“The High Ground”
Written by Melinda M. Snodgrass
Directed by Gabrielle Beaumont
Season 3, Episode 12
Original air date: January 29, 1990
Star date: 43510.7
Mission summary
The Enterprise has decided to give some medical supplies to Ireland Rutia IV, but it turns out terrorists have been bombing places so shore leave got canceled. Bummer. Dr. Crusher, Worf, and Data are sipping some tea in a cafe (for…work?) when a bomb goes off injuring civilians. Worf says they have to get out of there, but Crusher starts bandaging the wounded and refuses to beam back to the ship until the local medics arrive. Suddenly one of the Ansata–the space IRA–appears out of nowhere, kills a policeman, and abducts Crusher to the void from whence he came.
Crusher is taken to their leader–a man named Finn–but she gives him the silent treatment.
Meanwhile, Picard meets with Devos, the police chief, about getting his chief medical officer back. She doesn’t have anything nice to say about the Ansata. Nothing useful, either:
PICARD: And what exactly is Ansata policy with regard to hostages?
DEVOS: I doubt they have one. They don’t usually take hostages. These are not people we’re dealing with here. They’re animals. Fanatics who kill without remorse or conscience. Who think nothing of murdering innocent people.
PICARD: But they could just as easily have shot her where she stood.
DEVOS: Don’t ask me to explain them. I can’t.
Writing! By professionals!
Devos half-heartedly requests some arms to quell the rebellion, but Picard cites the Prime Directive and she doesn’t seem surprised. She does, however, hand over a confiscated…thing…that may be responsible for the Ansata’s miraculous transport ability. Picard trades Riker for it, proving himself a shrewd businessman.
Meanwhile, Finn has made some inroads with Crusher who finally asks him what she’s doing there. He says he wanted her medical expertise, and berates the Federation for “allying” themselves with the Rutia, which Crusher of course denies. She invokes Wesley to try and garner sympathy (has that ever worked?), but is quickly put to work with some stolen Federation medical supplies to treat a bunch of dying rebels. They’ve suffered some kind of irreparable DNA damage. Finn reveals that it’s the work of the “inverter,” their magic transporter, which is actually a dimensional shifter that destroys humanoid tissue. He’s dying, too, but to Crusher’s horror he embraces his role as a martyr. On a more positive note, he draws pretty pictures! But in order to see them you have to hear his conspiracy theories about George Washington, America’s First Terrorist, so it’s ultimately a net loss for the viewer.
Riker and Devos are on the hunt for any leads to the Ansata hideout. First, they interrogate various people who were present at the bombing that are sympathetic to the Ansata cause, including the waiter at the restaurant. Maybe he’s just bitter that a currency-less society is responsible for bad tips, but he’s definitely one of Finn’s men. Riker tells him to report back that the Federation is willing to negotiate for Crusher’s release. It turns out Wesley is the only one actually making progress on this front, though, because he figures out what the inverter Devos had passed along can do and works with Geordi and Data to trace the emissions and pinpoint the location of their hideouts.
Unfortunately, the waiter not only tells Finn about the possible exchange but mentions the mass arrests and police brutality. Because he might actually have a point in any other show, this one discredits him by making him decide the obvious next step is to blow up the Enterprise while listening to Dashboard Confessional because then, finally, “someone will listen.” Sorry, emo kid, but they won’t.
Using the inverters, various of Finn’s followers zap to the Enterprise, killing random personnel and planting a bomb on the warp core. Geordi manages to pry it off and have it beamed into space, but Finn still makes off with the captain. Picard refuses to cooperate but Finn only needs him as a pawn to get the Federation involved. Then, rather than make a phone call, he uses the inverter AGAIN to go back to the ship and tell Troi to tell the Federation to come talk. By the time he zaps back, he’s in bad shape thanks to the DNA damage.
That last transport was just what Wesley needed, though, so Riker plans a rescue party. They beam over, cut the power, and take down the terrorists while looking for Picard and Crusher. Crusher is starting to get a little Stockholm Syndrome, though, because Finn has been drawing her and gave her his sketchbook as a peace offering. She gets pretty upset when Devos finds the three of them–Picard, Crusher, and Finn–and kills Finn. Then a little boy shows up and points his gun at Devos, but Crusher tells him not to and that works for some reason.
