“Threshold”
Written by Michael De Luca and Brannon Braga
Directed by Alexander Singer
Season 2, Episode 15
Production episode 132
Original air date: January 29, 1996
Stardate: 49373.4
Captain’s log. After mining some super-special dilithium that can handle higher warp frequencies, Torres, Kim, and Paris start tinkering with a transwarp drive that can hit warp ten, a theoretical impossibility, but which would enable them to get home in an instant since it’s, in essence, infinite velocity.
The problem is, every simulation they’ve run on the holodeck has failed. Talking with Neelix in the mess hall actually prompts an idea on how to fix the problem, though Neelix himself didn’t understand a word they said.
Their simulation works once they make that fix, and they put it to Janeway and Chakotay to move on to a practical test. Everyone is thrilled at the notion, and they get to work.
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The three of them outfit the shuttlecraft Cochrane with the transwarp drive and all the modifications they need to make. The night before the test, Janeway visits Paris in his quarters to inform him that the EMH did a medical exam and found an enzymatic imbalance in his cerebellum during the simulations. There’s a two-percent chance that it will cause a brain hemorrhage during the test, and Janeway wants Kim to pilot the shuttle instead. Paris whines and complains about how mean his father was to him, and how he wants to do something meaningful with his life because he was told as a boy that he would and he hasn’t. Janeway, for some reason, gives in to this and allows him to fly the test, assuming the brain hemorrhage will be staved off by the power of his machismo.
Paris takes the Cochrane out and hits the transwarp drive, and then suddenly the shuttle disappears right when he hits warp ten.
Eventually, they find the shuttle and bring it back on board. Paris is unconscious, and when he wakes up in sickbay he says he was everywhere at once. He mentions seeing Earth, the Klingon Empire, the Kazon, and other galaxies, all at the same time. He also saw Voyager looking for him, so he shut down the warp drive, which put him back where he started, er, somehow.
Torres confirms with the shuttle computer that he hit warp ten, and the shuttle’s sensors have craptons of data scanned, including every cubic centimeter of the sector Voyager is in. Janeway has Torres send it to stellar cartography to start making star charts.
Later, Torres and Paris share a drink in the mess hall—specifically the “Paris blend” of coffee that Neelix has created in his honor. Then Paris suddenly collapses—and the transporter room can’t get a lock on him to beam him to sickbay. He’s brought there physically, and the EMH is shocked to learn that he had an allergic reaction to the water in the coffee. His lungs are no longer processing oxygen properly, either. The EMH sets up a containment area with an atmosphere he can breathe, but only the EMH himself can go in there. Paris’s skin starts changing, and he becomes delirious, muttering different things, ranging from requesting a big funeral to when he lost his virginity to wanting a pepperoni-and-olive pizza, and at one point asking Kes to kiss him as a final wish—but she can’t enter the containment unit.
And then Paris dies.
And then later he wakes up, er, somehow. According to the EMH, he’s evolving. He’s grown another heart, his hair has fallen out, and his skin has changed, plus one of his eyes is different. The EMH has had to put him back in a containment field, as he’s also suffering some major personality shifts. Janeway tries talking to him, and he goes back and forth from miserable bastard to flaming asshole. And then he vomits out his own tongue.
Jonas covertly sends information about the warp ten experiment to the Kazon-Nistrim. This will possibly be important at some point in a later episode.
The EMH believes he can revert Paris to normal by using anti-protons to wipe out the mutated DNA, thus leaving only his original DNA behind. (How the anti-protons are supposed to be able to distinguish is left as an exercise for the viewer.) The only source of anti-protons is the warp core, and there isn’t time to set up a device to bring to sickbay, so they bring Paris to engineering, restrained in an allegedly secure biobed in front of the warp core. But before the treatment can start, the biobed proves insecure and Paris breaks out, getting into a firefight with the engineering crew. One shot takes out a port plasma conduit, causing power failures all over the ship. Tuvok calls a security alert, but internal sensors are down, so they can’t track Paris.
Paris, who has been saying he needs to get off the ship, ambushes Janeway and takes her on the Cochrane and hits warp ten again.
