Synopsis: Answering a distress call, the crew of the Enterprise finds what appears to be only two survivors on a devastated planet.
“The Survivors” gives viewers the opportunity to see a physical manifestation of a character holding the Senex archetype as described by James Hillman.
When the Enterprise reaches the planet Rana IV, the ship’s scanners indicate that there are only two survivors on a planet that has been devastated by an alien attack. As the episode unfolds, we come to see that Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s hunch that there was in fact only one survivor is in fact true. That survivor is a member of an immortal alien race, the Douwd, who after falling in love with a human woman, Rishon Uxbridge, has been living in human form of her husband for the last fifty years. The Douwd race is morally totally against killing, and when Rana IV was attacked by an aggressive alien race, the Husnock, although the Douwd had the ability to stop the attack, because of his beliefs, he did not interfere. But when his wife was killed, the Douwd tells Picard that he went insane and caused the death of not only the attackers, but of the entire Husnock race, which he deeply regrets.
This is the power of the Senex, the archetype of the powerful and wise old man. He is all knowing and all powerful, like Zeus or Jupiter in ancient mythology. He embodies structure and institutions, and can be magnanimous, but if crossed, he can be very dangerous. As Picard remarked to the Douwd, Starfleet has no laws to punish him for his sins, yet in depth and archetypal psychological terms, our conscious egos do need to break away from the controlling aspect of a Senex at some point in order to become more whole.
Original post created 23 July 2021
mydailysoultrek 