Synopsis: The crew of the Enterprise comes across a community of energies that will not accept their death.
In “The Lights of Zetar” the life force of “the desires, the hopes the mind and the will of the last hundred of Zetar” could not only “not be wiped out” but they figured out a way to roam the galaxy in search for a physical body that they could inhabit. This is reminiscent of the aliens in “Return to Tomorrow.” Here, the way to recover the body and psyche of Lt. Mira Romaine, was to find an environment that would keep her alive and kill the aliens, while Romain was a vessel to contain them.
There is a surface interpretation of this episode as a warning of what happens when humankind uses other species to prolong its life, for example animal trials of drugs and cosmetics. The analogy is clear, although animals do not have the ability to say to humans, as Captain James T. Kirk does to the Zetarians, that you have a right to your own life, but not to the life of another.
There is a depth psychological interpretation possible as well. It is that Romaine’s ego began by fighting the alien presence, much as our egos fight the bits of our unconscious that make it through our conscious defenses. Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy and Mr. Spock several times remark about the pliability of Romaine’s persona, and they seem to interpret this as a negative quality. Yet, it is her ability to hold her own ego and the alien presence in her psyche that saved the crew of the Enterprise. At the end of the episode Spock remarks: “I would say her struggle in this experience would strengthen her entire ego structure.” And so are all our psyches strengthened, each time we acknowledge a bit of our unconscious and integrate it with our conscious ego.
Original post created 27 March 2021
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