“Juggernaut”
Written by Bryan Fuller & Nick Sagan and Kenneth Biller
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 5, Episode 21
Production episode 215
Original air date: April 26, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. On a Malon vessel, First Crewmember Pelk has made a toy ship for Controller Fesek’s son’s birthday. Their conversation is interrupted by a tank rupturing. Every attempt to get it under control fails.
Torres is in Tuvok’s quarters, being taught how to meditate. This is Chakotay’s anger-management-training-style solution to Torres losing her temper and breaking the EMH’s holocamera. Torres takes to meditation like a duck to atmospheric reentry. Tuvok remains patient and understanding and attempts to be helpful, but for all that, he doesn’t help in the least.
Voyager answers the Malon’s automated distress call. They find a ship heavily contaminated with theta radiation and thirty-seven escape pods, only two of which have lifesigns: it’s Fesek and Pelk. Fesek explains that there’s four trillion isotons of antimatter waste still on the ship, and when the warp core collapses, it’ll explode, taking out everything within three light-years. Paris finds himself unable to obey Janeway’s order to get five light-years away, as the theta radiation is so intense that they can’t form a warp field. So they’re fucked.
Fesek suggests hiding in a nebula and hoping for the best. Janeway instead goes for heading to the ship and trying to fix it so it won’t explode and kill everyone else in a three light-year radius. Fesek hates this idea, but goes along with it reluctantly.
They can’t beam into the control room, as it’s flooded with radiation. They need to go to a deck that isn’t contaminated and vent the deck above it, and keep doing that until they work their way to the control room, where they can then shut down the engines and stop it from exploding. Neelix spent some time serving on a Talaxian garbage scow, so he joins the away team, along with Chakotay and Torres, as well as the two Malon.
Pelk warns them about a superstition: the Vihaar, a story that is told about a monster that lives in the radiation tanks. Fesek decries it as a myth; Pelk counters that several of the evacuees saw a large figure in the tanks; Fesek counters right back that hallucinations are one of the symptoms of theta radiation poisoning.
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Torres takes every opportunity to snark off the Malon, which leads to Chakotay taking her aside and telling her to cool it. Right now, she needs to focus on the mission, not on her critiques of Malon society.
The EMH provides them all with inoculations of arithrazine, which should hold off the effects of theta radiation for a few hours. Then they beam over AND THEY’RE NOT WEARING EVA SUITS, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE MORONS, THEY’RE ON A SHIP CHOKED WITH RADIATION THAT COULD HAVE A HULL BREACH AT ANY MOMENT, WHAT KIND OF IDIOT GOES INTO THAT SITUATION JUST WEARING A REGULAR UNIFORM, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!
Ahem. Sorry.
Then they beam over and get to work. Many of the control systems aren’t working, and they need to manually operate them. At one point, Pelk goes off to perform a task and then screams. They find him gravely injured and talking about a strange figure he saw—before he dies. They beam his body back to Voyager for autopsy, and Chakotay says that nobody goes anywhere alone after this.
On Voyager, Janeway wants a contingency plan: to shove the Malon ship into an O-type star, which should absorb the theta radiation. The trick is to tow it there without the ship exploding prematurely. Seven works on a way to do that, and also to protect Voyager in case they’re inundated with theta radiation.
Torres starts to show signs of radiation poisoning. Fesek takes her to the infirmary for treatment while Chakotay and Neelix keep working. Fesek explains that his job is important, as he’s keeping the Malon people safe, and also making a crapton of money to support his family. He only works half the year—the rest of the time he’s a sculptor.
After the away team is back together, an attempted decompression of one deck instead decompresses the deck they’re on. They shut it down, but not before Chakotay is clobbered by debris, and he’s sent back to Voyager. Tuvok offers to beam over to take command of the team, but Janeway trusts Torres. Tuvok is, to say the least, skeptical.
