Synopsis: Voyager’s crew encounters hologram programs that have learned to kill.
This episode illustrates how the Logos-driven rational conscious ego becomes inflated when it identifies to strongly with the god-like powers of an archetype contained in the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Flesh and Blood” Voyager receives a distress call from a Hirogen training facility, where hunters have been killed by their holographic prey. Three years earlier, Captain Kathryn Janeway had given hologram technology to the Hirogen to allow them to hunt without killing living beings. Instead, using The Doctor’s ability to adapt as a model, the Hirogen created more and more sentient prey, including adding to their programs the ability to feel pain. Eventually, one of the holograms, Iden, escaped and decided to try to liberate other hologram prey. They became a force, led by Iden, and were taking revenge on the Hirogen who created and hunted them. The Doctor is abducted by the hologram programs, but then learns of their plight and tries to help. Similarly, Lt. B’Elanna Torres is also abducted and tries to help the holograms escape persecution. But when Iden starts to kill other exploiters of hologram technology, The Doctor and Torres realize that he has become like the Hirogen who were hunting him. Eventually, The Doctor kills Iden and the other holograms will be reprogrammed to take out their killer instincts.
In this episode, there are many illustrations of inflation, when the ego identifies too strongly with the god-like powers of the unconscious. The first is implied when Starfleet originally invented hologram programs and felt god-like in the act of creation. The second is Janeway feeling she knows what is best and giving this technology to the Hirogen. Then the Hirogen, feeling the same god-like power as Starfleet, created prey that have the ability to adapt. And finally, there are the holograms themselves, that eventually evolved to become like the killers that created them. All these are examples of the conscious ego becoming too closely associated with the god-like power of an unconscious archetype. And while inflation and deflation are both necessary in the union of opposites, the way by which the ego becomes stronger and the psyche more whole, to remain too long in a state of inflation will lead to an equally painful experience of deflation. We cannot avoid inflation, but if we can recognize it when it occurs, we can lessen the amount of deflation that will follow it, in the ongoing process by which the ego acknowledges and integrates bits of unconscious material into itself.
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