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Star Trek: Voyager’s “Threshold” stands as one of the weirdest entries in the whole franchise, but it found a strange way to answer a big question.
Star Trek: Voyager had a habit of swinging for the fences with its more high-concept episodes. When they succeeded, they created some of the series’ high points and helped put its own unique stamp in the Star Trek franchise. These included episodes like Season 2, Episode 24, “Tuvix,” which posed serious ethical questions in unique and fascinating ways. However, not every episode could hit the delicate balance required for that, and when they failed, the Voyager got weird, such as when answering what happens when hitting warp 10.
Season 2, Episode 15, “Threshold,” explores that question. Presented as a mystery, it builds to a reveal involving giant salamanders and easy sex jokes. It’s particularly odd considering it surrounds one of the staples of Star Trek’s lexicon: warp speed. The moment could have defined one of Star Trek’s key pieces of technology. Instead, it’s become a shining example of the franchise at its goofiest.
According to the franchise’s rules, warp factors exponentially increase speed. For instance, a ship traveling at warp 6 moves more than twice as fast as it would at warp 5, which is more than twice as fast as warp 4 and so on. The barrier to that is warp 10, a point where, as Harry Kim explains, an object touches all points in the universe simultaneously. After the ship discovers refined dilithium on a new planet, Tom Paris thinks he can use it to hit warp 10 and bring Voyager home to Earth in an instant.
The episode makes an obvious nod to Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. Tom’s increasingly fixated efforts to cross the barrier reflect a disregard for the potential safety problems. “Threshold’s” early scenes play that tension well, as Tom, Harry and B’Elanna first test their theories in the holodeck before Tom ventures out in a shuttle to break the barrier himself. The science is shaky, even for Star Trek, but the suspense admirably builds, and the dialogue plants just enough hints about some kind of Frankensteinian consequences should Paris succeed. That helps the episode skirt around its omnipresent Gilligan’s Island question: the audience knows that Tom will fail since Voyager can’t return home just yet. The tension comes in what his flight will do to him.
Positing the question isn’t the episode’s problem. That comes with the answer, which “Threshold” at first seeks to defer in favor of more suspense. Tom’s flight succeeds, but it has untold effects on him, resulting in a slow transformation into a seemingly amphibious humanoid with a good deal of body horror included to keep the tension high. The word “quantum” floats around the entire episode, another term Star Trek often uses as a catch-all explanation for whatever concept it wants to explore, but the change still comes out of left field. It lacks any causal connections to Paris’s flight and turns its intriguing mystery into an utterly ridiculous one.
But it gets worse. As the physiological changes take hold, Paris abducts Captain Janeway and returns to the shuttle to repeat his warp 10 feat. The crew finds them three days later on an uninhabited jungle planet, transformed into six-foot-long salamanders. Moreover, they have bred, and their spawns are found nearby. Chakotay stuns them and returns them to the ship — leaving their offspring behind — while the Doctor restores them to their human forms. They simply remark how little of the experience they remember, and the ship flies on to the next Voyager episode.
The disposable nature of the entire affair is the last touch for a concept that had gone wildly astray long before. The salamanders’ nature and their connection to Paris’ flight are never mentioned, nor is the fact that they simply abandoned their genetic offspring to the wild without a second thought. Considering the way “Threshold” builds up the monumental achievement of breaking warp 10 — Paris is compared to Zefram Cochrane and the Wright Brothers — the nonchalance with which it tosses aside Tom’s success and his subsequent transformation are stunning. That extends to the elephant in the room: the fact that Paris and Janeway mated and conceived of children as giant salamanders, which the crew accepts without a second thought.
Terms like “best” and “worst” don’t really apply to episodes like “Threshold.” From an objective standpoint, it’s terrible. However, its terrible qualities come in such a freakish and unanticipated way that they become selling points in and of themselves. It’s ridiculous but lovable in its own way, no different than any of the other occasions that the franchise’s sillier side came out. Although, that doesn’t save it from its sheer head-scratching quality, leaving it the “Spock’s Brain” of Voyager and a contender for one of Star Trek’s all-time weirdest episodes.
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