Synopsis: The U.S.S. Discovery is trapped in a dangerous subspace rift and Captain Burnham must work with Zora, the sentient being of Discovery’s computer, to escape it.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of what Carl (C. G.) Jung called the union of opposites, when the conscious ego acknowledges and integrates pieces of unconscious material into itself.
In “Stormy Weather” the U.S.S. Discovery and her crew head into a subspace rift to try to gather more information on the Dark Matter Anomaly (DMA). While this is going on, Zora, who defines herself as a sentient being inside a supercomputer (Saunders et al., 2021), is undergoing what she tells Captain Michael Burnham is an organic development of her emotions. When Discovery becomes trapped in the rift and the only way out will take longer that the life support on the ship can be maintained, the crew is ordered into transporter buffer patterns and Burnham must rely on Zora to complete the mission and recover the crew from the pattern buffers after Discovery has escaped the rift, in spite of Zora’s new found fearful emotions.
In this episode, when Zora explains to Burnham that she is a sentient being and her emotions are organically becoming part of her programming, this can be analogized to the conscious ego acknowledging the presence of the unconscious and integrating pieces of it into itself, in an ongoing process Jung called the union of opposites. As illustrated by Zora controlling her fear, this is not a smooth operation, but it is required to make the ego stronger and the psyche more whole.
Reference:
Saunders, A. C. (Writer), Schultz, B. (Writer), & Frakes, J. (Director). (2021, December 23). Stormy weather (Season 4, Episode 6) [TV series episode]. In A Baiers, H. Kadin, A. Kurtzman, J. Lumet, O. Osunsami, M. Paradise, E. Roddenberry, T. Roth, K. Siracusa, & J. Weber (Executive Producers), Star trek: Discovery. CBS Television Studios, Living Dead Guy Productions, Roddenberry Entertainment, Secret Hideout.
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