Janeway goes rogue for no great reason. She's obsessed with catching Captain Ransom to the point where she's using kidnap, threatening to torture and kill, barking at everyone, and shooting at everything. Ransom, meanwhile, mellows for no great reason, either. He balks at having the Doctor torture Seven of Nine, despite deleting the EMH's ethics to get the job done.
In fact, while both ships are shooting at each other and Janeway is lying (?) to the Green Goblins, promising that she will let them have their deadly revenge, it is actually Ransom and Gilmore who enforce the Equinox surrender and beam the survivors to safety on Voyager. Burke dies in the midst of a clumsy mutiny, and our EMH deletes the treacherous EVIL MH. To be clear, if our EMH counts as a person, then this counts as a murder. Self-defence, I'll grant you. 'Deactivate' is as easy to say as 'delete', isn't it? Like everything else, no one seems to hold any grudges for anything anyone has done. Slaps on the wrist all around, then, and back to business as usual. It's eerily like the first season, where Voyager just adds terrorists to the melting pot and all is forgiven and forgotten quite conveniently.
Remember 'The Omega Glory'? Probably not. It's one of the worst episodes of the Original Series. And it has a lot in common with "Equinox, Part II" except reviewers seem to love 'Equinox, Part II'. 'The Omega Glory' also has a rogue Starfleet Captain (Tracey) who throws away his principles, gets most of his crew killed, and slaughters aliens by the boatload. On the plus side, Captain Ransom is not the centerpiece in a patriotic wank-fest. On the minus side, at least Captain Tracey didn't die while wearing a VR headset for what looks like a masturbatory fantasy about Seven of Nine.
And 'The Omega Glory' is the story where Captain Kirk claimed Starfleet officers swear oaths to DIE before breaking the Prime Directive. Starving to death is a form of dying, if I'm not mistaken. So. in theory, if Janeway had been put in Ransom's position, she would have LET her people starve to death rather than kill the Eel Men. In any case, it will never matter: we'll never see these killers again. Janeway may have adopted five of them and given them a stern talking to, but as far as the series is concerned they all walked into a plasma injector six seconds after they left her office.
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