Synopsis: The crews of the U.S.S. Anaximander and the U.S.S. Beagle work together to save the multiverse.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of how Carl (C. G.) Jung perceived the conscious and unconscious working differently.
In “Fissure Quest,” the clone of Lieutenant Junior Grade Bradward (Brad) Boimler, who goes by the name William Boimler, is not dead. He is the captain of the U.S.S. Anaximander, a Federation ship that moves between quantum thresholds, on a secret mission to discover who or what is trying to destroy the multiverse. He is frustrated with his mission, because instead of exploring space, his crew travels through many dimensions in the same place. An alternate Lieutenant Junior Grade Beckett Mariner comes through a time rift and is beamed aboard the Anaximander. This Mariner is an engineer, and she helps Boimler and his crew find the ship that is causing the rifts. That ship, the U.S.S. Beagle, is from an alternate dimension, where the mission of her crew is to explore other realities to understand humanity. Trying to escape the Anaximander, the Beagle creates another rift and explodes as it enters it, causing a danger to all the different realities. Working together, the crews devise a plan to save all the alternate universes, but Boimler must choose one reality to save all the others, and he selects the reality in which he was created, believing the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos will find a solution to the dilemma.
In this episode, the way that Starfleet explores, by traveling to unknown areas of space, can be analogized to how the conscious ego makes sense of the universe, while the Beagle’s approach understand humanity by exploring other realities, can be compared to the way the unconscious elements of our psyches perceive the world. Jung wrote that we needed both the conscious and unconscious elements of our psyches to be whole. To explain why this is necessary he wrote:
Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too—as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an “individual.” (1939/1969, p. 288 [CW 9i, para. 522])
Here this is illustrated in how both the crew of the Anaximander and Beagle working together were able to devise a way to save the multiverse.
Reference:
Jung, C. G. (1969). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 9 pt. 1. Archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., pp. 275-289). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1939) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850969.275
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