Synopsis: Voyager’s crew locates the family of Icheb, one of the young former Borg drones that recently came aboard the ship, but Icheb’s parents have their own agenda.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman’s acorn theory. The idea that just as an acorn has all the information inside it to become a tree, each human has their own inner daimon that has all the information we need to become who we are destined to be. This extends to the inner daimon even choosing parents for us that will enable us to fulfill our destiny.
In “Child’s Play” Captain Kathryn Janeway tells Seven of Nine that the crew has located the birth parents of Icheb, one of the young former Borg drones who has been under her care. When Seven in turn informs Icheb that his parents have been found and that Voyager is taking him back to be with them, he does not want to go. Icheb’s species, the Brunali, have an agrarian culture, and Icheb has innate abilities in astrophysics, something that he will not be able to use on his homeworld. Nevertheless, Icheb meets his parents, Leucon and Yifay, and agrees to stay with them. He tells Seven that it is his duty to help his planet defend itself from the Borg. Almost as soon as Icheb returns to his family, he is placed in a spacecraft and sent out into Borg space. Sensing something is wrong, and that Icheb’s parents have lied to them, Seven convinces Janeway to return Voyager to the Brunali homeworld, where they discover Icheb alone in a spacecraft. As it turns out the Brunali have extensive genetic engineering abilities and Icheb was created to be a weapon to infect the Borg through assimilation. Icheb is recovered from the spacecraft and continues his studies with Seven in Astrometrics.
In this episode, when Icheb uses his innate gifts in Astrometrics, this can be interpreted as to him being true to his internal daimon, the internal intelligence that when followed, can lead us to what we are meant to be. However, it can also be argued that in having the birth parents of Leucon and Yifay, who use their gifts to engineer him to be a weapon against the Borg, which in turn led him to being mentored by Seven, that this is also in line with the will of his inner daimon. This is because even though Leucon and Yifay, in choosing to offer their son as bait to kill Borg, sacrificed the life he would have had with them on the planet, had he not fulfilled the mission of infecting the drones on the Borg cube that Voyager’s crew found him on, he would not have discovered his true gifts in Astrometrics. Fulfilling his destiny, just as his inner daimon conceived of it.
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