3x12 The High Ground

[6.8/10] We’ve seen enough episodes written by Melinda M. Snodgrass to know what to expect at this point. Her installments will feature a dearth of naturalism in the dialogue, in favor of characters lobbing on-the-nose speeches at one another. But they’ll also seize on an issue of genuine importance and intrigue, exploring it with depth and nuance that befits her thoughtful approach.

That’s the yin and yang of “The High Ground”, an episode which delves into all facets of the “terrorist vs. freedom fighter” debate with conviction and understanding, while also devolving into what feel like dueling essay contests at times.

The central premise of the episode sees the Enterprise visiting Rutia IV, a Federation trading partner, when Dr. Crusher is kidnapped by a group of separatists called the Ansata. The Rutians view the Ansata as ruthless terrorists who inflict violence indiscriminately and cannot be reasoned with. The Ansata view the Rutians as oppressors, the Federation as abettors, and their tactics as a necessary and only option to gain their freedom.

One of the best element’s of Snodgrass’s script is that she takes both sides in the dispute seriously, as befits her legal background. We get a sense of the Rutians through their director of security (I think that’s her role?) Devos. She seems harsh in her methods and dehumanizing of her adversaries, but we also understand how she got there. The episode spins of a tale of someone who saw themselves as moderate but slowly grew more and more exacting in her views of the other side after escalating death tolls in attacks on innocent lives, assassination threats to her, and the general sense of unease and fear that’s disrupted the peace of Rutian society.

Likewise, we get a sense of the Ansata through their leader, Finn. The episode presents him as someone who uses fear and terror as a last resort to a government that won’t recognize their right to self-determination otherwise. (The episode is a bit fuzzy about the Ansata’s cause beyond that, presumably to make it easier to map them onto various real life analogues with enough abstraction.) He sees himself as a freedom fighter akin to American Revolutionary patriots. He his suicide bomb equivalent of debilitating extra-dimensional jumps as a encessary cost to fight back against an oppressive government. And he sees fear and violence as regrettable but vital tools, the only tools, to gain justice for his people.

The dialogue explicating these clashing perspectives is anything but subtle, but there’s an acknowledged complexity and ecumenical bent to the story, which is always a good look for Star Trek. The show doesn’t ultimately come down on one side or another, but rather laments the state of the problem and finds reasons to sympathize and condemn both sides of the equation. As much as this episode writes its points on the screen, it provides for more in the way of nuance and the real-world knottiness of these types of situations than other episodes.

It also presents one of the best and most startling critiques of the Federation, one later shows like Deep Space 9 would take up with conviction. In a roundabout way, Finn calls out the hypocrisy of the Prime Directive. He slates Starfleet for pledging not to interfere in the internal affairs of unaligned worlds, but then still trading, aiding, and otherwise interacting with those communities, which has an impact on those internal disputes whether the Federation wants to acknowledge it or not. There’s a potent line of criticism that the Federation is already involved here, whether it wants to be or not. And his ploy -- to make the Rutian/Ansata dispute such a nuisance to Starfleet that it “mediates” the dispute and forces a resolution -- is a clever one.

The episode gestures to the American Revolution, and was reportedly edited to speak to conflicts among the Irish (oddly, not the first time one of Snodgrass’s scripts was revised to focus more on Ireland). But there’s enough tractability there to apply it to Basque Separatists, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and any number of other situations past and present. The complexity of the script is matched by its malleability, speaking to broad concerns over how to address these sorts of entrenched, longstanding dispute where one side feels plagued by fear from an implacable enemy, and the other feels forced to take such actions to gain any traction from an unreasonable oppressor.

The problem is that for all its complications, the episode conveys these points with an approach so ham-handed, at times you feel like you’re watching a high school debate rather than an episode of television. None of the characters really talk to one another, they just announce high-minded points or themes to the audience while someone else is in the room. There’s little shading to the major figures here, with most of them, even familiar faces, seeming more like argument-delivery systems than people.

The one big exception there is Finn, but it doesn't really accrue to the episode’s benefit. As the Ansata’s leader, the episode needs (and seems to want) to make him sympathetic despite his actions. It needs us to understand him as someone who’s been driven to this, whose casualty about taking life and sacrificing his own through the dimensional transportation stems from losing his own son and feeling human loss on his side.

But Finn comes of some combination of smarmy and creepy, however comprehensible his position might be. “The High Ground” tries to humanize him by revealing that he’s nursing a bit of a crush on Crusher, after he gifts her some drawings he made of her. (You see, he’s an artist, not a fighter!). But his demeanor toward her as a hostage is downright abusive and manipulative. His vacillating kindness and cruelty seems nigh-sociological, and it makes his affections and allegedly tragic end less poignant than the episode is clearly aiming for.

Snodgrass and company do inject some humanity in the episode, mostly anchored on the loose blended family that is Jean-Luc, Beverly, and Wesley. While captured, Picard and Dr. Crusher talk about Wesley like he’s a son to both of them. Wesley frets about his mom while aboard the Enterprise and comes up with the idea that helps locate her (of course). Dr. Crusher tells her captor about Wesley to help convince him of her own humanity, and in a perilous moment, seems ready to confess her feelings toward Jean-Luc before being conveniently interrupted by the rescue operation.

The ensuing action is fine. There’s some tense moments here and at other parts of the episode which take advantage of the hostage situation setup. But it quickly turns into a pained metonym for the whole conflict, where the Rutian Director shoots the Ansata leader, and but a young boy chooses not to retaliate, symbolizing the shape of this vicious cycle and the possibility to break out of it. There’s blunt and writerly pronouncements about “imperfect solutions to an imperfect world” and “no more killing” that takes intricate and compelling ideas about these sorts of conflicts and lays them on too thick.

But that’s the tradeoff for an episode penned by Snodgrass. Subtlety goes out the window, and the realism of the dialogue is all but absent. In their place, though, is usually an examination of some key political or philosophical issue explored with a jurist’s eye and a sci-fi writer’s heart. “The High Ground” is, like the conflict it portrays, imperfect, but it tackles the split decisions of intractable, generational conflicts in the way only Star Trek and Snodgrass can.