2.15 — “Threshold”
Plot: I can’t improve on this brief summary from Wikipedia: Tom Paris breaks the transwarp barrier in the Shuttlecraft Cochrane, designed to reach warp 10, but de-evolves into a salamander.
Thoughts: This episode pushes to the foreground all of my feelings about how great it would be if the writing staff had anyone who knew anything about science, or cared about science.
I don’t necessarily mean advanced physics knowledge necessary to grapple with concepts like lightspeed and relativity–although that would be nice!–but it would be useful to have someone capable of giving a grade-school summary of the mechanism by which evolution works.
The talk about the warp ten barrier got my attention, but it turns out it’s just something they pulled out of Gene Roddenberry’s show bible for Star Trek: The Next Generation. All they could think to do with and idea this rich is graft it onto a reworking of TNG 7.19, “Genesis,” an episode written, like “Threshold,” by Brannon Braga. We get body horror and a chance to show off great makeup (in fact, the episode won an Emmy for Outstanding Makeup) and make a cheap joke about Paris and Janeway screwing as salamanders.
It wasn’t long ago that Voyager was talking about its shuttlecrafts as a precious, irreplaceable resource based on being cut off in the Delta Quadrant. Now we have a new shuttle design, and guess what? It’s faster than any starship! That big warp engine room turns out to be unnecessary. And this ship can go anywhere in the universe in an instant, but Voayger can still always track it, maintain radio communications, and rush to its side, wherever it ends up, within three days. Doesn’t this undercut the thesis of the series?
I will rapidly make myself crazy judging Voyager, as it stood in January 1996, against the show I would have wanted it to be. It’s evident that at this point Voyager wanted to be a jokey adventure show that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Judged against that yardstick, we have seen worse episodes than this one, and recently.
Paris is a decent character to spend time with, at least when he isn’t hitting on Kes, because he can say amusing and unpredictable things you can’t picture coming out of the mouths of the other characters. EMH is even more fun, for his limited scenes.
I don’t buy that receiving credit for going on this mission is so important to Paris, you know why? Because he didn’t put the work in. We never hear about these transwarp experiments until this episode. The hardest problem they have to solve untangling this impossible conundrum is what material to use to build the pylon struts. I feel like more attention was paid to the project to fix and repair the robot in VOY 2.13, “Prototype.”
If this was more realistic, Paris would be content to remain associated with this life-altering project, Janeway would stick to her guns, and Kim would have flown the mission.
I expect we’ll hear about as much about the breakthrough in this episode going forward as we have heard of the discovery in TNG 7.9, “Force of Nature,” that warp travel above Warp 5 causes damage to the fabric of spacetime. Which is a shame.
Online sources indicate this episode is extremely unpopular with Star Trek fans. At the 50th Anniversary Convention, it was voted the third worst Trek episode of all time behind the series finale of Enterprise and TNG 1.4, “Code of Honor.”
I give it a charitable 2 of 5 space tadpoles.
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