Synopsis: Lt. Stamets realizes the extent of the mycelial network and that it is being threatened.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of the later teachings of Carl (C. G.) Jung, who put forth the idea that the collective unconscious was something that all humans and potentially all life were in, and that all life was one unus mundus, or unified world.
In “Vaulting Ambition”Captain Gabriel Lorca and Specialist Michael Burnham arrive at the Terran Imperial Flagship, the I.S.S. Charon, posing as Captain Burnham of the I.S.S. Shenzhou and Lorca, her prisoner. Meanwhile, aboard the U.S.S. Discovery Lt. Paul Stamets is in a coma, but at the same time is part of the mycelial network and meets his counterpart in the mirror universe. Mirror Stamets tells Stamets that when he was receiving information from the mycelial network that it was his way of reaching out to him. But now something has corrupted the mycelial network, and if the damage spreads all life in the multiverse will cease to exist. At the same time, aboard the I.S.S. Shenzhou Burnham realizes that Lorca is from the Mirror Universe and used her to return to it.
In this episode, when Stamets realizes that Mirror Stamets was reaching out to him from the mirror universe through the mycelial network, he realized that everything in the multiverse was connected. And that if one part of the network was corrupted, then the entire network, and all life, was threatened. The mycelial network here can be analogized to how Jung described the collective unconscious in his later writings. While initially, he saw the psyche as being divided into the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious, with the latter being something that was common to all humans; later he saw the collective unconscious as something not as something that was inside us all, but something that we were all inside. Further it connects everyone and everything and makes us all affected by whatever happens to it, as part of the unus mundus.
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