Dear god somebody please help me and I hope someone knows how to fix this without me having to restart this entire game LOL.

So, you're going to the hangar bay and Malak drops the truth bomb on you. He uses Stasis on Bastila and Carth and you fight him. Cool - I beat the first phase of the fight and he whirlwinds me and runs away. I run around to meet him on the other side and... Malak is missing. Totally gone. I try looking in the other corridor, loop all the way back to my still frozen companions and nada.

I've reloaded 4 times to see if it's just a one time glitch but no - it's a persistent bugger.

I have the KotOR Restoration mod installed. The only other mods are just texture improvements to NPCs/companions/environments.

WELP. Fixed it myself. "Fixed".

Had to cheat and set my security to 99. Opened the blast door that he ran through and Malak was stuck in the door he had run through to escape. He was friendly. I screamed in frustration. I opened the blast door past him with my stupidly high security skill and THIS finally triggered the scene to progress to the second phase of the battle and Bastila comes to "save" me.

In case anyone else has this ever (which it looks like it never happened to anyone else in the history of this game ever judging from my deep dive on the internet), now you know how to progress. :)))))