Lots of things have gone wrong, and there’s no way they’ll shut down the ship in time. The EMH’s autopsy of Pelk reveals that he was attacked by a creature who is resistant to theta radiation. Seven adjust sensors and finds the creature. What Pelk thought was the Vihaar is really a core laborer named Dremk who is horribly scarred by theta radiation burns. He sabotages the control room so that gas spills into it. Fesek and Neelix are rendered unconscious. Torres tries to talk Dremk out of his sabotage, which he’s doing to show that the Malon’s waste-disposal methods suck.
When talking doesn’t work, Torres hits him with a pipe. She collects Fesek and Neelix and they beam back to Voyager, which then tosses the ship into the O-type star.
The EMH informs Fesek that the radiation damage he suffered will be fatal before too long. Another Malon ship is en route to pick him up. Meanwhile, Torres takes a desperately needed sonic shower.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway’s first instinct is to get out of Dodge, if for no other reason than to keep them safe for longer. Once that stops being an option, her only decision is to do everything they can to stop the ship from exploding.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok doesn’t automatically condemn Torres’s emotionalism, understanding that her anger is a big part of who she is. What he’s trying to teach her is how to keep it under control.
Half and half. Torres was called “Ms. Turtle Head” when she was a kid. The revenge she took on the child who called her that was pretty epic. She still remembers it fondly as an adult, even though her retaliatory actions were pretty dang horrible.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH’s photography habit has continued unabated, much to the chagrin of the crew in general and Torres in particular.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix has a foul-tasting soup that supposedly helps protect his cellular membranes from theta radiation. Chakotay declines the option of trying it after watching Neelix’s efforts to choke it down.
Resistance is futile. Seven expresses surprise when Tuvok makes an offhand mention of luck. Tuvok explains that serving under Janeway has made him start to believe in luck a bit. Seven dryly replies, “I’ll factor it into my calculations.”
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris has to chase Torres down to get her to say goodbye to him before going on the away mission. To his credit, his rebuke is gentle, and when she snarks him off, he responds with encouragement and kindness. He’s turning into a very good boyfriend.
Do it.
“I lost my temper. No big deal.”
“You destroyed the doctor’s holographic camera.”
“I told him three times to leave engineering, but he kept buzzing around, snapping pictures for some photo essay.”
“‘A Day in the Life of the Warp Core’.”
“I apologized, and I replicated him a new camera.”
“You have a long history of emotional volatility. The point of this exercise is not to atone for past transgressions, but to prevent future ones.”
“You can’t order someone to meditate!”
“Commander Chakotay thinks otherwise.”
—Torres having her first meditation session with Tuvok.
Welcome aboard. A trio of Trek veterans in this one. We’ve got Ron Canada as Fesek. He previously played the recalcitrant security chief in TNG’s “The Masterpiece Society” and a Klingon lawyer in DS9’s “Rules of Engagement.” We’ve got Lee Arenberg as Pelk. He previously played three different Ferengi, in DS9’s “The Nagus” and TNG’s “Force of Nature” and “Bloodlines,” and will go on to play a Tellarite in Enterprise’s “Babel One” and “United.” And we’ve got an uncredited Alexander Enberg as the ill-fated Malon engineer. He has the recurring role of Vorik on Voyager (he’ll next appear in that role in “Renaissance Man”), and also played a reporter in TNG’s “Time’s Arrow, Part II” and Taurik in TNG’s “Lower Decks.”
In addition, Scott Klace plays Dremk; he’ll also appear in Enterprise’s “Precious Cargo” as Goff.
Trivial matters: This is the last onscreen appearance of the Malon. They appear again in your humble rewatcher’s DS9 novel Demons of Air and Darkness and TNG novel Q & A.
While sonic showers have been a thing in Star Trek since The Motion Picture, this is the first time we’ve seen one in normal use.
Arithrazine was established as an inoculation against theta radiation in “The Omega Directive.”
At no point in this (or the previous) episode does anyone explain how the Malon could even be nearby, considering that, since the last time Voyager encountered them in “Extreme Risk,” they’d made two major jumps that covered tens of thousands of light-years in “Timeless” (using the quantum slipstream drive) and “Dark Frontier” (using the stolen Borg transwarp coil).