Three days later, Voyager finally locates the shuttle on a planet. They find two lizards with human DNA in them, as well as their three offspring. Apparently, this is what Janeway and Paris “evolved” into—tiny lizards that can mate, gestate, and give birth in three days.
Chakotay uses his phaser to stun the lizard versions of Janeway and Paris, and brings them back. (He leaves the offspring behind because the producers don’t want to deal with baby lizards on the show.) The anti-proton treatment works fine when the subjects are unconscious (raising the question of why they didn’t sedate Paris the first time), and they both recover. Janeway tells Paris that she’s putting him in for a commendation because, regardless of the outcome, he did break the warp-ten barrier.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? This episode establishes warp ten as a theoretical impossibility, because it’s infinite velocity, putting you in every place in the universe at once. This despite the fact that multiple previous Star Trek episodes (“Journey to Babel,” “The Changeling,” “By Any Other Name,” “That Which Survives,” “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” “The Counter-Clock Incident,” “All Good Things…“) had ships going faster than warp ten. And yes, I know all the nonsense about recalibrating the warp scale and other behind-the-scenes stuff, which is all utterly irrelevant, I’m talking about what’s been seen onscreen. And what’s been established in actual Star Trek TV shows is that ships can go past warp ten, until this episode, when they suddenly can’t without turning passengers into lizards.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is very obviously thrilled at the notion of breaking the warp ten barrier, and not just because it will get them home. She talks very reverently of the accomplishment.
And then Paris thanks her by kidnapping her, mutating her, and making babies with her. Cha cha cha.
Mr. Vulcan. When Tuvok and Chakotay find the mutated Janeway and Paris and their kiddos, Chakotay says he has no idea how he’s going to write this up in his log, and Tuvok dryly says, “I look forward to reading it.”
Half and half. Torres, Kim, and Paris are all-in on trying to get this project to work. It’s kinda fun to watch.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH at first treats Paris with the same disdain he always does, but once he starts to get seriously ill, he actually seems to feel sorry for him for the first time—well, ever.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. While he knows nothing about warp theory, truly, Neelix’s questions about the project help focus Torres, Kim, and Paris and put them on the road to a solution.
Also, when told that Paris drank a new blend of Neelix’s coffee before collapsing in the mess hall, the EMH expresses surprise that the coffee didn’t kill him outright.
Do it.
“Can you wake him?”
“I don’t see why not. WAKE UP, LIEUTENANT!”
–Janeway requesting that Paris be revived, and the EMH not wanting to waste a perfectly good stimulant.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Paris apparently lost his virginity at the age of seventeen in his own bedroom. The EMH dryly notes that he’ll make a note of it in his medical file.
Also the mutated Paris and Janeway knock boots and have three kids.
Welcome aboard. The only guests in this one are Raphael Sbarge as Jonas and Mirron E. Willis as Rettik, who are in one scene to show that the Jonas-betrays-the-crew-to-the-Kazon thing is an ongoing plot point since it started in “Alliances.”
Trivial matters: Janeway mentions other pilot pioneers: Orville Wright (why she only mentions Orville and not Wilbur is a mystery), who created and flew the first heavier-than-air flying machine, Neil Armstrong, who was the first human to set foot on the surface of the moon, and Zefram Cochrane, established in “Metamorphosis” on the original series as pioneering faster-than-light travel, and also seen in Enterprise’s “Broken Bow” and the movie First Contact (and after whom they name the shuttlecraft they use in this episode).
The notion of transwarp drive was first mentioned in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as the U.S.S. Excelsior was equipped with such. It is generally assumed that the Excelsior transwarp experiments were failures since the next time we saw the ship in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, there was no mention of transwarp drive, nor any mention of same in any of the spinoffs—until now, anyhow.
Supposedly, Gene Roddenberry wanted a recalibrated warp scale for TNG, so that warp speeds up to, but not including warp ten were as far as one could go. This was never stated onscreen, however, which is why you had the Enterprise hitting warp thirteen in the alternate future of “All Good Things…”
Michael De Luca sold this story to Voyager when he was the head of New Line Cinema.
Writing as “TG Theodore,” Ted Kopulos wrote a followup to this episode from the point of view of the three lizard offspring in the short story “On the Rocks” in Strange New Worlds V.
