Synopsis: While responding to a distress call from a Romulan warbird the Enterprise is caught in a temporal anomaly.
In this episode we can see what Star Trek does so well, in that the crew of the Enterprise responds to a sudden emergent situation in a Logos-driven rational way, only to find out that this does not solve the problem at hand and instead needs to seek an Eros-driven way to deal with the situation.
In “Timescape” Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Lt. Commander Data, Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge, and Counselor Deanna Troi are aboard a runabout returning from a conference, and find the Enterprise and a Romulan warbird frozen in time. Seeing destruction on the Enterprise, energy beams between the two ships, and Romulans aboard the Enterprise, their first thoughts are that there has been a Romulan attack. But when they investigate further, they discover that the Enterprise had come to the aid of the Romulan vessel. Going still deeper into the unknown they discover that the reason that the Romulan vessel was experiencing difficulty was that an alien being from another dimension in time had tried to make a nest in the Romulan ship’s engine. The source of power of the Romulan warbird having been misidentified as a black hole by the aliens. Further, there are two of these aliens visiting from another temporal dimension, and one of them explains that their offspring are nesting in the Romulan ship’s engine, which is causing it to lose power. The power transfer from the Enterprise is killing the young aliens in the nest and must be stopped.
While an argument can be made that using Data’s ability to understand the information contained in various sources and extrapolate its meaning is an embodiment of the rational ego, I would say that it is the human, or the human psyche’s ability to see not purely rational alternative ways of connecting the information that allows the crewmember aboard the runabout to save not only the Enterprise, but also the young alien nests in the Romulan warbird. Picard’s imagination allows him to request that Data make certain uses of the information at hand, and it is through this that a solution to a puzzling situation is arrived at. This is much how an individual’s psyche augments rational thinking with somatic understanding in order to assess a situation. A hunch if you will. A hunch that comes from the unconscious, the exploration of the unconscious being the subject at the core of depth psychology.
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