The boy who made fun of Torres as a kid is named Daniel Byrd. That’s the same name as the ensign who was assigned to Voyager instead of Kim in the alternate timeline of “Non Sequitur.” It’s not clear if it’s supposed to be the same person.
The “Turtle Head” nickname dates back to early TNG, as that was the nickname the cast gave to Michael Dorn when he was in Klingon makeup.
Set a course for home. “Getting B’Elanna to control her temper is like convincing a Ferengi to leave his estate to charity.” It’s funny, by the time this episode had aired, I had given up watching Voyager on a regular basis. But in 2000, I was contracted to write a DS9 novel that would be part of a crossover called Gateways, in which Iconian gateways would suddenly open up all over the galaxy. One of the things I did was have a Malon tanker dump its antimatter waste into a spatial gateway that had opened up—which led to a human colony in the Alpha Quadrant near Bajor.
To prepare for that novel, Simon & Schuster provided me with VHS tapes (remember those?) of “Night” and “Juggernaut.” (For some reason, they didn’t give me “Extreme Risk.” In those days, the S&S library had only one VHS copy of each episode to lend to authors, who had to give them back, and it was possible that another author had “Extreme Risk” at the time.)
I really liked “Juggernaut” then, and I still mostly like it now, but watching it in 2021 in sequence, I have two major problems with it, one I missed by watching it out of context, one that I just didn’t focus on two decades ago.
The first is one that actually poked its head out last week when Kurros disguised himself as a Malon—what the hell are we doing still anywhere near the Malon? This is even worse than the Kazon somehow still being near Voyager even as it was booking farther and farther from the Ocampa homeworld in the first two seasons, because since the last time we saw the Malon in “Extreme Risk,” Voyager has made two giant leaps forward: in “Timeless” when they tested the quantum slipstream drive and in “Dark Frontier” when they burned through a stolen Borg transwarp coil. They combined to shave twenty-five years off their seventy-year journey home, which means that either Malon space encompasses 25,000 light-years, which seems unlikely given that they have substandard, waste-producing warp drives, or the writers weren’t paying attention and/or can’t do math.
Now we don’t get a stardate in this one, so you could argue that it takes place before “Dark Frontier,” at least. (Paris is an ensign, so it has to be after “Thirty Days,” and thus after “Timeless.”) That mitigates the problem, but still…
Just as big an issue is why the hell they’re transporting over to a radiation-choked ship that’s in danger of hull breaches (and, possibly exploding) while only wearing regular uniforms? (Or less, in Torres’s case, as she spends most of the away mission in just a tank top and pants and boots…) They absolutely should be wearing EVA suits, which would be much more effective in keeping them safe from the radiation than a drug that will wear off at some point and will likely have different levels of effectiveness on each member of the away team (which is represented by four different species). They’ve even got the EVA suits from First Contact (used quite effectively in “Prey” and “Day of Honor“) on the coatrack.
Once you get past those two elephants in the room, this is an enjoyable little action episode. Torres’s anger management issues haven’t really come up much lately, but I like the idea of her trying meditation with Tuvok. Speaking as someone who has tried meditation and failed at it pretty miserably (they keep telling me to empty my mind, and I’ve never been able to do that), I was amused by Torres’s inability to manage it, either. I also liked Tuvok’s patience and encouragement—and snark, deliberately provoking her by calling her “Ms. Turtle Head.”
The plot itself is a straightforward ticking-clock quest story as our heroes work their way to the control room, losing members of the team one by one, though, of course, the only one who dies is the guest star.
I’m still giving this a high rating, because the episode works on its own merits. I understand why they don’t want to put actors in EVA suits for the bulk of an episode, as they’re limiting and difficult to work in. And I really like that this episode makes the effort to show the Malon as something other than nasty greedheads, as they were in their previous two appearances. Fesek and Pelk are just working stiffs trying to support their families by doing a difficult, risky, necessary job, and that serves to make the Malon significantly more interesting.