This episode is pretty universally despised, and routinely makes “worst-of” lists for both Voyager in particular and Trek in general.
Set a course for home. “I have no idea what they just said.” This episode is generally spoken of in the same disdainful breath as other worst-ever episodes, residing in the bottom of the barrel alongside “Spock’s Brain” and “And the Children Shall Lead” and “Plato’s Stepchildren” and “Shades of Gray” and “Sub Rosa” and “Profit and Lace” and so on.
And it absolutely deserves it. More so because the episode actually starts out really promising. The whole notion of trying to break a speed barrier is a good one, one that human history is replete with. (It would’ve made sense for Janeway to mention Chuck Yeager in her list of famous pilots, since he’s the one who broke the sound barrier, a major breakthrough in flight.) I love the exhausted brainstorming scene in the mess hall among Torres, Paris, Kim, and Neelix, and I love that Paris is passionate about it.
I could’ve lived without the scene in Paris’s quarters where he tells Janeway he has to make this flight regardless of any medical issues because his Daddy and his teachers told him he’d be a huge success in life, which is a pathetic artificial way to add pathos to what happens later, especially since that enzymatic imbalance the EMH found is a complete nonfactor in the episode. (Janeway does ask if that caused his mutations, the EMH says no, and that’s the end of it. What a waste.)
But I’d have been willing to forgive the episode that bit of self-indulgence if it hadn’t gone so thoroughly into the toilet after that.
First there’s the flight itself, where Paris is somehow everywhere at once, yet just the act of shutting the warp drive down puts him right back where he started. But where is that, exactly? Voyager was following along the shuttle at warp nine-point-nine or whatever, which is roughly nine thousand times the speed of light. When you’re going that fast, where, exactly, is “back where you started”? For that matter, after a deluded, mutated Paris buggered off (pun intended) with Janeway at infinite speed, hitting every point in the universe, how is it even remotely plausible that they wound up on a planet that’s only three days away? (Also, given how much time they spend at warp nine and higher in this episode, they should be nowhere near any Kazon or Vidiians anymore. And yet, there’s Jonas, calling the Nistrim…)
Also, Paris’s mutations took a couple days. Yet somehow, Janeway mutated completely into this new form, mated with Paris, gestated their kids, and gave birth all in three days.
To be fair, that’s at least one way you can say they’ve “evolved,” but then we come to the absolute worst part of this episode, which is the most obvious example of Brannon Braga’s perpetual misunderstanding of evolutionary biology, first seen in his first solo script for Trek, TNG’s “Identity Crisis.” The EMH talks about how Paris is going through millions of years of evolution in a day—but that’s not how evolution works, because one of the most important elements of evolution is environmental factors. And there are none, because Paris is lying in a bed in sickbay, but that’s going to affect how he evolves.
Then we find out that the end result of him losing his hair, his skin getting weird, his attitude changing, his growing another heart, and losing his tongue is to turn into a salamander. A very small salamander. Sure. That makes sense. (It makes nothing like sense. Where’d all the extra mass go? How did hitting them with anti-protons get that mass back?)
The tonal shifts in this episode are maddening, as we go from a fun story about scientific exploration (leavened by tiresome macho posturing from Paris, but whatever) to a body horror episode that makes absolutely no sense in any way. Then in the end, Chakotay just leaves the three offspring to fend for themselves on an alien world without their parents in an unfamiliar biome, making their life expectancy maybe two days. I mean, is there any food they can eat on the planet? Water they can drink? Will they even have the means to survive without any kind of guidance or help? The spectacular irresponsibility here is appalling, and that’s before you even consider that these are the captain’s kids. And the only consideration this gets from Janeway and Paris themselves is an offhand joke.
Warp factor rating: 1
Author’s note: There’s a crowdfund for three new science fiction novels out there with only three days left as this post goes live, one of which is by your humble rewatcher, in collaboration with David Sherman: To Hell and Regroup, the third book in David’s “18th Race” trilogy of military science fiction novels. (The other two books are a duology by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett.) There are lots of cool bonuses and rewards alongside the books, so please check it out and consider supporting it!
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I just… Ehh?
It’s not often Star Trek makes me dumber. Though I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the used the magic anti-protons on the baby salamanders.
