Synopsis: While exploring animal life on a rogue planet, Enterprise’s crew comes across a group of hunters.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the Logos-driven rational conscious ego projects its inner ideal other onto another individual, which is one way it becomes aware of bits of material from the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Rogue Planet” Enterprise’s sensors pick up a planet that has broken out of its orbit, a rogue, which is home to a diverse number of animal life forms. Captain Jonathan Archer and an away team take a shuttlepod to the planet. They encounter a group of hunters of the Eska species. The planet, named Dakala, is a sacred hunting ground and the Eska are allowed to hunt on it four days a year. Archer and Sub-Commander T’Pol stay overnight on the planet and Archer is awakened during the night to the sound of a woman calling his name. The next day he sees her again. It turns out that she is a Wraith and can appear as anything to anyone. Archer is seeing her in this form because his mind is making a connection with a work by William Butler Yeats, “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” that he read when he was young. It is the story of a man who caught a fish that turned into a beautiful woman, who leaves, and he spends the rest of his life looking for her. Archer learns that the Eska are really on Dakala to hunt her kind. Archer feels compelled to help her and her species and orders that a masking agent be created, so that the hunters cannot find her.
In this episode, when the Wraith appears as an image from the poem that Archer remembers from childhood, this can be analogized to when the conscious ego projects its own ideal other onto another individual. When this occurs, if the other individual accepts the projection, feelings of love or friendship are possible. Here the Wraith accepts the projection because she needs Archer to protect her, to help her escape the hunters. Archer cannot help but want to help her, even though T’Pol tells him that they have no right to interfere with the Eska’s hunt. This is the power of love – and the unconscious.
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