Even if they should be tens of thousands of light-years behind them…
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido has two recent releases. There’s the short story “In Earth and Sky and Sea Strange Things There Be” featuring Ayesha from H. Rider Haggard’s She in Turning the Tied, a charity anthology from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. And then there’s “Transcript of the Mayoral Debate Between Batman and the Penguin” in BIFF! BAM! EEE-YOW!: The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guide to Batman ’66—Season Two, his piece on “Hizzoner the Penguin”/”Dizzoner the Penguin.” Ordering links can be found here.
“tried meditation and failed at it pretty miserably”
This, yes. For a couple months I went to a vipassana meditation class off of River road in Maryland. Either I fell asleep or my head would just start going faster and faster…. I later discovered “moving meditation”. A good walk, or a bike ride. Surfing is excellent meditation.
Trivia: The toy spaceship at the beginning was a model built for the first edition of the Star Trek Chronology to represent Zefram Cochrane’s first warp ship (later supplanted by the Phoenix in First Contact). Although they took the nacelles off to make it look less like a human design.
I dislike this episode, because I can’t get past the logic problems of the presence of the Malon and the absence of EV suits. I’ve hated the whole “antimatter waste” stupidity since it was introduced in “Night,” so devoting a whole episode to it was grating. Plus it’s just a dark, dingy, unpleasant slog.
Anyway, the episode confirms that B’Elanna’s half-Klingon anatomy lacks the prominent spinal ridges we’ve seen on Worf’s back. Heaven forbid that a half-alien woman not have a sexy back.
It was always pretty obvious to me that the reason they aren’t wearing EV suits is because they wanted to be able to oil up Roxann Dawson and have her run around in her tank top, which is a heck of a lot harder when you are wearing PPE ;).
I’ve always liked B’Elanna as a character, and I always liked that she never really succeeded in “getting over” her anger and bad temper and insecurities. It always made her interesting to me (especially compared to most of the Starfleet crew, who are composed bordering on wooden at times), and believable as a former Maquis in a way that most of the others really weren’t. She reminded me of Kira Nerys, in a lot of ways. Sure, she got better about not physically assaulting her crewmates, but she was just never going to be an even-tempered, well-behaved kind of person, and I found that refreshing. I always found the classes with Tuvok kind of funny (and always got a bit of an impression that he didn’t particularly expect them to work), although it would have been nice to get to explore some more Klingon spiritual practices instead.
All of this, plus I really like the ending scene where Torres, before stepping into the sonic shower, reflects on her actions towards Dremk and realizes she still has a way to go in managing her temper…these things take time!
“I told him three times to leave engineering, but he kept buzzing around, snapping pictures for some photo essay . . .
I apologized, and I replicated him a new camera.”
Based on what we’re told, really have to side with Torres here. So the Doctor was asked three times, by the Chief Engineer, to not use engineering as a place to shoot photographs and did so anyway? And only after the third warning did she engage in some property damage, which she apologizes for and makes right? If someone tried this stunt in the engine room of a real naval ship, they’d be lucky if they only ended up with a broken camera and they definitely would not be receiving a replacement.
Really seems like the Doctor should be the one getting a talking-to about the chain of command and boundaries– just because he’s into photography doesn’t mean everybody is or the ship is his playground, but it’s always played for laughs.
[In theory Janeway/Chakotay could have ordered cooperation with the photo essay, which changes things, but if so this detail isn’t mentioned.]
Janeway got a bad-ass tank top episode and now Torres gets one. I can’t complain, especially with the sonic shower at the end. An OK episode overall, but the lack of the EV suits really threw me off. I kept thinking, why the heck are they walking around a highly irradiated ship in their uniforms?
Loved the Tuvok snark when he called Torres “turtle head.”
B’Elanna meditating is inherently funny.
I’m just gonna put this here…………………….
(That link is NSFW, by the by….)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is not the Juggernaut (….bitch!)
