S5 E21: Juggernaut

A Malon ship has experienced a disaster, flooding it with deadly theta radiation and forcing its crew to evacuate. Voyager recovers the only two survivors, who warn them to get away before the ship explodes and destroys everything in a two light year radius. However, the theta radiation is destabilizing subspace, so Voyager cannot go to warp, and Voyager's crew must disable the freighter or be destroyed. Chakotay, Neelix, Torres, and the Malons (great band name!) board the ship, but Chakotay is injured, leaving the volatile Torres in charge - who was reprimanded at the beginning of the episode for destroying the Doctor's holo-imager when he was bothering her with it by taking pictures of the warp core. The team runs into trouble in the form of a disfigured, irradiated monster formed from one of the abandoned Malon crew; he is a "core worker," someone who is hired for the purpose of working in the most dangerous areas of the ship at a rate that is equal to what most Malons make in a lifetime - but they only have a 30% chance of surviving a two-month journey. Torres, after trying to negotiate with him, is forced to fight him in order to save her team before Voyager tows the ship into a sun.

Torres starts out extra-grating in this episode, continuing the not-so-proud Voyager tradition of taking steps backwards with a character in order to give them some development in the course of the episode. She does get a rare scene with Tuvok, possibly the first one of any substance since season two's Twisted, and despite Tuvok's meaningless aphorisms, I'm still happy to see the two bounce off each other some more. And though it is annoying for Torres to need to make some negative progress in this episode, her subplot manages to tie into the story well enough without being a too-perfect fit. I'm glad that she doesn't manage to negotiate with the monster, it was enough for her to try (though it is clear that it bothered her that she failed from her final scene).

So, Malons. I know what I expected to think: why would they bring these failures back again? Surprisingly I was quite impressed by their use here. Great efforts were made to make them less two dimensional - the writers took a closer look at their social structure, their motivations, and their lives than they do for most other species. The lead Malon, Fesek, is a family man, who has taken this dangerous job to support his family. His comrade, Pelk, has made a model of a Malon ship for Fesek's son to play with, assuming they get home in time for his son's birthday. Together they give a more noble side to a villain you'd expect to see in a Captain Planet episode, while still managing to maintain their shortsightedness. I love the idea of the "core workers," desperate enough to take a hopeless job just to provide for their loved ones. They are a perfect way to humanize a bad guy without taking away the elements that make them someone for the protagonists to work against.

The big problem is: Voyager solved the Malon's garbage-dumping problem in the very first episode in which we meet them (Night). Because they just needed to cause conflict there, they ignored it in order to make the episode longer. But these Malons here, they're fairly reasonable people. Especially after the revelation that the monster is a core worker, that they are turning their people into their own enemy (similar monsters on other Malon ships were considered to be something of an urban legend), I really wanted Janeway to re-offer the solution to Fesek. According to memory-alpha, we never see the Malons again, and that would have been the perfect opportunity to say why.

Still, I am impressed with the writers. Thus far, it has been more their style to just give up on concepts that they cannot make work (See: Kes), but here they show a rare form of bravery in their attempt to rework them into something worthwhile. I saw Nick Sagan's name in the writing credits, son of the more famous Carl Sagan; I knew he was coming to the Voyager writing staff at some point after trying to search for patterns in episode quality based on who the writers were for each episode (I'll probably post my findings once I'm done with the series). However, I didn't know when he was coming, and when I saw his name here I was all excited to proclaim him to be the factor that saved the Malons. And then I saw that I simply had not been observant, and his name was on several other episodes from this season: In the Flesh 2/5, Gravity 2/5, and Course: Oblivion 1/5. Well, instead I guess I'll just congratulate him on contributing to a good episode finally, and look forward to his last installment, Relativity, with some trepidation.

Watchability: 4/5

Bottom Line: The treatment of the Malons here is nothing short of a triumph, but it is held down by a middling Torres plot and by Malon elements in previous episodes.