Synopsis: The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise come under attack by an alien ship with superior power.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of the conscious ego acknowledging that the unconscious communicates in ways different from its own.
In “Momento Mori” the U.S.S. Enterprise is on a mission to take supplies to Finibus III. However when the ship arrives, the crew discovers that the colony there is devoid of life. An unidentified vessel appears, which turns out to be where the surviving colonists have fled to. They are brought aboard Enterprise when a Gorn vessel fires, destroying the vessel the colonists had been on and damaging Enterprise. Outgunned, Captain Cristopher Pike orders Enterprise to enter a gas cloud above a brown dwarf, where the Gorn will not be able to use their sensors to locate and fire upon the ship. The crew is able to destroy one Gorn ship, but three more appear. Science Officer, Mr. Spock, and Chief of Security, La’an Noonien Singh, take a shuttle closer to the brown dwarf to gather information. They discover that the Gorn ships communicate with each other through lights. Another ship is destroyed using this information. The crew devises a strategy where it will look to the Gorns that the Enterprise has been pulled into the nearby black hole, while using the gravity of the black hole in a slingshot maneuver. This plan succeeds and the Enterprise escapes the Gorn.
In the episode, when Singh and Spock learn that the Gorn communicate through light patterns, this can be compared to when the conscious ego acknowledges that there are other ways of making sense of the world other than its own. This acknowledgment is the first step in what Carl (C. G.) Jung called the individuation process. When they use light patterns to trick one of the Gorn vessels into destroying the other, incorporating this foreign knowledge to further their mission can be compared to when the conscious ego integrates bits of unconscious material into itself, making it stronger and the psyche more whole.
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