Synopsis: The Infinity crew work with Captain Chakotay to repair the Protostar’s warp drive.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of what Carl (C. G.) Jung termed the union of opposites—the conscious and the unconscious—facilitated by the transcendent function.
In “Last Flight of the Protostar, Part II,” on the planet Ysida, the Infinity crew works with
Captain Chakotay to follow Commander Adreek-Hu’s plan to transform the Protostar into a sailing vessel in order to travel across the planet’s vapor ocean to where they can harvest deuterium gas. The gas is needed to mix the matter and antimatter that they have attained, what will allow the warp drive to re-engage. The crew faces many obstacles, but they do retrieve the deuterium gas, and combining the matter and antimatter with it, the ship’s warp drive comes back online and Protostar is launched into space.
In this episode, the warp drive that needs both matter and antimatter in order to work, but also needs deuterium gas in order to make it possible, can be compared to what happens in the human psyche, in what Jung called the union of opposites—the conscious and the unconscious—facilitated by the transcendent function. The transcendent function being the way that unconscious material is made perceivable to the conscious. “It is called ‘transcendent’ because it makes the transition from one attitude to another organically possible without loss of the unconscious” (Jung, 1958/1969, p. 73 [CW 8, para. 145]). Here, the ability of the deuterium gas to facilitate the union of matter and antimatter can be analogized to the transcendent function, because it makes it possible for the Protostar warp drive to re-engage and the vessel to launch. In the human psyche, the transcendent function allows for the conscious ego to acknowledge and integrate unconscious material into itself, resulting in the ego becoming stronger and the psyche more whole.
Reference:
Jung, C. G. (1969). The transcendent function (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 8. Structure and dynamics of the psyche (2nd ed., pp. 67-91). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1958) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850952.67
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