The Malon are everywhere!

[ryan123450]

I just watched Juggernaut and I'm wondering how the Malon could be encountered again after the 10,000 plus journey in Timeless and another big journey in Dark Frontier? It seemed to me that a plausible explanation would be that Juggernaut actually took place before Timeless back when Voyager would have been near Malon space. There is a somewhat clear view of Paris's ensign pip, but that seems a much less glaring error than to assume the Malon operate over a stretch of more than a 10th of the galaxy.

The other strange reference to the Malon occurs in just the previous episode, Think Tank. It is stated that they haven't seen the Malon in months, but the thought of encountering them again isn't met with incredulity because they are a decade away from Malon space. And why would the Think Tank guy pretend to be a Malon when it would seem to be such an unlikely enemy?

The only problem I can see with moving this episode up the timeline as well is that Paris is clearly refered to as an Ensign in dialog. I'm wondering if anybody else has any better explanations for these two weird appearances?

 

[Ghost]

Hey I had not thought about that but you are right regarding the Malon and the Voyager's crew encounters with them.
Basically it is the same thing with the Hirogen. Okay they are spread out across the Quadrant but how could the Hirogen the crew encountered in that episode with the renegade holograms have acquired the holodeck technology when that particular group was left behind the ship as it moved towards the Alpha Quadrant.

Same applies for the Talaxians that were encountered in the last season.
The distance not to mention the large swats of Borg space would make it difficult if not impossible.
Either there is some wormhole network out there the Voyager crew was not privileged to to use or the writers just forget the facts of the show or just plain ignore them whenever they feel like it.

 

[ryan123450]

The Talaxian thing is so outrageous and blatant that I always assumed there was a very interesting story behind their crossing of the quadrant. But I wish there was an easy way to explain away the Malon thing. It seems like there might have been some similar situation with the Devore, but I can't recall what is was.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Eh, Delta Quadrant races just travel way further and have much more territory than humans do.

 

[Lynx]

Hey I had not thought about that but you are right regarding the Malon and the Voyager's crew encounters with them.
Basically it is the same thing with the Hirogen. Okay they are spread out across the Quadrant but how could the Hirogen the crew encountered in that episode with the renegade holograms have acquired the holodeck technology when that particular group was left behind the ship as it moved towards the Alpha Quadrant.

Same applies for the Talaxians that were encountered in the last season.
The distance not to mention the large swats of Borg space would make it difficult if not impossible.
Either there is some wormhole network out there the Voyager crew was not privileged to to use or the writers just forget the facts of the show or just plain ignore them whenever they feel like it.

It was almost the same with the Kazon-Nistrim who did seem to be following and chasing Voyager for more than a year.

As for the Malon and the Talaxians, we could assume that they were using a wormhole which the Voyager crew didn't know anything about.

 

[Jeri]

For a long time apparently, the Malons were very motivated to find wildcat dumps for their theta radiation; they probably found heaps of old wormholes and conduits.

Remember that one jerk who was afraid proper disposal would ruin his business had found a secret way in and out of the void that gave him an economic advantage even over other Malons.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, the reuse of the Malon in "Juggernaut" was sloppy and ill-conceived. I can buy that a species might spread pretty far across the galaxy if it had decades or centuries to do so, particularly since a race as wasteful as the Malon would foul its own nests pretty quickly and have an incentive to spread far in search of new resources and territory; but encountering them after a jump of 30,000 light years in total, over a quarter of the diameter of the galaxy, is ridiculous.

The Talaxians showing up 40,000 light years from Talax was equally sloppy. I can rationalize it by assuming they used either a Sikarian trajector (whose maximum range was 40,000 ly) or the Vaadwaur subspace corridor network (assuming they were able to dodge the Turei), but it still should never have been done. The story could've worked just as well if Neelix had met some new aliens who reminded him of his own people.

But it makes perfect sense for the Hirogen to be so widespread. We know them to be a nomadic race that's been around for many centuries. Moreover, they're predators. As a rule, predators don't share territory well, since each one (or each pack) needs a large hunting ground. So the Hirogen would have a natural incentive to spread as far through space as they could. As for how they got the holodeck technology, surely they have subspace radio. The different Hirogen packs across the quadrant presumably shared the technical specs with their neighbors and it eventually spread to the group Voyager encountered in "Flesh and Blood."

 

[hux]

The Malon. Another classic Delta quadrant species brought to you by Voyager

As others have mentioned, there were a few examples of species (often very unimpressive species) existing across the massive distances of the Delta quadrant. That whole quadrant felt parochial from start to finish.

Sometimes I get the distinct impression that all the interesting, powerful species were just beyond that Borg hub. Sadly, all those serious bad ass aliens like the Fen Domar were snatched from us by admiral Janeway. Another reason to hate her. Prior to that, it was just dumb fucks like the Kazon and Malon etc

 

[Christopher]

I thought the Hirogen worked great, but they were the exception.

 

[Lynx]

The Voyager books have a lot of interesting species like the Kirse, theAlcawellians, the Hachai, the P'nir, the Ryol, the Televek, the Drenarians and many other.

 

[Ghost]

I thought the Hirogen worked great, but they were the exception.

Personally I preferred the Hirogen in general as a recurring antagonist for the Voyager crew.

They were much more interesting than the Kazon which were IMO Klingon-lite and weren't as much obsessed with Voyager's advanced technology but rather their motive of hunting worthy prey.
I know that makes them predator rip offs but they did it IMO better than some of the 'hunter' species we have encountered before on Star Trek.

