Synopsis: Voyager comes across a weapon that Lt. Torres reprogramed in order to attack the Cardassians when it was in the Alpha Quadrant, and now must destroy before it targets a populated planet in the Delta Quadrant.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of what happens in the aftermath of inflation. Inflation is when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego identifies too strongly with the god-like energy from an archetype from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious. While as Carl (C. G.) Jung wrote, this is part of the union of opposites, or transcendent function, the way in which the conscious ego incorporates bits of material from the unconscious into itself, if the ego identifies too long or too strongly with the archetypal energy, inflation can become a problem – but in any case, inflation is always followed by deflation.
In “Dreadnought” the Voyager crew comes across a weapon that must have arrived in the Delta Quadrant the same way they were brought there by the Caretaker. Lt. B’Elanna Torres is able to identify it as a Cardassian weapon that she reprogrammed to target one of their bases while she was a member of the Maquis. The self-guided tactical missile, nicknamed Dreadnought, has been damaged and now mistakenly thinks that an inhabited planet in the Delta Quadrant, Rakosa, is its target. Torres goes aboard the missile trying to alter its course, but she has reprogrammed it with so many defenses that she cannot. Finally, at the last second she is able to breach its protective shielding and destroy it, but at great cost.
In this episode, Torres can be seen as having in the past been in the grips of inflation. She believed that she could reprogram an alien weapon and use it against them. She believed this so strongly that she did this without informing her commanding officer. In another stroke of inflation, she reprogrammed the weapon to be indestructible and to defend itself in the same ways that Torres would herself. But now, the weapon’s navigation program is damaged, and just as Torres reprogrammed it, it believes in its own infallibility rather than facts presented to it. This results in the threat of death to millions of people on the planet Rakosa as a result of Torres’s hubris. Torres feels responsible for this and goes to great ends to destroy the weapon. In the end she does, but only at great cost. This is similar to what happens when the conscious ego identifies too closely with the god-like power of an unconscious archetype and cannot be dissuaded from believing that it is all powerful. This is inflation, which inevitably leads to deflation. However, like Torres, often the ego rises again to the occasion to temporarily thwarting the wants of the unconscious, in the ongoing process of inflation and deflation that is part of the union of opposites or transcendent function.
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