“Jean-Luc, there are some things I want to tell you…”
The best outcome of Gates McFadden’s return to Star Trek: The Next Generation was the emergence of proper Beverly episodes, which (strangely enough) never happened in Season One. With them, we have the arrival of what I’d call the True Beverly, and it begins here: from the moment she steps onscreen in “The High Ground,” McFadden and the writers are giving us a clarified version of a character who had previously been somewhat ill-defined and unfocused. Here and afterwards, Beverly is clever, courageous, and defiant – and it gets her in a lot of trouble in “The High Ground,” when the good doctor is taken prisoner by a band of terrorists who use inter-dimensional shifting to fight for the freedom of their homeland.
It’s a top-notch Beverly episode, and her interplay with Richard Cox, as terrorist leader Kyril Finn, is great. McFadden commits gamely to her various moral and emotional dialogue scenes throughout. A late scene between herself and a kidnapped Captain Picard brims with energy, as the two actors find the gear that would define Beverly and Jean-Luc’s powerful chemistry for much of the series. And the scene where Finn admits that he is going to attack the Enterprise – meaning that he will be attempting to kill Wesley, along with everyone else – is perfectly pitched by McFadden, who struggles mightily to contain a visible wave of helpless fear.
The attack on the Enterprise is a bravura sequence that brings about “The High Ground’s” other great contribution to Star Trek: The Next Generation: having delivered us the new, best version of Beverly, it also delivers the new, best version of Captain Picard. Picard, who had fallen into a kind of ambassadorial stuffiness in the past season or so, seeming to want to negotiate his way out of every problem, now strides confidently across the Enterprise bridge while it’s under attack, and flat-out coldcocks Finn with a haymaker punch that would outclass James T. Kirk on his best day. It was, and is, a thunderous reversal of form for the character, and I can still remember the glee with which it was greeted back in the day – a single, indelible CRACK! of old-fashioned physicality that seems to forever redirect the way the captain is written, performed, and perceived. Yeah, Jean-Luc’s an older fellow, a scientist, and a peaceful soul… but he didn’t get in that bar-room brawl with the Nausicaans when he was a cadet for nothing. Picard’s reformation into a more rugged Starfleet adventurer begins here – and by “Captain’s Holiday,” a few episodes down the line, it’s in full flower.
The episode is the last in a series written by Melinda M. Snodgrass, who also penned “The Measure of a Man,” “Pen Pals,” “Up the Long Ladder,” and “The Ensigns of Command.” This is my favourite of the lot and, unfortunately, her swan song with the series. Although the allegory in the episode is clearly intended to address the IRA bombings of the 1980s, Snodgrass scores a chilling bit of prescience with the Ansata terrorists’ dimensional shifting device, which security chief Devos describes in the episode by asking, “How do I combat an enemy that doesn’t register on any scanner until they’re standing in front of you?” A decade or so ahead of her time, Snodgrass perfectly described the complex and frustrating paradigm of the War on Terror, and “The High Ground” reads all the better for it.
Final note: dying to know what Worf and Beverly were talking about over their apparent lunch date at the start of the episode. Something along the lines of: “So… we…. don’t… really… have anything in common, do we?”
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Three is available now.