Personally I felt the show started to show more interesting civilizations/species after "Scorpion 1/2", most of them before that were rather forgettable.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

The same way they ran into the Hirogen again after traveling 30,000 ly.

I hated the Hirogen. If they were going to make them the new 'Main villain species' they should have given them more depth instead of portraying them as just these random guys who like to murder people for sport. Like, they could have shown that to be just one facet of their culture that a small percentage of the population participates in. Instead, it came off like every single Hirogen devoted their entire life to hunting people, and it does not make sense in that vein that their entire civilization has not collapsed in on itself.

 

[Christopher]

^"Flesh and Blood" did feature a Hirogen who was more interested in engineering than hunting. It's natural enough that most of the Hirogen that Voyager encountered would be hunters, since the hunters would be the ones to interact most with outsiders. Same reason all the Klingons we saw in TOS were in the military.

 

[hux]

Instead, it came off like every single Hirogen devoted their entire life to hunting people, and it does not make sense in that vein that their entire civilization has not collapsed in on itself.

Are you kidding? Every major recurring Trek species generally has a one note culture (an Earth based note). Humans are (understandably) the only species with more than one hat (though Trek also did a good a job of making humans fairly homogenous)

Kilingons - warriors
Vulcans - logic
Cardassians - dictatorial
Ferenghi - greed
Bajorans - spiritual
Hirogen - hunters

How many camp Klingons who like to use innuendo and work with animals have you seen?

I understand the limitations of creating large numbers of alien species for a show and totally get why they use a one concept culture to flesh out a species, but my problem with the Malon is that their one note was tedious. A culture based apparently on.....polluting shit.

The others have some possibilities for story telling but polluting.....sigh

 

[Christopher]

^Heyy, Captain Planet got a whole series out of that!

 

[Ghost]

It's perhaps weird but I have always wanted to see an atheist Bajoran as I am very interested to see how it would have been handled on DSN.

And yeah, I would have liked to have seen Malon who are not in the waste disposal business.

 

[Christopher]

It's perhaps weird but I have always wanted to see an atheist Bajoran as I am very interested to see how it would have been handled on DSN.

Ro Laren. At least in the books. The show was a bit more ambiguous -- she didn't believe in ghosts, and she wore her earring on the "wrong" ear despite not being a Pah-wraith cultist. (In the books, that's because she sees it as a cultural symbol but doesn't embrace its religious significance -- and didn't like vedeks grabbing her ear to read her pagh.)

 

[Ghost]

Okay, it has been such a long time since I last saw the episodes with her that I have completely forgotten about those details.
Always thought like "what if there are Bajorans who do not believe in supernatural beings or the Prophets even though the Prophets have been shown to be real. That these Bajorans see them as just another bunch of aliens, be it very powerful ones, but not anything they should worship"

 

[Finn]

I'd agree that the Malon were a bit iffy- if they were transwarp-capable, they wouldn't need that wormhole into the void... Maybe there's some kind of wormhole that reaches that far out.

But I have no issue with the Talaxians, as Voyager made the distance (actually more as they started further out than Talaxia...) in less time....

There are likely more Talaxians that far out, all across the galaxy. Dragon's teeth implied Talaxians were warp capable in the 15th Century at the least. More than enough time for a group of Talaxians to venture that far out. It's also possible that a Talaxian actually made it to our part of the Galaxy but nobody cared enough to notice.

 

[Christopher]

But I have no issue with the Talaxians, as Voyager made the distance (actually more as they started further out than Talaxia...) in less time....

But only through extraordinary circumstances. They got pushed 10,000 light years by Kes's supercharged psi powers, then traveled 300 extra light years using Arturis's quantum slipstream drive, then jumped 2500 light years through the Malon vortex, then traveled another 10,000 light years using their own experimental quantum slipstream drive that almost destroyed them (well, did destroy them until the timeline was changed), then covered another 20,000 light years using a stolen Borg transwarp coil, then jumped another 200 ly through the Vaadwaur subspace corridor and another 600 ly thanks to the graviton catapult. Out of an estimated 46,000 light years (according to Star Trek Star Charts), they only covered 2400 ly -- a mere 5.2 percent! -- under their own warp power. And a key premise of the first season was that Voyager's technology was far more advanced than anything else in that region of space -- i.e. the region the Talaxians came from.

There are likely more Talaxians that far out, all across the galaxy. Dragon's teeth implied Talaxians were warp capable in the 15th Century at the least. More than enough time for a group of Talaxians to venture that far out.

Except that "Homestead" makes it clear that Dexa personally remembers Talax -- and that she and the other colonists left to escape its occupation by the Haakonians, which means that they left less than 21 years before. So they spanned a distance in under two decades that would've taken Voyager at least four to five decades -- probably much more. (If they covered only 2400 ly at regular warp in 7 years, then covering 46,000 ly would've taken 134 years!) So these Talaxians, whose technology is supposed to be so much less advanced than Starfleet's that Neelix was astonished at Voyager's capabilities, were able to travel anywhere from two to seven times as fast as Starfleet's most advanced warp engines.

So the whole thing just made no damn sense. It took what the entire series had portrayed as an incredibly difficult, arduous, and unlikely journey and made it seem casual. And that made a mockery of the entire premise of the series. It's like if Gilligan's Island had done an episode late in its run revealing that the island had been just 8 miles from Oahu the whole time.