Synopsis: After Voyager’s crew causes the explosion of a Borg probe vessel, Captain Janeway decides to go after a damaged Borg sphere and take its transwarp drive.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of inflation, when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego identifies too strongly or for too long with the god-like archetypal power contained in the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
“Dark Frontier” begins with Voyager’s crew devising a plan to defeat a Borg probe vessel, that ends up accidentally destroying it. When the wreckage is beamed aboard Voyager, Seven of Nine finds a data node which contains information on Borg vessels, their positions, and their movements. When a damaged Borg sphere ship is identified, Captain Kathryn Janeway, fresh off the victory over the other Borg vessel, decides to attack the damaged ship and take its transwarp drive. The transwarp drive having the capacity to take decades off the journey back to Earth. Janeway is unaware that the Borg Queen senses her plan and speaks to Seven through her communication implants. The Borg Queen tells Seven that the only way to save Voyager is for her to stay upon the sphere vessel. Seven does this and the mission is successful. Then Seven, aboard the sphere, is taken deep into Borg territory. Once there the Borg Queen wants to use Seven’s knowledge of humans to assimilate Earth. After the transwarp drive is activated, Janeway orders Voyager go into Borg space to rescue Seven, and this is accomplished, but Seven and the Borg collective are forever changed.
In this episode Janeway can be seen as the embodiment of the conscious ego when it identifies too closely with the god-like power of an unconscious archetype. An archetype being a repeating energy pattern that is found in the human unconscious. Here, after defeating one Borg vessel, the triumph makes Janeway feel aggressive, and so she plots to steal a means to get closer to home from an alien vessel. This causes her to lose Seven to the Borg in the process, but because she still is identifying with the god-like power of an archetype, she has Voyager rescue her as well. This is also successful, however, in the meantime the Borg have accessed all Seven’s knowledge of humans, which may prove very dangerous to the inhabitants of Earth in the future. The consequence of inflation is inevitably deflation, which will occur when Janeway realizes what she has lost in the process. This can be analogized to the surge of power that is necessary for the process of the union of opposites to begin, but when identified with too closely, or for too long a period of time, it can also be dangerous. The union of opposites being the ongoing relationship between the conscious ego and the unconscious, that occurs in individuation, the way by which the ego acknowledges and integrates bits of unconscious material into itself, to become stronger and make the psyche more whole.
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