In 1993, I wrote a spec TNG episode called “The Empath.” The crew needed to get information from an alien race about how to get through a dangerous part of space. But the aliens only communicated telepathically, so the universal translator was no help. Troi couldn’t understand them either. However, the neural interface of Geordi’s VISOR allowed him to perceive their thoughts.
The problem was that these aliens were highly emotional, and Geordi found it overwhelming. So he turned to Troi for advice about how to handle and interpret the emotional overload. My idea was to take the chief engineer completely out of his element and force him to solve a different kind of problem, leading to some reflection about why he chose to work with machines instead of people, and why his best friend was an android. It was a perfectly good episode, if nothing spectacular.
The script did get me invited in to pitch stories to Deep Space Nine, which led to my writing an episode for them and getting hired on Voyager.
Lisa Klink (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Roswell, Flash Gordon), quoted in Vulture’s article “8 Star Trek Spec Scripts That Never Saw the Light of Day.”
Lisa Klink on pitching a spec script for Trek
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