Synopsis: Odo goes on a mission to save the life of a valuable informant and finds someone else instead, while on Deep Space Nine Ensign Nog engages in trade to acquire a stabilizer for Defiant.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how we all carry the beliefs and experiences of our ancestors with us in our psyches and how humanity is one element of the collective unconscious.
In “Treachery, Faith, and the Great River” one storyline has Odo take a runabout to rendezvous with a Cardassian informant, only to find that it was not the informant but Weyoun, or more precisely Weyoun 6 who sent a message to him. Weyoun 6, the clone of Weyoun 5, wants to defect from the Cardassian Dominion Alliance, likely because of the death of his predecessor over mysterious circumstances. Weyoun 7, who was created after Weyoun 6 left Cardassia, contacts Odo demanding the return of Weyoun 6. When Odo refuses Jem’Hadar ships are sent to intercept his vessel, and Weyoun 6 auto-destructs to save Odo’s life. But in the process Odo learns that the Founders are dying because of a virus in the Great Link, and he will soon be the only changeling living. Meanwhile, on Deep Space Nine, Ensign Nog tells Chief of Operations Miles O’Brien about the Great Material Continuum, the faith that holds his world together. By using O’Brien’s security code, Nog is able to make a series of trades, which while dicey at some moments, ends up with everyone getting what they needed.
In this episode, Weyoun 6, Odo, and Nog all experience a connection to their ancestors. For the clone Weyoun 6, he carries the knowledge of his ancestors as a duplicate of prior Weyouns. Odo, as a changeling, learns that the other changelings, who are all connected in the Great Link, are dying. Nog not only embraces the teachings of his ancestors of the Great Material Continuum, he tells O’Brien about it and then through a series of trades, shows the entire station how it works. Carl (C. G.) Jung’s teachings throughout his career spoke of the psychic connection we have to our ancestors, but it was in his later works that he came to understand the collective unconscious not as something that was inside all of us, but something that we were all a part of. Similar to the Great Link here, except Jung, in his later years, considered the collective unconscious as containing everything ensouled in the universe, not just the human species.
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