Synopsis: Enterprise is tasked with visiting a 70 year old Earth colony, Terra Nova.
This episode illustrates Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman’s acorn theory, the idea that just as an acorn has everything inside it that it will need to become a tree, we all have all the information we need to become who we were meant to be inside us in our inner daimon.
In “Terra Nova” Enterprise is sent to Terra Nova, the first Earth colony outside of our solar system, which has not been heard from for over seventy years. When Enterprise reaches orbit over the planet, sensors indicate that seventy years ago the colony would have been saturated with deadly radiation. Captain Jonathan Archer leads an away team that includes Sub-Commander T’Pol, Lt. Malcolm Reed, and Ensign Travis Mayweather, to the planet. Once there, Reed sees an alien life form and follows him into a cave. Archer follows. The inhabitants of the cave call themselves Novans and are armed. They take Reed hostage. When Archer returns to the caves with Dr. Phlox to negotiate for Reed’s release, Phlox’s instruments indicate that one of the Novan females, Nadet, has lung cancer. Archer invites Nadet to come aboard Enterprise for treatment, and to bring her son Jamin. While they are there, the crew discovers that an asteroid hit Terra Nova seventy years ago and caused the radiation. Phlox also discovers that the water source for the caves has been contaminated with radiation. Archer shows Nadet a photograph of her family when she was a little girl. Archer also speaks with Jamin and tries to convince him to move his people to a new settlement on the planet where there is no radiation. Jamin does not initially want to move, however, when Nadet returns to Terra Nova she convinces the inhabitants to relocate and saves their lives.
In this episode, when the character Nadet sees herself as the young child Bernadette, she makes the connection that she and the other Novans are human. This can be analogized to when an individual listens to their inner daimon to learn who they truly are. That each of us has an inner daimon with all the information we need to become who we are meant to be is the thrust of James Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling and the thought behind his acorn theory contained therein.
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