Synopsis: Voyager encounters what it believes is a wormhole but is really a lifeform that has the ability to control minds and digest starships.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how integrating bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious can be crucial to survival, even though sometimes it can be very difficult for the Logos-driven rational conscious ego to do this.
In “Bliss” Voyager comes across what appears to be a wormhole that will take the vessel directly back to Earth. Sensing that this is something too good to be true, Captain Kathryn Janeway is initially skeptical. But after a probe is sent into the “wormhole” and comes back miraculously with messages from Starfleet welcoming them home, Janeway and the crew seem blinded to any dangers involved in entering the “wormhole.” That is the crew other than Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman, both of whom have no great desire to get to Earth, and The Doctor, who has been deactivated since the “wormhole” was sighted. Seven scans the putative wormhole and finds a ship inside piloted by Qatai, an alien who tells Seven that what he is inside is not a wormhole but a living entity. He warns Seven that the entity has a telepathic ability to know what the crew most desires and make them believe that this is the truth, in order to bait them, so that he may consume Voyager. Seven beams Qatai aboard Voyager. Qatai wants to kill the entity, but The Doctor concocts a plan to escape without doing so, which succeeds, sending Voyager on her way and Qatai to continue his quest to destroy the entity.
In this episode the entity that has telepathic abilities and eats starships can be seen as a physical manifestation of the conscious ego’s worst fear about the unconscious projected upon it. And while Qatai can be compared to a complex that alerts the conscious ego that there is some unconscious material to be addressed, his wanting to kill the entity also seems to be projecting the conscious ego’s worst fear onto it. Here The Doctor, who comes up with a plan to both free Voyager and Qatai’s vessel from the entity without killing it, can be analogized as to what can happen when the conscious ego moves beyond mere projection of unconscious bits of material to working with them to make it stronger and the psyche more whole.
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