Series: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Season 3, Episode 12
Original Air Date: January 29, 1990
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| via Memory Alpha |
While the away team visits Rutia IV, Dr. Crusher is abducted by a terrorist group. Obviously, the Enterprise crew must rescue her. Along the way, we get an interesting though occasionally clumsy exploration of terrorism as a means of waging war against a militarily superior enemy.
The story is based on The Troubles in Northern Ireland, though the writer, Melinda Snodgrass, did not originally intend it that way. Her plan was an American Revolution parallel (with Picard as Cornwallis) but the production bosses insisted on the change. Apparently, this sort of switcheroo happened often and perhaps that explains TNG's overall clumsiness with message episodes. Since the ultimate allegory was not part of the original story, those aspects feel tacked on because essentially, they were.
Due to the relatively sympathetic attitude towards the terrorists, "The High Ground" was not aired unedited in the UK until 2007. The full episode has never aired on RTÉ, the Irish national television network.
Acting Notes
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| via Castle Wiki |
Canadian actress Kerrie Keane plays the role of Alexana Devos, the head of Rutian security. She was born September 7, 1948. She majored in history at McMaster University.
Her most prominent big screen appearance was in Obsessed, for which she was nominated for a Genie Award (Canada's Oscars). Beyond Trek, she has made guest appearances on Matlock, Beverly Hills 90210 and Murder, She Wrote.
I’ll take Things That Were Awkward in Star Trek Post-9/11 for $200, Alex. (R.I.P.)
ReplyDeleteYeah. It all feels different when you're the target, doesn't it?
DeleteProducers really need to keep their fingers out of things.
ReplyDeleteIn this case, definitely. For television in general, the central vision of the executive producer is crucial. But for as much credit as he deserves, Roddenberry clearly needed more people around him to say no. That's already been apparent with the movies and TNG clearly improves as control is gradually entrusted to others.
DeleteI don’t necessarily agree. In the original series Roddenberry was surrounded by a lot of great collaborators who can sometimes seem invisible to the average fan. I think his vision for The Morion Picture was brilliant. I also think for all its macho elements Wrath of Khan was basically a restatement of the same premise of what an aging Kirk means. And getting hung up on that meant we never really moved past it, until Voyage Home sort of sidestepped it and Undiscovered Country (and credit where credit is due this was also Meyer) finally outright let us just question how heroic Kirk really was. It allowed him to be contextualized, finally, and not so subtly undermined by the only other character capable of being inherently more heroic, Spock, whose whole arc in the movie actually kind of leads him into the exact opposite, a confrontation with Valeris that actually compromises him.
DeleteI stand by my original assertion. Roddenberry gets tremendous credit for the initial vision and for its long-term survival. Frankly, there aren't many in American television with a comparable legacy. However, Trek got better with the rise of new voices. Big picture, I feel his oversight evolved into interference.
DeleteIt certainly evolved. It became more sophisticated, and it moved past the kind of material he was championing in Next Generation‘s first season, but that basic framework, it’s not just the bones, it’s the essence. There’s a reason why fans cry foul when the franchise seems to stray too far from it (I don’t tend to agree with them, but that’s another matter). The fact of the matter is, everything that works about the franchise works because it follows that essence, not because it changes it. Casual fans are not really going to, even now, even with all the changes that have occurred over the curse of the past thirty years, think Star Trek is really any different than it was back in the ‘60s. Fans easily lose perspective. I don’t follow along to their logic (in any arena) for that reason. They exaggerate everything. As a fan of the Red Sox, for instance, you would really think, when a season is going badly, that we still hadn’t won a World Series in eighty-six years. The passion itself is great, but it gets out of control, pretty much by definition.
DeleteSo, Gene Roddenberry is not some quaint relic of Star Trek’s past. To steal a line from recent franchise lore, context is king. The new guys are good. But that’s no reason to celebrate the end of an era. It was under his watch we got Q. You might not personally like the character, but it’s an archetype Roddenberry doggedly pursued for years. And finally nailed. A crowning achievement for another generation. Plus a few other creations. That Picard chap, for instance. Seems to have worked out okay.
