Star Trek scene inspired by Showrunner’s real-life vision quest

To understand this crazy Star Trek story, we must first revisit the plot of the Traveler episode “The Cloud”. Apparently the main story of this episode involves the crew encountering, harming and then healing some sort of living nebula. In fact, most of the episode is taken up with charming side stories, one of which involves Chakotay helping Janeway figure out who her animal guide is.

It should be noted that this is a start Star Trek: Traveler episode, and this strange storyline in “The Cloud” was intended to solve the problem of the ship having no official advisor.