@5 @Rick I think the problem was not the fact that Torres punished the Doctor, but rather her reaction and being a senior officer who needs to be a good example for the rest of the crew. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt a naval captain would be allowed to grab a camera and angrily smash it onto the floor. I would think the captain would be more likely to proceed in a more sensible way, for example confiscate the camera and say “I’m putting you on report. Dismissed.” (Or in the case of a civilian, have security escort him out) But even if I’m wrong, the 24th century probably has a different guidebook as to how a senior officer is supposed to react. And Tuvok’s point was spot-on…her temper was an ongoing problem, not just a one-time thing.
@9 Fair enough, and in theory Torres probably should have called security, had them escort the Doctor out and kicked this up the chain of command if he continued to be an issue. It’s also not like the Doctor sleeps, so he could just come back when she’s off duty and be the night crew’s problem.
I thought this was a decent episode. I liked most the atmosphere and direction of the episode. Yes, everyone should have been wearing EV suits, but I understand what the writers or director wanted to get across to the audience were the uncomfortable, unpleasant conditions on the Malon ship and what better way to do that then have B’Elanna strip down and sweat a lot. I also liked the Torres/Tuvok pairing which we don’t get a lot of during the series and I see Tuvok as a good mentor for her.
Trivial Matters: “Juggernaut” has the distinction of being the lowest rated episode of Voyager in terms of Nielsen ratings during the series’ first run achieving a series low of 1.7 million viewers. This is because for some reason UPN aired this episode on a Monday night when the typical airing of the series is on a Wednesday night. There was a still a new episode that aired on Wednesday of that same week (“Someone to Watch Over Me” which received a more typical 3.4 million viewers), but apparently they didn’t really advertise that well the airing of this “bonus” episode. Otherwise, the lowest viewership for a Voyager episode on its regular Wednesday night timeslot was in the seventh season and a tie for four different episodes that each got 2.8 million viewers.
I saw this episode being connected to B’Elanna’s depression in Extreme Risk as otherwise her temper seems a bit of a reversion. It’s better than her acting like she just stepped of the Maquis ship because the writers wanted to do an episode about her and “Torres smash!” is the only character trait they remembered. It could have been established in the episode itself though.
This is the episode that I always think I remember until I realize it’s not Dreadnought… I mean they are both Torres-centric, feature a massively threatening vessel that has to be disarmed, and have similar titles.
@1, have you every tried walking a labyrinth? It’s my absolute favorite form of moving meditation.
@11/garreth: “I understand what the writers or director wanted to get across to the audience were the uncomfortable, unpleasant conditions on the Malon ship and what better way to do that then have B’Elanna strip down and sweat a lot.”
I don’t think that was the audience reaction they were trying to provoke by getting B’Elanna stripped down and sweaty…
@13/Christine: “have you every tried walking a labyrinth?”
I tried once, but I couldn’t figure out where to attach the leash.
I didn’t care for the characterization of the Malon, “I’m just a simple sculptor, except I do this very dangerous job”. Its almost identical to how we were introduced to the Vidians way back when they were stealing organs to survive.
“They absolutely should be wearing EVA suits, which would be much more effective in keeping them safe from the radiation than a drug that will wear off at some point and will likely have different levels of effectiveness on each member of the away team (which is represented by four different species).”
Glad we’ve established that after some people made excuses for the Discovery crew not following that exact same protocol while going into a hard radiation environment without covering their heads and hands and relying mostly on meds for protection. Which led to close-up shots of radiation burns on faces and hands: “Look we’re burning up here; it’s getting bad… “
@16/Sunspear: “Glad we’ve established that after some people made excuses for the Discovery crew not following that exact same protocol while going into a hard radiation environment without covering their heads and hands and relying mostly on meds for protection.”
I’m sure I already corrected you on this — it was established in the seed-vault episode that the environment suits they were wearing have force-field “helmets” that are only briefly visible when activated. So the characters do have protection against vacuum, toxic gases, and radiation while the actors are free to perform without helmets and gloves.
