A Supermarket in California carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life. In "Story Line", Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud
Barge of the Dead episode as part of a pitch for the "" episode "Soldiers of the Empire". The idea was initially rejected, but was revisited for "Star Trek: Voyager". Following the episode's completion, both Moore and Fuller left the series because of dissatisfaction with their lack of control over its direction, and the perceived absence of strong story arcs across multiple episodes. "Barge of the Dead" was one of several episodes that addressed Torres' strained relationship with her parents and her Klingon heritage. Scholars have offered a range of opinions on Gre'thor, with the setting and ideology compared to Norse mythology, Greek mythology,