Synopsis: Captain Pike is reunited with a lost love only to find that her society’s belief system is in conflict with Starfleet ideals.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how the ways of the unconscious differ from those of the conscious ego.
In “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” the U.S.S. Enterprise is on a cartographic survey mission in the Majalan System, when the ship receives a distress call from a small shuttle that is being attacked by another vessel. The passengers from the shuttle are beamed aboard. They are from Majalis. The passengers are a child known as “First Servant,” his father, Elder Gamal, and a beautiful female, Alora, who seems to have met Captain Christopher Pike in the past. Pike goes to Majalis with Alora, Gamal, and the First Servant, to see the ascension ceremony. Meanwhile, the crew learns that the ship that fired upon Alora’s vessel was from a colony of former Majalan people on Prospect VII. On Majalis, Pike observes that the superior technology and paradise-like civilization there is made possible by the sacrifice of the life of one child, the First Servant. Pike is horrified but unable to do anything about it and leaves the planet. Meanwhile, Gamal, who previously believed that the colonists on Prospect VII were trying to destroy the Majalan civilization by preventing the First Servant from sacrificing himself, now understands that they were just trying to save his child from suffering and death.
In this episode, when Pike is horrified by what he believes is a barbaric way of life on Majalis, this can be compared to how the conscious ego may first experience the way in which the unconscious behaves in the psyche. However, when Gamal admits that he has changed how he perceives the colony of former Majalan people on Prospect VII, this paradigm shift can be analogized to when the conscious ego acknowledges and integrates bits of unconscious material into itself, and in the process, becoming stronger and making the psyche more whole.
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