It’s so impressive that they managed to get real science and fake Star Trek science wrong in the same episode.
It’s here. It’s finally here. How does one go about writing down thoughts on this infamous episode? I surprise myself by saying that I found it to be highly entertaining when I watched it the other day. But I went into it with the mindset of it being so bad that it actually becomes entertaining. And it was. The part where the EMH yells at Paris to wake up had me doubling over with laughter. The makeup used on Paris was actually pretty gross and effective. Though I shook my head at him still being able to talk without a tongue. That’s not how how that works.
The whole Paris and Janeway mating thing…just seems so wrong. Like oil and water. I heard that Kate Mulgrew was really uncomfortable with the whole thing and I really can’t blame her. What a weird subplot that was not at all entertaining. Really, up to the kidnapping part, the episode was actually really entertaining. Then the whole salamander thing…where the heck did that come from? It has to be the stupidest idea ever pitched, let alone approved, in a TV show.
There must have been a great deal of temptation to hang a goose egg on this episode, or even a negative number. I admire your restraint; I would not have been so kind, and I actually like most of Voyager (even if I’m usually muttering about how something could have been done differently).
David H. Oliver: I was all set to give this a zero, but I actually liked the first 10-15 minutes or so. Basically everything before Paris collapsed in the mess hall……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m pretty sure this is the episode that made me stop watching Voyager. At least for a few seasons.
Somebody on Facebook pointed out something I should have mentioned….
Okay, so going warp ten turns you into a salamander. Fine. But the EMH also has a cure. SO WHY DON’T THEY GO HOME AFTER THIS EPISODE? They just hit warp ten, go home, and then have the EMH hit them all with antiprotons so they revert to human. SHOW OVER!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, so grateful that he’s past watching this and can move on to “Meld” on Monday
I believe my thoughts on this episode are best summed up by this gem from Chuck Sonnenburg’s SF Debris review:
“Even if that somehow was [evolution], individuals don’t evolve! WE ARE NOT POKÉMON! Do you understand that, Braga?!…What the hell kind of name is Brannon anyway? Sounds like a high-fiber yogurt.”
It’s worth mentioning that Brannon Braga himself essentially disowned this episode, declaring it apocryphal. Essentially, it never happened. After all, we do get later mentions of transwarp drive on the show, used by both the Borg and the Voth (“Distant Origin”), but it functions totally differently there. (Although there seem to be several incompatible versions of transwarp, so I see that just as a blanket label for drives faster than warp drive.)
The premise of reaching infinite speed makes no sense, because of course it would take an infinite amount of time to accelerate to it. Infinity is not a destination, it’s a direction. The one thing that makes the idea potentially salvageable, though, is that Tom, B’Elanna, and the rest are talking about “quantum warp theory.” Before I decided to just disregard the episode as apocryphal, I figured that maybe the drive involved an instantaneous quantum leap from a finite velocity state to an infinite velocity state, which is the only way it could even remotely make sense. I also suspected that the infinite state was the Q Continuum, and that the whole salamander thing was a prank played by the Q as a way of dissuading mortals from trespassing on their domain.
My other potential rationalization is that everything after the test was a hallucination Tom had. It almost works that way. (Third theory: The whole thing is a holonovel written by Naomi Wildman some years from now.)
I kind of think there’s a decent character story in here before it all falls apart, though Keith disagrees. At least they’re trying to explore and deepen Tom’s character, and that part is more worthwhile than the “science” parts.
And in a way, I respect what Braga was trying to do with the evolution angle — namely, to refute the wrongheaded notion that evolution is an upward progression, that species are destined to evolve to some “higher” level. That was a good idea, but it was sabotaged by the even more wrongheaded depiction of a species’ evolution as something that was predetermined rather than a stochastic result of random mutations selected for by environmental circumstances. In his defense, though (and it’s a weak defense), he’s far from the first TV writer to make that assumption about evolution. The Outer Limits‘ classic “The Sixth Finger” makes the same mistake, as well as embracing the “upward progression” myth of evolution that Braga was trying in his hamhanded way to refute.
“And what’s been established in actual Star Trek TV shows is that ships can go past warp ten, until this episode, when they suddenly can’t without turning passengers into lizards.”
