ISOLATION
Our hero, a geologist named DWIGHT LAVAUGH, is upside down, froth coming out of his mouth. He’s fine; that froth is beer; his colleagues have him doing a keg stand because this is Dwight’s going-away party. He’s moving to Washington DC in a week to marry his fiancé, TRACEY. The venue for the keg stand is BAR 82, as in 82°N LAT. It’s the supply depot at ECO-1 base which doubles as their local pub, because the next closest one is 3,800 miles away.
At 2 am, an Italian biologist named MARIO goes outside to check some equipment. In this land of the midnight sun an eerie glow reflects off the glacial ice. Mario sees a SHIMMER in the shape of a torpedo streak across the sky and crash through the ice nearby. Remember what the Predator in the movie of the same name looked like when he used his cloaking device? It’s like that. Mario goes to investigate and that’s the last anyone sees of him until, 2 hours later, when Dwight finds him frozen solid, naked, next to a 10-meter tunnel right through the ice to the Arctic Ocean below. Mario’s cell phone shows video of the shimmering object crashing – and now he’s dead.
That shimmer was an alien projectile masking its presence.
Unmanned, but it presents a way bigger threat than the global warming Dwight and his colleagues are trying to reverse. It’ll take our heroes much of Season One to figure out what the projectile represents, which is as follows:
An alien civilization sent the projectile to Earth to do exactly what WE say we’re going to do to other planets: terraform them, as in, change the climate and atmosphere to make it more hospitable. Worried about global warming? Want to keep the Earth from over-heating? The aliens want it colder too: 100° colder! Ninety-eight percent of all life forms on Earth will die including plants, which means our atmosphere will change too.
It could take those aliens a century to get here (or so we think…), but when they do arrive our planet will be just the way they like it. Unless we stop them. Unless the nations of the Earth can get past their instinct to circle the wagons and throw everyone else under the bus.
All this plays out at ECO-1 base where you’ve got people from many different countries who regress to tribalism and nationalism. It’s a microcosm of the world at large, playing out right at Bar 82 with a bunch of hard-drinking, competitive scientists who will have to look in the mirror and ask themselves: Are you for your country? Or for your planet?