Synopsis: The Enterprise receives an automated distress call from a Vulcan vessel.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how dangerous it can be when the Logos-driven rational conscious ego is too one-sided and suppresses the Eros-driven irrational unconscious.
In “Impulse,” the Enterprise receives an automated distress call from the Vulcan vessel, Seleya, which entered the Delphic Expanse nine months earlier. Captain Jonathan Archer, Sub-Commander T’Pol, Lt. Malcom Reed, and Corporal Hawkins take a shuttlepod to the Seleya to investigate and offer assistance. What they find are Vulcans that appear almost zombie-like and violent. As T’Pol explains to Hawkins, Vulcans have emotions, they just normally control them. But in the expanse, the same substance that protects starships from space anomalies, Trellium D, is a neurotoxic to Vulcans, rendering them unable to control their emotions. T’Pol is taken off the Vulcan vessel in time to recover from her exposure, but there is no help for the others that have been exposed longer.
In this episode, the Vulcan crewmembers aboard Seleya can be seen as an embodiment of the rational conscious ego. The belief that they could suppress their emotions left them vulnerable to the neurotoxin that rendered them unable to control their emotions. However, when unleashed, their emotions became violent and paranoid. This can be analogized to how when the conscious ego mistakenly believes that it is so powerful that it can suppress the irrational unconscious, but then when bits of material from the unconscious erupt in this situation they can be violent, in direct proportion to how much they were suppressed. This is an example of the conscious ego being too one-sided and therefore vulnerable.
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