I don't think I'd seen this ep. since it first premiered. As much as I like B'elanna, she was the only thing that saved it. I just watched it and wow, it was not good.
It's also a weird vehicle for getting B'elanna stripped of her clothing. I mean, yes, I get it that she's being emotionally stripped, poetic symbolic somethingorother blah blah, but it's still sorta comically weird. Not even Jim Kirk went to that much trouble to get his shirt ripped. It furthermore feels really out of place timeline-wise. Sure, the heroes state they, too, thought they had left these folks behind. But how far behind, we can't readily comprehend until we remember "Timeless" and "Dark Frontier" both happened in between, putting tens of thousands of lightyears between this and the last Malon encounter. The longest distance between any two appearances of a species, really, save for the Talaxians in "Homestead" so long after "Fair Trade". Timo Saloniemi