd really intended was to name this and any subsequent Trek episodes he might sell for Beatles songs. He admits that today, he has mixed feelings about the fact that when you Google "The Inner Light music," this episode shows up in the results before the Beatles song.
- Among all its other wonderful elements, this episode even has some subtle commentary to offer on climate change, as Kamin fights to get a politician to listen to his plan to save the planet. Morgan Gendel says this was purely coincidental, because he knew little of global warming in the early 1990s. He just needed a reason a whole civilization would go extinct, and a supernova fit the bill nicely.
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