Synopsis: On a planet that is a duplicate of Earth, a landing party finds a virus and immensely old children.
Re-watching this episode in January 2022 it is difficult to see it through any eyes other than those of someone trying to survive in the midst of our own global pandemic. But on this duplicate Earth at the far reaches of our galaxy, apparently a plague virus was the result of a “Life Prolongation Project.”
The feeling that one has enough knowledge to “play God” and create such a virus could be considered the shadow of the Senex archetype. The result of this ill-fated hubris was a world full of immensely old children, embodiments of the Puer Aeternus archetype. James Hillman believed that the relationship between these two elements of our personality, the Senex and the Puer, was a key to understanding all the archetypes within ourselves (2005).
Depth and archetypal psychology are all about discovering and accepting the inner persons or voices within ourselves. To do this requires the ability to contain these differing aspects within a psychic vessel. On this duplicate Earth, there is no connection between the Senex voice and the Puer voice, because the virus on the planet does not allow for a metaxy – that middle place between two ways of being in the world (Hillman, 1999). In humans, one physical manifestation of a middle place in the lifecycle is the time of puberty, that time in life between childhood and adulthood. But on this planet as soon as individuals reach puberty they die. This inability to reach a place of in-between-ness led to a planet in chaos. It was not until the vessel of the Enterprise visits this planet, responding to an SOS call, that the realm of puberty was returned to individuals that were immensely old but unable to successfully move from childhood into adulthood, from the realm of the Puer to that of the Senex.
References:
Hillman, J. (1999). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Northwestern University Press.
Hillman, J. (2005). Senex and puer. (G. Slater, Ed.). Spring Publications.
Original post created 12 January 2021
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