Synopsis: The Enterprise and her crew find themselves thrown into the distant past and learn about how humanity came to be.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, or one unified world, where everything is interconnected.
In “Valles Marineris” the Enterprise crew was sent to observe a Category 10 interstellar squall, a space where time has gone wild. Uhura received a mayday from inside the storm from a buoy. Going in to investigate, Enterprise was pulled into a warp field and became stuck in the storm with no power. They needed iridium to repower the systems and a shuttle was sent to a planet to retrieve some.
The shuttle, containing Lt. Commander Una Chin-Riley (Number One), Noonien-Singh, and Lt. Erica Ortega, landed on the planet. The iridium was near a volcano. But before they could reach the volcano, Number One, Noonien-Singh, and Ortega would need to get past dinosaurs. As Enterprise had traveled back in time to the Sol system 65 million years in the past and the shuttle was currently on Earth during the time of the dinosaurs.
On the Enterprise, Battle Commander Cassell of Mars was towing the ship, claiming it as salvage. Cassell had no knowledge of Starfleet, but was at war against the Dol’drm. Pike invited Cassell aboard the ship. Cassell believed that her enemy was evil. She said that she had always been at war. On Mars, Valles Marineris was a crater created by a Dol’drm crash. Cassell admitted that Pike and the crew did not seem to be enemies. Spock opined that it would take a quantum entanglement, the power of a supernova, to return Enterprise to her time. Cassell, now aware that Enterprise was from the future, took an anti-matter fuel cell. Pike hailed Cassell. Her vessel was approaching the Dol’drm homeworld, the fifth planet. Pike did not intervene, when she attacked it because in the future there will be no fifth planet. The explosion Cassell created sent Enterprise back into the future. The crew learned that the evolution of humanity was a result of the destruction of the Dol’drm homeworld.
In this episode, when Pike realized that the destruction of the fifth planet in our solar system had led to the evolution of humanity, can be seen as an illustration of the synchronicity that Jung associated with the unus mundus. That everything was related, just as it should be, and we were all connected. A hopeful outlook that resonates with much of Star Trek.
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