@13/Christine: “have you every tried walking a labyrinth?”
@14, I tried once, but I couldn’t figure out where to attach the leash.
@14/CLB: Yes, that’s probably true regarding the audience reaction as the target audience was young males who are straight, but as someone not sexually attracted to women, my visceral reaction to sweaty B’Elanna was that the Malon ship was certainly no fun place to be and work and her sonic shower at the end of the episode must have felt like quite the relief. I was reminded of some rather unpleasant manual labor gigs I’ve had in my time – no exposure to toxic radiation at least!
Does theta radiation bounce off an EVA suit or does it just go through and spawn secondary radiation as it does so? Did I propose that already, the last time it was around? I may have mentioned short-ish sci fi story “Grapeliner”.
“Tell them the truth. Tell them the Vihaar is no myth.”
The message of this one is…decidedly mixed. Torres spends much of it in one of her worst moods ever. Her trajectory throughout seems to be about her learning to control her temper, which becomes even more obvious when she’s contrasted with Dremk, whose desire to take his anger out on others causes dozens of deaths and nearly causes hundreds. But in the end, Torres tries to reason with him but can only save the day with a violent outburst, that obviously weighs heavily on her afterwards.
Ultimately, the away mission fails and it’s Janeway’s Plan B that controls the contamination. The only thing that stops the team’s suffering and Pelk’s death all being for nothing is that Dremk could probably have diverted the freighter away from the star if Torres hadn’t been there to stop him. Pelk’s death is pretty lazy: Mere minutes before, Chakotay didn’t want the Malons working unsupervised, but then he lets Pelk go off on his own so he can get killed.
The characterisation of Fesek is interesting, demonstrating the odd contradictory mixture of Star Trek values that the Malon first demonstrated in “Night”. In some ways, this is a traditional humanising of the bad guy aliens, with Fesek and Pelk coming across as sympathetic when encountered in isolation. But the constant friction between Fesek and Torres accentuates his alienness. He’s committed to the Malons’ way of doing things, and able to argue for their values in a fairly logical manner, even though it’s completely at odds with Federation ethics.
So yes, inevitably the episode is criticised for having the crew encounter the Malons again despite the jumps in “Timeless” and “Dark Frontier”, but to be fair, when we first encountered the Malons in “Night”, it was thousands of light years away from their own space at the end of a short cut. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that Fesek knows a similar method of getting his waste sectors away from Malon space. Compared to the Hirogen and Talaxians turning up in Season 7, this one’s fairly believable. I definitely wouldn’t see it as a reason to write the episode off entirely!
@21/cap-mjb: The Hirogen are an ancient nomadic species, and we know that the communications network they used stretched nearly to the Federation. So it’s perfectly reasonable that they’d be spread over a very large portion of the galaxy compared to more sedentary civilizations. The Kazon were nomadic too, so that also made perfect sense; the only problem was that they kept encountering the same individual Kazon instead of moving through the territories of different, widely dispersed tribes. But that wasn’t a problem with the Hirogen encounter later on. Those weren’t the same individuals, just a group that the knowledge of holotechnology had spread to over the course of a few years — more than enough time for it to propagate from one Hirogen pack to another to another, even without a communication network to make it instantaneous.
Encountering Talaxians 40,000 light years from Talax, though — that was just dumb. I figure that either the Sikarians let them use the trajector, or they used the Vaadwaur subspace corridors (which we know reached as far as Talax).
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@23/CLB: I’m not entirely convinced that three years is enough time for gossip about the Hirogens’ new toy to spread 30,000 light years or so, and the communications network was destroyed shortly before they got the holo-technology, so if they were using it to keep in touch with other packs, they’d likely have to spend time coming up with a new method of communication. It’s not impossible, but like I say, I find it less likely that the Malons having a dumping ground in this region of space, especially with the implication that it’s a six month round trip.
@2/Christopher: Hang on… are you saying that spinal ridges are not sexy?
