Synopsis: The Enterprise disappears into the Delta Triangle and must work with the crew of a Klingon Battle Cruiser to escape Elysia.
There are powerful depth psychological and mythical messages in this short, animated episode. The mythological element comes from the idea of Elysia, a location where crews from spacecraft that have disappeared from the Delta Triangle find themselves in “a pocket in the garment of time,” where “representatives of 123 races . . . many of whom were enemies on the outside have learned to live together,” and where “peace is their single goal.” This harkens back to the Elysian Fields, as that place in the Underworld where the honored heroes go to live out their eternal life after they have left their physical existence on Earth.
Also in depth psychology, Elysia could represent the unconscious, and all its many competing and complementary archetypes that each of us holds in our psyche as part of being human. When Captain James T. Kirk tells Devna, the Interpreter of Laws, that “even though Elysia is almost perfect,” home with all its faults is where he and his crew wants to be, he is speaking from the role of the Logos, or conscious ego, that does not want to let in the unconscious Eros elements of the psyche; it wants to escape the unknown. That Kirk and the Enterprise escape is the “happy ending” for the episode, as it is written from the conscious ego’s point of view, but it also meant that knowledge that could have been obtained was not.
Original post created 17 April 2021
mydailysoultrek 