A Malon waste freighter — four trillion isotons of antimatter waste in failing theta tanks — drifts toward detonation, and its contaminated escape pods bring two survivors to Voyager. If the freighter explodes, everything within three light years is destroyed, and the theta radiation has collapse...
Voyager S5E03 — B'Elanna Torres has been running holodeck simulations without safety protocols, accumulating untreated injuries. Janeway discovers the pattern: Torres has been trying to feel anything after learning her Maquis crewmates were massacred. Frameworks: The Numbness Cascade (grief unprocessed becomes numbness, not resolution), The Infrastructure of Feeling (Chakotay's forced confrontation as emotional first aid), The Competence Return (skill returns before feeling does in crisis), The First Small Pleasure (banana pancakes as the return signal).
Chakotay's solo mission as the Personal HDF - a frame that looks like responsibility but operates as isolation. Seska's weaponized intimacy: the Inherited HDF that uses shared history as leverage. Torres as bridge-framework between Maquis instinct and Starfleet protocol - the Flask applied through translation rather than binary choice. Janeway's containment discipline: named breach + formal consequence + relationship preserved. The permanent residue: Seska's biological violation (DNA theft, self-impregnation) as a frame that can't be undone by recognition alone - the question the tetrad can't yet answer.
The Bothan as the perfect Hollow Deceptive Frame - a predator that reads your deepest desires and gives them form, not as a threat but as a lure. Kes as Suture Conductor: reflecting the hallucinations back, positioned between signal and source, conducting the current without generating it. Paris's three-sentence refusal ("Get out of my life. Not any more. Not any more.") as the e-prime of self-reclamation. Torres recognizing the false Chakotay by the absence of friction - smoothness as the tell of a lie. The Bothan's vanishing question: does the mechanism of production change the reality of experience? Janeway's integration: the shame of being seen wanting, not the desire itself, was the infection.
B'Elanna Torres is split into her Klingon and Human halves by a Vidiian surgeon. The rejected self saves the self that rejected it. Integration as continued argument with someone you can't live without.
Hospitality as performance: the Sikarian pleasure economy, Tuvok's sacrifice, Janeway's refusal of unilateral logic, and B'Elanna's quiet becoming.