RIKER: He could have killed you. He didn’t. Maybe the end begins with one boy putting down his gun.
Actually, no. The end begins with the credits, which can’t come soon enough.
Analysis
I very much want to admire this episode. I wish I could find in it a scathing indictment of the Federation’s dull pacifism, or a smart look at the difficulties that come with any quest for peace, autonomy, and freedom. It gets so close when Finn refers to the Federation’s “moral cowardice.” I hoped, again, to see a shadow of America’s history: the paradox of warring for peace and fighting for freedom.
Sadly, no. Terrorism and the skunk people who support it are bad!
I’m grossly unqualified to analyze this through its intended lens, that of “the Troubles.” But it’s too superficial and silly to even demur here. When Devos calls these people animals, she’s right. They’re completely ridiculous. We don’t know what they’re fighting for, and we don’t care. From where I’m sitting, their biggest difference appears to be hair stripes. The conflict is absurd, the Federation’s stance is absurd (why exactly are they supplying medicine to one side of a civil war??), the resolution is absurd, and the less we think about it the better.
The only way I find this episode remotely palatable is as a Dr. Crusher character piece. She’s competent, principled, and keeps her head together in the face of great threats. She sees a lot more complexity than the rest of us do in Finn’s cause, and isn’t afraid to defend the Federation’s own history against his distortion of it. And while she does sympathize with Finn, she doesn’t fall for him, and never misses an opportunity to call his tactics stupid and self-defeating. Finally, when she meets Picard again, she apologizes for her mistake, acknowledging that her effort to help those on the scene was in a sense selfish and jeopardized the whole ship. Her arc embodies the kind of maturity the rest of the episode so painfully lacks.
But then there’s the creepy pictures and the little boy at the end and the police lady who is just so SAD to be an oppressor and Troi needing to explain to Wesley what a hostage is and SIGH.
At least it includes Picard punching that guy. That was awesome.
Torie’s Rating: Warp 1 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Blue and purple, plus skunk hair: just no.
Best Line: FINN: Captain, the Federation has a lot to admire in it, but there’s a hint of moral cowardice in your dealings with non-aligned planets. You’re doing business with a government that is crushing us and you say you’re not involved. You’re very, very much involved. You just don’t want to get dirty.
Trivia/Other Notes: Snodgrass wanted to write an episode paralleling the American Revolution, but the producers meddled: “I wanted it with Picard as Cornwallis and the Romulans would have been the French, who were in our revolution, trying to break this planet away. Suddenly Picard realized he’s one of the oppressors. Instead, we do ‘Breakfast in Belfast,’ where our people decide they’re going to go off to Northern Ireland.”
Ron Moore, Michael Pillar, and Brannon Braga all disavow it, but someone wrote the thing, didn’t they!?
This never aired in Ireland or the UK until 2007.
Richard Cox, who plays Finn, has to be one of the hardest working actors in LA. He’s been in pretty much every TV show since the ’70s. He will look familiar. You will not know why. You will look him up on IMDB. You will still not know why.
Previous episode: Season 3, Episode 11 – “The Hunted.”
Next episode: Season 3, Episode 13 – “Deja Q.”
If I were feeling generous, I might bump this up to a 2, but I’m not, so I agree with Torie. It may be my memory playing tricks on me, but it seems like TNG went to the political terrorism well about once a season in the post-Roddenberry years. And it never really works. They always flirt with “these people are fighting for something important to them” but wind up having to make them basically bad.
There are so many things they could have done here to make this a really good episode. First of all, they could have given us some indication of why the Ansata are doing what they’re doing. Either make it something that looks really trivial from the outside (closer to the Troubles and you run the risk of comparison with “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”) or something serious (closer to the American Revolution thing but you run the risk of endorsing terrorism). They could have actually shown us that fighting the terrorism has turned Devos into a cold-hearted, ruthless policewoman. They could have acknowledged their own backstory and had Picard deal with the fact that this may be the second time he has to tell Wesley about the death of a parent (they never make use of this obvious dramatic tool, going all the way back to “Justice”). But of course, they didn’t do any of that.
