Synopsis: After the crew comes to Dal R’El to tell him that they want to go to the Federation for help, he discovers the Starfleet training program for the Kobayashi Maru scenario in the holodeck and tries to defeat it.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of James Hillman’s theory that the opposition of the puer, or eternal youth archetype and the senex, or wise elder archetype, can be used to explain the relationship between all the other archetypes in an individual’s psyche.
In “Kobayashi” the crew comes to Dal R’El to tell him that they want to go to the Federation for help, but Dal R’El does not. He feels that if they go to the Federation that they will be accused of stealing the U.S.S. Protostar. Shortly thereafter, the crew locates a holodeck which Hologram Janeway tells them is a holographic simulation room. Dal R’El finds the Starfleet training program of the Kobayashi Maru scenario and tries to beat it. He tries over one hundred times and at one point attempts to win by randomly acting in ways to promote chaos, but all to no avail. Afterward, Dal R’El is told that the Kobayashi Maru is a no-win scenario and designed to test how officers will respond in a hopeless situation.
In this episode, Dal R’El can be seen as embodying the energy of the puer, or eternal youth archetype. As such, he chafes against the restraints of the senex, or wise elder archetype, here represented by the Federation and the Kobayashi Maru scenario program. Del R’El sees the Federation as just one more entity that wants to control him and he does not want to be contained. He also does everything he can think of to defeat the Kobayashi Maru scenario, not believing that he will ever need to face a no-win situation – because his ideas are so much better than those of the individuals that have come before him. Del R’El’s actions can be compared to how the puer archetypal energy in our psyches is in direct opposition to that of the senex archetype. And the struggle between these two sources of power in an individual’s psyche can be used to explore all the other relationships between and among the other archetypal energies contained therein.
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