10 Darkest Star Trek Moments That You've Never Seen
5. The Crotonan Guard
Captain Rudy Ransom already had quite the reputation for original thinking by the time the USS Voyager encountered the Equinox in the Delta Quadrant. While much of this expertise would be put to use in his attempts to escape Janeway's wrath, he was sadly outmatched in his first week in the frontier.
After being dragged across the galaxy by the Caretaker, the Equinox found itself in the Crotonan Guard's territory. Despite warnings from the locals, he gave the order to proceed.
Much of what we know about the Equinox has been told to us by the surviving crew that Voyager encounters. However, when Ransom gave that order, they were still a mostly functioning ship with a mostly intact crew (we are allowing for some deaths from the Caretaker's actions). In that first week, Ransom tells Janeway, that the Crotonan Guard killed half of his crew. From that time on, they were limping through the Quadrant.
The event is detailed almost off-hand by Random. He had almost five years to come to terms with that horror, so one could be forgiven for blasting through the report - but there is little doubt that at the moment, this would have been a truly horrific event to endure.