The warp 10 limit may not have been explicitly stated until now, but it was always implicitly followed in the TNG-era shows, with the highest warp speeds always being warp 9.9-something at most, with only a couple of rare exceptions. In “Where No One Has Gone Before,” Geordi said “We’re passing warp 10!” as if it were impossible, and in “Time Squared,” Riker said “theoretically, accelerating beyond warp 10” could send a ship back in time, though no ship actually did so. So it was treated as the normal limit that was impossible to surpass except in extraordinary circumstances, with the “warp 13” in “All Good Things…” being meant to suggest a futuristic advance or another redefinition of the scale.
This was the episode that made me stop watching Voyager. I caught a few episodes here and there years later in reruns, but this was the one that broke me.
If memory serves, Janeway and Paris’ salamander kiddos were the subject of a fairly humorous story in one of the Strange New Worlds short fiction anthologies. Just goes to show writers who are fans can take any gauntlet the franchise throws down!
writermpoteet: the author himself, Ted Kopulos, reminded me of that on Facebook, and so I go and edit the post to include that in the Trivial Matters.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who would be SO MUCH STUPIDER without the edit function…..
There’s no defending this episode because it’s spectacularly dumb and it rightfully belongs at the bottom of the barrel. But in my honest opinion, it is at least watchable in a WTF kind of way and a “I can’t believe how this ever made it to air” kind of way.” It’s so ridiculous there are some moments that are unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) funny. So that is at least better than say “Twisted” which is both bad and boring.
So transwarp/warp10 is a success because it’s achievable and Paris saw Earth. Great. So modify Voyager’s engines to reach warp 10, engage the transwarp, and reach home. The whole crew starts to evolve into salamanders? No problem, have the EMH bombard everyone with anti-protons. End of series.
I get that the intention of the Jonas scenes are to build that ongoing arc but it also flies in the notion of the studio/network’s dictate to not serialize the show. So now anyone who catches these particular episodes out of order sees the random Jonas scene and wonders what that’s all about.
I would have loved to see the actual process of changing Paris and Janeway back to their human forms because that could have been another moment of hilarity.
Alternatively, despite not seeming to have a minimum viable population they turn out to be wildly successful and their status as an invasive species causes a devastating collapse of the local biome. Which has got to violate the Prime Directive in some way, even if there are no sapients on the planet at this time.
Btw, Keith, your “Cha cha chas” always crack me up.
Dr. Who got evolution basically right in “Full Circle” in 1977-ish (Tom Baker and Lalla Ward years) on probably one tenth the budget. Star Trek should take the pledge never to do evolution or de-evolution again.
I always assumed that the second trip sent them backwards in evolution, becoming ancestral salamanders. Not that that makes any more sense…
@16/Thomas: Nnno, “Full Circle”‘s take on evolution was just as nonsensical as most depictions of evolution in SFTV. The Alzarian life forms “evolved” on an individual level, magically developing whatever traits they needed to survive in a new environment, rather than gradually adapting over dozens of generations as random mutations improved survival and thus were reproduced more widely. And that somehow caused one group of them to become exact duplicates for humans just because they occupied a human-built starship.
@17/brendaa: No, the Doctor specifically said that Tom’s evolution was accelerated and that his changes represented a future evolutionary state. In Braga’s own words, “I think I was trying to make a statement about evolution not necessarily being evolving toward higher organisms, that evolution may also be a de-evolution. You know, we kind of take it for granted that evolution means bigger brains, more technology, you know, more refined civilization. When in fact, for all we know, we’re evolving back toward a more primordial state. Ultimately, who can predict?“
Which, of course, is wrong, since evolution is not predestined or predictable, and there’s no such thing as “de-evolution” because evolution has no preferred direction. But at least he took the first step and questioned the “Sixth Finger” preconception that evolution is always “upward,” even though he got everything else wrong.
The only way that the Newtvolution makes sense (and it makes sense of some of Star Trek’s other Evolution howlers) is if you assume that Starfleet’s understanding of humanoid evolution is orthogenetic. That is to say, that is directed some purpose and higher or ultimate expression of evolution. And to be fair, this is made more or less explicitly true in TNG’s “The Chase,” which suggested that the prevalence of humanoid species (at least in the Alpha and Beta quadrants) was the result of evolutionary meddling by an ancient progenitor race. I also think that this nicely explains the serious taboo against intentional genetic engineering discussed in Deep Space Nine.
