“Juggernaut” is episode twenty-one of season five of Star Trek: Voyager.
Inside a Malon vessel that is spewing radiation into space, one of the crew is playing with a model freighter. It’s a gift and another Malon tells him that if he had a child, he would have an excuse to play with toys more of the time. An alarm sounds as there is a rupture. Ejection ports don’t respond, comms and more systems go down and one of the bridge crew is ordered to go seal off the decks manually.
B’Elanna is in Tuvok’s quarters. She lost her temper and destroyed the Doctor’s holocamera. No big deal; she apologised replicated another. Tuvok wishes to teach her how to avoid future occurrences. B’Elanna says you can’t order someone to meditate. Tuvok tells her that evidently Chakotay believes differently. B’Elanna participates, somewhat unwillingly, though she gets distracted imagining Tuvok as a child with cute little pointy ears. Tuvok wants her to remember a time when she felt angry. A schoolmate; he used to terrorise her. She rigged his gyro swing and attacked him. Tuvok wants her to describe her anger, what she wanted. Anger has been a source of strength; it protected her, according to Tuvok. Her rage runs deep. B’Elanna still doesn’t see the point. Tuvok insults her with the same epithet as her schoolmate. She’s easy to provoke.
On the bridge, Tom asks Tuvok how it went. Does Tuvok think he can help B’Elanna? The training will be a challenge to them both. Harry reports an automated distress signal and a course is set. This leads to 37 floating escape pods contaminated with theta radiation. Only two lifesigns, beamed directly to sickbay. The cloud of radiation is 600 million kilometres wide and the source appears to be an abandoned Malon freighter.
In sickbay, Captain Janeway comments to Tuvok that she thought they’d seen the last of the Malon (this episode was originally planned for earlier in the season, before the Malon were left 20,000 light years behind). The Doctor revives one, Fesek, the ship’s controller. He asks where his vessel is. 3 million kilometres away. Too close. There was an accident, over 60 crewmen died in minutes. The fact that they are still here means the ship hasn’t exploded yet. When it does; well, it will be bad. Everything in 3 light years will be destroyed. Janeway orders a course set to put some distance between them and the freighter and to warn every ship. However, the warp field collapses. They need to try and stop the freighter by getting onboard. Fesek doesn’t want any hand in this, but he’s given a choice; help, or back in his escape pod.
The ship will explode in 6 hours and 33 of the 42 decks are flooded with theta radiation, including the control room. B’Elanna suggests starting at a lower level and venting the others. Fesek doesn’t think anything will work; if it did, they would have tried it before they left. They have years of experience. There’s a nebula they could hide in that might protect them from the blast, but the other ships will be destroyed. The other Malon, Pelk, wants to talk about the Vihaar. A myth, an old story about creatures created in the theta storage tanks from radiogenic waste. Poisonous monsters that wreak havoc on a ship. Some of the crew saw something, but Fesek dismisses these as hallucinations.
Neelix used to work on a garbage scow and the Doctor has prepared an inoculation. It will take 2-3 hours to make it to the control room. B’Elanna is being unusually snappy, even for her, so Chakotay has a word and orders her to be diplomatic and keep her temper in check. Later, in the mess hall, Neelix is cooking something. Not food; an old Talaxian folk remedy for theta radiation. It seems absolutely disgusting.
They beam aboard and the place is a mess, even by Malon freighter standards. Their tricorders ignite an explosion, so they have to turn them off. The airlocks need opening manually to vent the radiation. B’Elanna ends up going with Fesek; he explains that for half the year he’s a sculptor. Work he loves, yet he volunteers to do this work, which will undoubtedly cut short his life. Because Malon Prime is a beautiful world and if people like him didn’t do this it would choke in its own waste.
Getting around the ship is difficult, as not only is it a mess but many of the systems are not working. And everything that failed in the first place shouldn’t have. That’s because the myth of the Vihaar is not as much a myth as would be liked.