Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review a character from Enterprise who appears in a couple episodes, this character being Malik.
Malik is one of 19 human augments who were made by 20th century genetic engineering in the timeline of Star Trek. The embryos of these 19 augments were stolen by Arik Soong and then raised as children by Soong on a distant planet called Trialas IV. However, at the age of 10, Soong is captured and put in prison for stealing the embryos, leaving the augments to fend for themselves. It goes about as well as it did when Khan and his followers were stranded on Ceti Alpha.
To this end, Malik grows tired of being stashed away on a distant planet when the augments reach age 20. Thus, he hatches a plan to steal a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, which he successfully does with one of his augment brothers Saul. This angers the leader of the augments, whose name was Raakin. This also leads Raakin and Malik to become fully at odds with one another, a conflict that had initially arisen over a shared love interest in Persis, one of the female human augments in their group.
Malik convinces Persis, who was Raakin's consort, to help overthrow the leadership of Raakin shortly after the theft of the Bird-of-Prey. Malik kills Raakin and then shows his true self to be incredibly ruthless, a familiar trait for augment leaders as we've seen in other stories.
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The crew of Enterprise then runs into Malik and the augments when Malik detects that Soong is aboard Enterprise. Malik successfully captures Soong by taking Captain Archer hostage to assure his safe escape from Enterprise. The Bird-of-Prey then takes off for Cold Station 12, the place where 1800 more augment embryos are being stored.
This obviously would be a bad situation, so Archer and his crew continue to try and capture the augments to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. Of course, there are thousands of nasty pathogens stored in stasis at the cold station, leading Malik to torture others and threaten to make biological weapons out of this nasty stuff. Long story short, with great effort and many twists and turns, Archer and his crew stop the augments and end up killing Malik in the end. Soong realizes the error of his ways based on how Malik turned out.
Malik was played by Alec Newman except one child appearance in a flashback played by Jordan Orr. Newman is originally from Glasgow and studied in the Shakespeare theater until coming to the field of acting. He continues to act in many TV shows today, but it possibly best known for his role Muad'Dib in the 2000 Dune movie.
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