I’m giving way too much credit here, of course. If they were working on orthogenetic principals, the revelation that humans were destined to evolve into subsapient, kind of rapey newts would be a revelation of profound, nigh-Lovecraftian horror.
There is the potential for some interesting thematic material here, because season 2 has in several episodes addressed the issue of the crew having, being or taking care of children. “Initiations”, “Parturition”, “Prototype”, “Resistance”, “Innocence”, “The Basics”, “Elogium” if you count it as s2 instead of s1, “The Q and the Grey” if you bring it forward from s3. So the idea of two members of the crew inadvertently having children together was rife with potential for a new way to explore this question – and that potential was of course utterly squandered.
I also read a theory once which posited that the Voth (from “Distant Origin”), rather than being the descendants of Earth dinosaurs as Janeway concluded, were actually the time-shifted descendants of her own lizard babies from this episode. Their Earth-related DNA actually comes from Janeway herself.
This episode I think is where I walked away from Voyager completely.
I’ve seen Children Shall Lead, Genesis, Sub Rosa, Spock’s Brain, that episode of Enterprise where a chunk of bridge crew turned into ape like things that made annoyi8ng high pitched noises, Profit and Lace, and that Alamaraine episode…..and yet this episode is the one episode in all of Star Trek history that makes me almost want to hate Star Trek and I feel like Brannon Braga STILL owes me an apology. Also this ep makes me forgive and like Spock’s Brain (which is hokey but still kinda fun sci fi).
THis episode is so bad it took over a decade and several years and my wife’s enthusiasm for watching all of Voyager (my fault!) for me to forgive Voyager and see it more positively.
@20
Hey, hey, hey, no need to drag the Voth into this. They’re just dinosaurs trying to make it in a mammal’s world. ;)
Seems to me they accidentally invented an infinite improbability drive instead. First trip, Paris improbably ends up falling apart mentally and physically. Second trip, he and Janeway improbably turn into a pair of salamanders. They’re lucky they didn’t turn into petunias or surprised whales.
@3/Austin: This episode actually won the Emmy for best makeup in a TV series in ‘96. So there you have it folks, the award-winning “Threshold!”
I have to say, season 2 of Voyager vacillates wildly between absolute dreck and some gems. I’d say it’s on par with season 2 of TNG.
Yeah…
Paris’ cry baby scene to Janeway was a bit….out of whack with everything. It was like out of left field for his character, like when whats his face on BSG suddenly became a laywer because *retconned history*
By the end of the episode I was thinking that they can:
a)be anywhere in the universe in an instant, but with a price.
b)the price can be removed real easy.
Why not use warp ten to go home but leave instructions for Earth on how to fix the ship full of lizards? job done!
@19: Are we talking about Paris before or after his change?
@18, as I recall the Doctor said something about it taking 40,000 generations for the marshmen inside the ship to evolve into a more human-like (but still humanoid) appearance to fit the ship’s ecosystem. Even if the marshmen and starliner crew both evolved from the marsh spiders, it took 40,000 generations and there was some selective pressure in the environment that was shaping that evolution.
CuttlefishBenjamin @@@@@ 19:
To be fair, there’s no evidence of ‘kind of rapey”; for all we know they were both enthusiastic participants.
And I will always (partially) forgive this episode because of the line “I look forward to reading it.”
@27/Thomas: Even so, evolving to fit an environment doesn’t mean you end up looking exactly like a former occupant of the same niche. If that were so, then bats would look exactly like birds.
@28/bad_platypus: Well, it’s kind of iffy. Sure, maybe once Janeway became a salamander, she acted on instinct to reproduce (and it may even have been an amphibian-style reproduction without actual intercourse). Still, that was after Paris kidnapped her against her will, leading to her being transformed against her will. Criminal guilt tends to trace back to the inciting incident. If you commit a nonviolent crime that indirectly causes someone’s death, then you can be convicted of felony murder. So it follows that if you forcibly abduct someone and that leads to their transformation into a sexually receptive mental state, then that initial act of coercion would render everything after it nonconsensual.
