Synopsis: Lt. Dax returns to her family’s home in order to locate Chief O’Brien.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the process of acknowledging and integrating the Eros-driven irrational unconscious into the Logos-driven rational conscious ego is not without pain and danger.
In “Prodigal Daughter” Chief Miles O’Brien is missing after traveling to New Sidney where he went to locate Morica Bilby, the widow of the man he informed on to Starfleet Intelligence. Captain Benjamin Sisko asks Lt. Ezri Dax to contact her family, who have a lot of influence in that system, to see if they will help locate him. Dax’s mother, Yanas Tigan, agrees to help, but only if Dax returns home. When Dax arrives there, she is greeted by her brother, Norvo Tigan and then her other brother, Janel Tigan, who has a report on O’Brien’s whereabouts. O’Brien is found, and he tells Dax that Bilby’s widow was killed by the Orion Syndicate. Yanas Tigan asks him to repair a drill in the mine, and when he is there, he is confronted by a member of the Syndicate. Dax’s family’s business records show that Morica Bilby was on the payroll for Dax’s family business, and it is revealed that Norvo Tigan killed her. He confesses and is sentenced to thirty years.
In this episode Deep Space Nine can be analogized to the conscious ego and New Sydney to the unconscious. Dax is sent to find and rescue O’Brien from Syndicate forces there, and she succeeds in doing that, possibly because O’Brien has such strong ties to the station. But her brother, Norvo, does not. What happens to his character can be compared to what happens when the conscious ego identifies too closely with the power of the unconscious. And in a very real way, Norvo, although Dax tried to get him to go to Deep Space Nine with her, is lost in the underbelly of the Syndicate. This reiterates a point that eventually, at least in our rational Logos-driven conscious ego driven world, we must leave the unconscious sphere in order to survive.
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