As a huge Star Trek fan, I was thinking about how, 36 years ago today, one of the most talked-about episodes of The Next Generation originally aired. It’s always fascinated me how political Star Trek has been – sometimes a little messy in its messaging, but political nonetheless. That was really the whole point, as far as Gene Roddenberry was concerned. He wanted to show us a hopeful future where humanity had moved past things like greed, bias, and just plain old hatred.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The High Ground,” which aired on January 29, 1990, proved controversial in the U.K. The episode featured a tense storyline where a crew member of the USS Enterprise was kidnapped by terrorists attempting to force the Federation to meet their demands. Originally, writer Melinda Snodgrass wanted the episode to mirror the American Revolution, with Captain Picard understanding he was supporting the wrong side. However, changes to the script created issues for the show.
The High Ground Became All About Irish Reunification
The show “The High Ground” began using strategies similar to those seen in the campaign for a unified Ireland, despite objections from one of its creators, Snodgrass. While these connections were mostly subtle, one scene explicitly drew a comparison between the show’s crisis and the Irish struggle for reunification, establishing that Ireland had unified in 2024 within the show’s fictional universe. Interestingly, this episode was never shown on British or Irish television. Although US shows often aired in the U.K. with a delay, this particular episode was rejected due to the sensitive nature of the Irish Troubles and wasn’t broadcast on the BBC or RTÉ.
Viewers in Britain didn’t see the important scene in “The High Ground” until 1992, when the satellite channel Sky removed it. Years later, in an interview with the BBC, writer Jane Snodgrass explained that the story’s themes were intentional. She, a former history major who later went to law school, wanted to explore how someone seen as a hero by one group can be considered a terrorist by another. She described these as complex questions, asking when people feel so desperate that violence seems like their only option, and whether violence can ever truly be justified.
Although the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 marked the end of the Irish Troubles, the documentary “The High Ground” was deemed too controversial to broadcast immediately. It wasn’t shown on the BBC until September 29, 2007. Surprisingly, there’s no record of why the episode wasn’t aired in the early 1990s, and no one knows who made that decision. Regardless, the actual course of events unfolded very differently from what the documentary portrayed.
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2026-01-29 20:40