Synopsis: The Enterprise encounters an alien vessel that attacks her for no perceived reason.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how different the Eros-driven irrational unconscious behaves compared to the psyche’s Logos-driven rational conscious ego.
In “Cold Front” Enterprise is deploying a couple of subspace amplifiers when an unknown alien ship appears. Captain Jonathan Archer hails the vessel, telling her crew that Enterprise and her crew are on a mission of exploration and peace. There is no response from the alien vessel and she leaves. Some time later, the vessel returns, scans Enterprise, fires on her, and leaves again. Archer decides that because Enterprise was not equipped with the phase cannons she was designed to carry before they left Earth, that they should go back to space dock and have them installed. Reed and Commander Charles (Trip) Tucker III believe that the engineering crew aboard Enterprise can do just as good a job as the workers in space dock and start the upgrade. But before this is done, the alien ship reappears, fires on Enterprise, disabling her, and then two aliens board the vessel, invasively scan a couple crewmembers, return to their ship, and the alien vessel leaves again. Once the cannons are installed, Reed and Tucker conduct target practice with them, but there is a power surge in the ship’s systems and the cannons produce ten times the explosive power that they were aiming for. Once more the alien ship returns and fires upon Enterprise, but this time, with the new cannons, Enterprise is able to defend herself and the aliens go away. In this episode, when Archer initially engages with the alien ship, announcing his purpose and getting no response, and then having the alien ship reappear only to fire on Enterprise without provocation, he is left in a quandary. This is because the aliens will not communicate with him in the manner of his choice and therefore the attack on Enterprise makes no sense to him. This can be compared to how the conscious ego cannot understand what motivates the unconscious, or more precisely, why it does not hold the same values. But the ego cannot know why the unconscious does what it does precisely because it is not conscious and therefore unknowable to the ego. But sometime bits of unconscious material do come into the purview of the ego, and when that happens, the ego has the opportunity to acknowledge these bits of material and integrate them into itself, to become stronger and make the psyche more whole.
mydailysoultrek 