Synopsis: An alien places a bounty on Voyager because he wants to add Seven of Nine to his think tank.
This episode contains various illustrations of what Carl (C. G.) Jung called inflation, which is when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego becomes too attached to the god-like power of archetypes found in the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Think Tank” Voyager’s sensors locate a planet rich in dilithium crystal deposits, but when the ship arrives at its location, the planet explodes, and a gas cloud released in the explosion disrupts her engines. At this point Voyager becomes surrounded by a group of Hazari bounty hunter ships, who’s crews mean to claim her. When she is trying to figure out a way to escape the trap that Voyager has been caught in, an alien calling himself Kurros appears to Captain Kathryn Janeway. He offers her the services of his think tank, for a price, to help her extricate the vessel from the dire situation. The price that Kurros wants is for Seven of Nine to join his think tank. Janeway refuses his request for help, and the crew discovers that Kurros himself is the payer of the bounty and that he has deceived the Hazari. Instead of trying to confront Kurros’s vessel and her advanced systems head-on, Janeway works with the Hazari to disable Kurros’s ship making him vulnerable to their attack.
In this episode there are illustrations of several examples of inflation, Jung’s term for when the conscious ego identified too strongly or for too long with the god-like power of an unconscious archetype. The first, is Janeway and Voyager’s crew assuming that a planet that had rich deposits of dilithium crystals was just waiting for them to exploit its riches. A second is the Hazari believing their own hype that they are the best hunters in the quadrant. Another is Kurros’s hubris in thinking that he, and his think tank, are smarter than anyone else, and therefore undefeatable. However, Janeway uses Kurros’s belief of his superiority against him, and instead of directly confronting him, works with the Hazri to defeat him. This can be analogized to when the inflated conscious ego is deflated and loses its feeling of invincibility. This is part of the ongoing process of the union of opposites, whereby the conscious ego needs to feel powerful in order to start the adventure, but then needs to be humbled so that it will acknowledge that there are valuable bits of material in the unconscious, that when integrated into itself will make it stronger and the psyche more whole.
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