Synopsis: Voyager’s crew assists the reluctant surviving members of the crew of a Malon freighter neutralize the threat of radioactive contamination escaping from their vessel.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of happens when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego tries to ignore bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Juggernaut” a Malon freighter containing vast amounts of toxic radiation waste is damaged. Her captain, Controller Fesek, orders the ship abandoned and sends out a distress call. Voyager receives the message. When she arrives to the location from which the distress signal was sent, finds escape pods with only two survivors among them, Fesek and Pelk. The Malon freighter is in imminent danger of exploding, which will contaminate a vast region of space with radiation, and Voyager’s warp field has been damaged, so she cannot get safely away. Captain Kathryn Janeway orders Commander Chakotay, Lt. B’Elanna Torres, and Neelix to accompany the reluctant Fesek and Pelk onto the freighter to try to avoid an explosion. When this fails, because there is a creature created by radiation, a Vihaar, aboard attacking them, Janeway orders that the freighter be gently nudged into a nearby star – after the away team is safely back aboard Voyager.
In this episode the radiation can be seen as a physical manifestation of the unconscious, and Janeway’s and the crew’s efforts to contain its damage, can be analogized to how the conscious ego will try to avoid contamination by the unconscious. In the episode, the radioactive ship is sent into a star to safely be consumed by its power, but in a human psyche, that is not possible. More symbolic of what can happen when the rational ego tries to suppress the unconscious is the creation of the Vihaar, a crew member aboard the freighter that was contaminated but cannot die, which can be compared to a complex. However, a complex can also be seen as an opportunity to gain self-knowledge and self-growth. Indeed, the Vihaar told the away team that the reason he was sabotaging their efforts was that he wanted to make them aware of the damage they were doing. This is analogous to a complex trying to alert the conscious ego that there exist bits of unconscious material that need to be acknowledged and integrated to prevent further psychic damage. When the warning is heeded, the ego will become stronger and the psyche more whole.
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