Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Episode 1: “That Hope is You, Part 1”

Synopsis: Commander Burnham arrives alone 930 years in the future.

This episode can be seen as an illustration of what James Hillman called the acorn theory.

In “That Hope is You, Part 1,” Commander Michael Burnham arrives in the future through a wormhole and is hurdled into a passing starship, causing both Burnham and the ship to crash land on the planet, Hima. The ship belongs to a courier, Cleveland Booker. Not seeing any other life on the planet, Burnham walks to where she sees the smoke from the crash of Booker’s ship. Arriving, they fight each other until they realize that working together they can get his ship repaired and access a communications array so that Burnham can try to hail Discovery. The two travel to a marketplace, where the equipment Burnham brought with her are considered valuable antiques, but a fight breaks out instead, and Burnham and Booker flee but are followed to Booker’s ship by a group of aliens. The cargo that Booker is carrying is a huge trance worm, Molly, which he wants to bring back to where it was taken from. The aliens want Molly, but Molly ends up eating the aliens. Booker brings the Molly and Burnham to Sanctuary Four, where Molly happily joins other trance worms. Booker then brings Burnham to an old Federation space station where Aditya Sahil has been waiting for decades for someone to bring him hope.

In this episode, when Burnham lands on Hima alone, she has to rely on her instincts to survive and find life. Once she does find life, she needs to intuit who to trust and who to disbelieve. She meets Booker, who also has a strong relationship with his intuition, at one point using it to harvest a natural remedy to heal Burnham’s wound. Then they meet Sahil, who has remained at his post alone for decades, because he believes in Starfleet. The three individuals can all be seen as trusting what Hillman called their inner daimons. Hillman wrote that just as an acorn has everything inside it to become an oak tree, we all have inner daimons inside ourselves that have all the information we need to become who we were meant to be, if we only honor them. This is his acorn theory.