10 Times Janeway Was The Best Captain In Star Trek
8. She Knew When To Quit
As kind and caring as Janeway could be, she also displayed on several occasions that when you attack her or her ship, she will fight back. Yet, in Equinox, she was faced with one of the greatest betrayals of all. Captain Ransom of the USS Equinox is discovered to have abandoned his Starfleet ideals - murdering innocent creatures and leaving Voyager to their mercy along the way.
To say that Janeway takes this personally is an understatement. She pursues the ship with everything she's got, hunting them across the sector. She slips farther and farther into her anger, continually butting heads with Chakotay as she goes. Consumed by the anger she feels, she is unable to let it drop - and no one can tell her otherwise.
This has all of the hallmarks of a shoot-to-kill mission. She destroys one of the Equinox's nacelles with one of their precious/ever replenishing torpedoes, forcing it to drop out of warp. At the last moment however, Ransom sees the error of his ways and reignites the last spark of Starfleet inside him.
Janeway immediately backs down, knowing that the hunt is over. She saves the crew-members of the Equinox that she can and later discusses with Chakotay the implications of her obsession.