They did use Wesley pretty well, though. He actually has something to do and even though he makes the final connection, he works as part of a team and acknowledges that. Also Riker doesn’t go hitting on Devos (or vice versa). So it’s got that going for it.
A sad, trite thesis on what (I believe) will be TNG’s lone commentary on terrorism/freedom fighting. Yet it does seem in the STU these troubles would be common, more common than war.
One problem, I think, is that we viewers have become a lot more nuanced and sophisticated in our understanding of the underlying tensions of terrorism, its rationalizations and “justifications,” than when this show originally aired. It seems rather naive in retrospect.
The Federation, as usual, plays the role of Ward Cleaver, the perfect dad, with seemingly no blood on its hands for glossing the tensions of this society.
I think, as Torie notes, this would have been a stronger episode focusing on something like the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party—each a highly nuanced event, with plenty of shared blame to spread, and enough historic distance to understand them as set pieces—than the Irish Troubles.
For all its klunk and quirk, the TOS episode “The Cloud Minnders” actually handles the “divided society” schtick much more ably than this episode.* There you at least understood the parties’ grievances and could gauge the internal merits (if not the legitimacy) of their claims against one another. More important, you understood they understood their claims against one another, none of this, “Who knows? They’re animals!” nonsense.
It’s interesting that, for all their posturing and doggerel about the Prime Directive, this episode very clearly shows the Federation picking the winners and losers in this exchange, as they do in every situation where they negotiate and treaty with “The Authoritays.” Perhaps the biggest failing of this episode is that it doesn’t tease that apart and examine it a bit more closely.
It’s ironic, but the PD seems to be invoked and explored in episodes where its nuances should not be explored at about the frequency where the consequences of that policy are glossed or ignored.
* From the standpoint of showing rather than telling, I think it is also superior to “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” TOS’s supposedly landmark root canal on social injustice.
O course the real blame in the episode goes to Picard. Hmm your doctore and otehr senior officers are in the middle of an attack nasd you don’t beam thet straight back to safety? Bad call. Doctor get all doctory and insists on treating the wounded? Well you are still captain and responsible for her and her teammates – whom are endagered as well. Feeling kind-hearted and you want the wounded treated? Fine, beam them up too.
This whole episode only works if Picard is dumb.
Wait… why is the Prime Directive the excuse for not getting involved with guns and troops? They’re already involved with medicines and whatnot, this is a society that clearly knows about warp technology, there’s no secret here. That’s just an excuse.
I kind of wonder if Police Oppressor Woman’s “They’re animals!” comment was an attempt to try to sway Riker to her perspective, rather than a sincere, artless reflection of her own beliefs. She’s clearly manipulative enough to zap Would-Be-Washington without blinking an eye and then throw up a political justification for the move…
@ 1 DemetriosX
I had this as a 2 until I had to contribute analysis, and realizing I had so little to say knocked it down to a 1.
I was intrigued by a lot of the same possibilities. I think I would have liked an American Revolution story, because our forefathers were by definition traitors and their motives weren’t as pure as history makes them out to be. I also was thiiiiis close to liking Devos, who mentions once off-hand that she was a moderate before she had to work this beat. They could have done a story about her, and the way that wars and horrors close to home fundamentally alter one’s perspective. But seeing as she and Riker have their heart-to-heart over some rolling desk chairs, maybe that’s asking too much. Also awful: her explanation of why she killed Finn. Um, who the hell wants to help a revolutionary become a martyr?! Certainly not the status quo.
The only problem with the Wesley plot as I mentioned was that Troi has to sit down with him and explain what a hostage is.
@ 2 Lemnoc
Well said.
The other thing that strikes me as weird is that if you’re going to parallel something, be it Ireland or the American Revolution, you should probably have some reason that they’re fighting. But in a world without religion, scarcity, or even class or race, their disputes are ALWAYS going to seem petty. None of these people ever have anything worst splitting society over.