@19/garreth: I assume that women (if not gay men) were part of the target audience, too. They certainly were a large part of the actual audience, if my friends and me are anything to go by. I think the writers knew that. They probably went for your reaction as much as the one suggested by Christopher.
Oddly, I have no memories of this episode, even though B’Elanna Torres was my viewpoint character throughout much of Voyager.
So, could this be an adventure from the duplicate crew? Is it definitely way ahead where we know Voyager is at this point? Because that would help explain the Malon being here with their waste ship. They aren’t way ahead, (duplicate) Voyager is still way back there. And as for Paris being such a good boyfriend, the duplicate Paris and Torres did get married sooner.
No, I won’t constantly post about the duplicates from now on. :)
@28: But the duplicate Voyager already disintegrated at this point
@26/cap-mjb: “I’m not entirely convinced that three years is enough time for gossip about the Hirogens’ new toy to spread 30,000 light years or so, and the communications network was destroyed shortly before they got the holo-technology, so if they were using it to keep in touch with other packs, they’d likely have to spend time coming up with a new method of communication.”
There’s still normal subspace communication. If we use the figures Data gave in “Where No One Has Gone Before” (2.7 million light years in 51 years, 10 months), Starfleet subspace radio as of the 2360s could travel about 145 ly per day if not boosted/accelerated by relay stations. So 30,000 ly would take only 207 days at that speed. Presumably a given transceiver has only a limited range, but again, the Hirogen are ancient and widespread, so there probably isn’t a prohibitively large separation between any two bands. So the information could spread pack to pack, one hop at a time, and cover that distance within a year or two.
I presume the relay network was used for its convenience, rather than being the Hirogen’s exclusive form of communication. They’ve been around quite a long time and no doubt have a lot of accumulated knowledge and technology.
@27/Jana: “I assume that women (if not gay men) were part of the target audience, too. They certainly were a large part of the actual audience, if my friends and me are anything to go by. I think the writers knew that.”
There’s knowing, and then there’s caring. Remember, these are the same people that stuck Seven of Nine in a sexy catsuit for four years.
@30/Christopher: They’re also the same people who gave Seven of Nine her intellect and her knowledge and made her a central character. It’s the same principle: serve different parts of the audience at the same time.
It’s well directed. I’ll give them that. Juggernaut benefits heavily from having Allan Kroeker in charge. No other Trek director other than Livingston is capable of generating a well put together package of well paced tension. It’s a good thing he was still available, because right after doing this one he had to tackle the real juggernaut of the season: DS9’s two hour series finale, What You Leave Behind, a far more grueling and demanding assignment.
But Juggernaut itself has a glaring problem, one that’s not about Malon geograph or lack of EVA equipment. I’m guessing Kenneth Biller’s rewrite credit was to give Torres something resembling a character arc for this one. But it’s half-hearted effort. The episode goes through the trouble of establishing Torres’ lingering anger issues (which hadn’t been revelant for a while by this point). But then, it really has nothing to do with the rest of the episode, which plays more like a ticking clock/haunted house premise. Her anger and temper have no agency on this one, other than her knocking out Dremk out with a pipe. Even then, it’s a plot solution that doesn’t connect with the episode’s arc at all. Torres is attacking the mutated Malon in an act of perfectly justified self-defense. The episode fails to track her anger and make it a plot point.
By this point, I’d pretty much conceded Voyager’s frequent inability to deal with geography hiccups. The minute they decided to keep things episodic with little to no connection between episodes, this was inevitable. I had more of a problem during the Kazon arc, because there was still some attempt at keeping things cohesive back then, and failing even more miserably. By this point, they’d ceased to care, which to me makes it less of a problem.
Besides, I still don’t think the issue is the location of Malon-controlled space. I’ve said it before: these haulers have to travel long distances to dump their antimatter as far away as they can from their backyard, in order to keep their home clean and safe. I assume some of them discovered wormholes to get where they need, which to me is enough to mitigate the Dark Frontier jump.