And Data. Roddenberry chased that concept for years. Pulling it off in this form was a real victory for him, and quite an impactful one.
DeleteI will not argue with the quality of Roddenberry's vision nor the doggedness of his pursuit of that vision. But by the late '80s (earlier, really), the enterprise (pun intended) was desperately in need of the sophistication you've noted. New voices brought good things.
DeleteLook, the same thing happened with Lucas and undoubtedly with others. Gifted creators need good editors and others who are willing to push back against ideas that aren't so great.
Yes, I know I just opened up a whole new argument...
I'm going to stick, mostly, with the original argument. I think producers need to stay out of the creative aspects of anything they're producing. Producers almost never have any creative insights or anything constructive to say. Producers, by definition, are only interested in the money and don't tend to understand stories or the creative process.
DeleteSpider-Man 3 is an excellent example of producers getting involved. Raimi is an excellent story-teller and had an excellent script for the movie, which did NOT include Venom, but the producers at Sony thought Venom would be an even bigger money-maker for them and insisted the character be added into the script. I think Raimi did as good a job as anyone could have in incorporating the character into the story he'd already written, but we all know how fans reacted to Spider-Man 3.
None of that is to say that visionaries like Rodenberry and Lucas don't need other voices around them to call them on their bullshit when they have it, but those voices need to be other creatives, not producers. Producers, inevitably, are the people pissing in the watering hole.
Except, the EP job in television is different. A TV series typically employs multiple directors and writers for an obvious reason: even a half-hour, weekly show is way too much work for any one person. So, the EP is typically the creator and maintainer of the central creative vision.
DeleteI think the real problem, early on, was simply that Roddenberry hadn’t yet found collaborators that successfully pushed his ideas forward. It was literally just Star Trek trying to be Star Trek on TV twenty years later. The results absolutely reflect that, and how everything got better when the creators themselves started pouring in worthy of the material. You can’t pin it all on Roddenberry. It was the whole team that was flailing. The same thing happened in Deep Space Nine. By the time that team came together, everything got better. I love the idea of collaborative genius. I think Ron Moore didn’t nail Battlestar Galactica because he didn’t have a real team around him. I think Straczynski didn’t nail Babylon 5 because he didn’t have anyone challenging him. Fans of those shows tend to lionize Moore and Straczynski, how they carried singular visions. But they worked in a medium that works best in concert. Would the Beatles have been best if only one member wrote everything? Absolutely not! That was the true genius of the band, that everyone had a voice (literally!), even if most of the stuff came from only half of them. And that’s what I loved about Deep Space Nine, that there was a well-defined team of writers creating most of it. And there was room for the occasional ringer (Michael Taylor, for instance, who later contributed to Moore’s BSG, too).
DeleteAnyway.
Well, I certainly agree with you about the benefits of collaboration.
DeleteAnd regarding the Fab Four, how lucky were they that they were born in the same city within a few years of each other? Indeed, we all benefited from that happy coincidence. Right place, right time jackpot!
I could happily do a whole blog just about the Beatles.
Interesting episode, and honestly I was okay with the Ireland reference.
ReplyDeleteAs for Roddenberry, yes, he had positive moments and some not so positive moments.
I don't have any issue with the Ireland reference in itself, nor the position taken. But the message is telegraphed. With more lead time, I expect more subtlety and nuance could have been achieved.
DeleteThis is interesting Finn the terrorist and Beverly the do gooder terrorized dr. Do the means justify the end? The transporter shift hit the establishment hard much like guns in Northern Ireland but at what cost? 🇮🇪 Ireland is still racist, xenophobic and now radically inherent with ethnocentrism and we’re a multi cultural nation. Radical lefties achieve nothing except risk lives and start wars. It always takes diplomacy and peace ☮️ peace to end them.
ReplyDeleteRacist, xenophobic, ethnocentric... sounds an awful lot like the USA, too. I'd like to believe we're all growing but the world can be an awfully disappointing place.
ReplyDelete