And yeah, I don’t see how Picard or anyone can make an argument that they haven’t taken sides when they are on an “errand of mercy” for the winners.
@ 4 Picard
He does admit that mistake at the end, and I would have been more sympathetic to it if his decision-making process hadn’t involved that exchange with RIker when he considers beaming Crusher up until Riker says “Would YOU want to greet her on the transporter pad?” Really? You’re going to endanger your ship and your crew because you’re afraid of being nagged? Ugh.
@ 5 DeepThought
Something about giving advanced weaponry to a dominant society engaged in the suppression of a rebellion doesn’t hit the right touchy-feely PD chord.
The Stargate SG-1 episode The Other Side had everything that this episode could have had. Even down to the indignation Jack felt when he saw the truth about the supposedly non-human ‘animals’ fighting against the society who asked the SGC for help. A society is willing to offer samples and user manuals for all of their advanced military technology in exchange for food, medicine, and people to help in their fight against their non-human attackers. Jack is gaa-gaa over the technology and doesn’t want to listen to Daniel’s comments. But when their host asks them not to bring Teal’c with them when they come back – because he’s different – he tells Daniel to continue raising questions. Jack gets a look at the enemy through remote sensing while controlling an attack drone and this leads him to the undeniable truth. The side he’s supporting started it and the enemy are the victims.
With major risk taking, Star Trek might have done this story. However. Star Trek at this point in the franchise couldn’t take this risk. So much of the fan base had roots in the original series, and the Great Bird of the Galaxy’s talons still gripped the soul of the show. (Wesley had to be told what a hostage was. Wesley had to be told about addiction in the episode about that silly game.) Star Fleet was the U.N. of the quadrant and they surely had grown beyond the mistakes made by the 20th Century U.N. There could be no Star Fleet version of the Korea Conflict – unless it was shown that Star Fleet was managing to avoid the conflict. Not until Deep Space Nine could there have been a sustained conflict within the Star Trek storyline. Then, with Enterprise, they tried to compete with SG-1. They failed because they could not tell SG-1 stories convincingly while trying to hold onto what made Star Trek STAR TREK.
But even without reaching as far as The Other Side, this episode could have been made better by taking some risks.
Even though episodes like Family, Remember Me, Darmok and Times Arrow rank among my favorite Star Trek stories, I think the problems discussed with these last few episodes are part of why TNG is my least favorite Star Trek series. While the storytelling quality was at least equal to what else was running on TV at the time, too few of the episodes became memorable by giving me things to think about. TNG is like Hill Street Blues to me. I remember loving it when I watched it, but I’d be lost trying talk about individual episodes. I can talk about a few scenes, but many forgetful things happened between those scenes.
Could others be responding to the same problem? Could that by the comment count for these episodes stays so low?
This episode evoked very little emotional or intellectual response from me. It is not overtly offensive and it also isn’t the dumbest story they’ve done, so it sort of fell into the midrange of mediocrity for me. Like Torie — and others, as Ludon points out — I don’t have much to say. “The High Ground” doesn’t invite much lively discussion because it boils the issues down to their simplest form and then doesn’t take much of a stance on them. I used to think that just raising questions is valuable in itself, but without contributing some new perspective or a surprising development (such as Worf opting not to help save the life of a Romulan), it may as well not exist.
I was kind of surprised at the violent teaser with the terrorist explosion, but it all went downhill from there. Although there could have been some interesting debate between Dr. Crusher and Picard on their differing ideologies, they make up by the end, defusing the potential for drama and character development. I did like that the terrorist seems to be perfectly reasonable and friendly to Dr. Crusher until he starts casually talking about killing people and her son.
My two least favorite moments: Dr. Crusher getting that drawing from the sensitive, artistic murderer, and when she thanks Wesley for saving the day again, he rolls his eyes and says “It was a team effort, mom!” Not quite humble brag, but it was getting there. I almost miss the days when they could just ask the computer, “Hey, check your database. Does this remind you of anything?” or “Computer: Speculate. Is it possible to transport without leaving a trace?”
Since I don’t feel all that strongly about this one, I give it an ambivalent Warp 2.