As for the lack of EVA, I can mostly live with that. It’s the same reasoning doctors on medical shows such as ER perform dangerous procedures without masks: It’s television, and we want to see the actors’ faces. It’s a compromise between scientific accuracy and dramatic presentation. Besides, we’ve seen more egregious examples on plenty of prior Trek episodes.
All that aside, I still enjoy Juggernaut for what it is. A competently made action/adventure episode. As long as you don’t stop to think much about it, including the Torres character issue I brought up.
@31/Jana: It goes without saying that a story element can serve more than one purpose. I’m just saying it’s unwise to underestimate the importance of male gaze in the calculations of any TV or film producer in the 20th century.
@31, Yea, I have to agree with Christopher Bennet, it seems pretty clear that, for much of Star Trek, the focus was very much on the straight male gaze, and that if something happened to have a secondary effect, that was mostly incidental. Even as a woman who is sexually attracted to other women, it was always pretty obvious to me that Seven’s catsuit, William Theiss’ costumes, and scenes like the one in this episode were not intended to appeal to me or other lesbian and bi women; they were meant to appeal to straight men. Sure, it is completely legitimate to view scenes in an alternative way (and as a big fan of fanfic and feminist/ Marxist readings of Trek, I’m all for that!), but that pretty obviously isn’t what the primary intent is. The assumption is, as is usually is when things cater to the male gaze, that those who it isn’t directed toward will just accept it as normal and move on.
Could the lack of EVA suits be explained by some alternative technology not identified on screen to save time but just assumed to be standard equipment in an environment such as this? I’m thinking of something similar to (although not exactly) the life support belts used in TAS.
@35/richf: The explanation given in the episode was the anti-radiation drug.
I don’t much mind male gaze. But I do wish female gaze got equal time!
@29: I thought lack of a stardate opened it to possibly being a look back at an earlier adventure?
@38: That would be possible since episodes have aired out of order before except we see that Tom Paris is clearly an ensign here which tracks with his demotion in “Thirty Days” but in “Course: Oblivion” the duplicate Tom Paris is still a lieutenant in that latter episode.
@14, Perfect. Yes.
I thought maybe the Doctor should be on the away team since the radiation wouldn’t affect him (I assume) and he could also administer medical aid to anyone else suffering from theta radiation, assuming their anti-radiation drug didn’t work as expected.
Hmm, my biggest issue with the Malons besides the mentioned issue about them being everywhere, is that this delivery of dangerous cargo should be just ONE business. where are all the other malons? no military? no other civilian ships at least? only the garbage guys? This is so inconsistent and unlikely, unless ALL Malon spaceships are expected to deliver garbage besides other duties or something, but that’s not very likely.
Commenting just to say:
It doesn’t surprise me that it doesn’t surprise anyone that Janeway and crew figured out how to improve the Malons’ waste situation long ago, but don’t even bother to bring it up here because plot reasons.
I’m assuming our communal lack of surprise accounts for why nobody even mentioned it. But it would have been cool to see the solution finally handed over to more sympathetic ears.
i find it easy to believe that they found another wormhole type thing to dump garbage through. But I wish they had said so.
The lack of personal protective equipment in Trek drives me bonkers. I know it’s done for telegenic reasons — but seriously? At least have respirators. Yes, I’ve become more sensitive to the idea of masking due to having an immune compromised partner in a world that has now dismissed COVID, but it makes no in-universe sense. I know they try to get Torres into a tank top every chance they get, which makes the out-of-universe factor even worse.
Other than that tho, yeah, a totally enjoyable episode. I like that Torres isn’t able to reason with the final Malon. I was really concerned things were gonna get all kumbaya, but the show took a much braver route, leaving her to deal with the conflicting emotions. I like the idea of a superstition being exposed as real and relating it to the overall theme of the show. It just works.
After reading Christopher Bennett’s post, it’s brought to mind how much it has bugged me that her expressions of Klingon physiology are too sexy convenient. Again, out-of-universe, makes sense in a gross way. In-universe it’s ridiculous.