@28- ChristopherLBennet @29 pretty well sums up my thoughts. Full on newt-Paris and Janeway may not be rapey, but abducting and then mating with Janeway is more than a little skeezy.
Any devolution should involve flowerpots worn as hats
John M. Harper: they don’t even need to leave instructions because the EMH is unaffected, so he can do it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Heck, if Janeway didn’t want to chance everyone turning into a salamander, Paris could have gone to Earth, told Starfleet what happened to them, got them working on a solution on their end, and then gone back to Voyager.
I dreaded needing to watch this once again – I haven’t seen it since it originally aired. I’ve always skipped past it when watching Voyager reruns, as it had become infamous since first seeing it, and I didn’t recall any particular important plot points of continuing storylines….though there clearly was a scene of the ship’s traitor Jonas communicating with a Kazon.
In any case, I also liked the opening several minutes of the episode and it was actually becoming quite exciting and fun – until they get to that scene with Paris whining about ‘needing to do this’ because he had to realize the culmination of some ridiculous childhood worship he received……but enough about that already. It’s simply a disaster following that Paris-Janeway conversation. Save for two humorous scenes (the Doctor ‘waking up’ Tom Paris; Tuvok getting a jibe in at Chakotay with his quip “I look forward to reading it.”) it’s practically unbearable to get through. I’m just glad that it’s over and I won’t need to rewatch it again. Or at least I hope so!
There’s little I can say about this one. Except maybe wonder how was this ever approved by Rick Berman?
And the answer is self-explanatory. They were producing 26 episodes a year, and they needed to get script pages to the soundstages ASAP given the relentless schedule of TV production. They couldn’t just jettison the script and start anew. It’s no different than TNG’s Genesis, a late season 7 episode driven more by the need to get it done rather than hope for anything good (at least Genesis had McFadden directing, adding some flair and choreography to the mutants; Threshold was stuck with Alex Singer).
Within the atrocious science, I also question Paris’s notion of him being everywhere at once and somehow ending back where he started. Does this mean the universe doubles back on itself, disproving the idea of it being infinite? Now that would be a headscratcher.
I enjoy Threshold mainly for the EMH’s snarky comments. It’s best not to dwell on its logic any more than analyzing brainless Spock directing McCoy’s surgery.
I can’t blame Braga for disowning it. But I’m not one to erase episodes from canon. In my mind, Threshold did happen, all the way through.
@9/Christopher: I also had in mind both the Paris hallucination aspect and Q somehow being involved as a way to reconciliate this one into canon, and make for getting home an impossibility.
Ah yes, this one. It seems to have gone down in history as Voyager’s equivalent to “Spock’s Brain”. Everyone involved seems to have decided to pretend it never happened: Certainly, its version of transwarp seems to bear very little resemblance to any version of it before or since, which seem to treat it as Neelix’s “very very fast” version rather than “infinite”. And you kind of have to disengage the brain and ignore some of the dumber moments, like everyone on Voyager acting surprised that the shuttle disappears from the sensors when it passes the transwarp threshold (what did they expect to happen?) and pretty much the whole “Going very very fast turns Paris into a giant salamander” thing.
But on the plus side, it’s great fun. It features several laugh-out loud moments and I think they’re all deliberate. Torres’ deadpan “You’re dead” after the failed shuttle test. Neelix’s “I have no idea what he just said” after Paris and Kim’s conversation descends into technobabble. The Doctor’s method of waking Paris and Janeway’s reaction to it. The Doctor having an even bigger battery of one-liners than usual. (On learning Paris drank Neelix’s coffee: “It’s a miracle he’s still alive.” On Paris fondly recalling losing his virginity at seventeen: “I’ll note that in your medical file.” On Paris declaring he has to talk: “So I’ve noticed.”) Chakotay and Tuvok’s reaction to the alien babies. Paris’ expression on realising he shagged the captain. Oh, and his dressing gown is hilarious. Try laughing at that instead of listening to the whiny dialogue. That said, we do at least get a pay-off to that one in the last scene, when Paris acknowledges that breaking the transwarp barrier hasn’t actually made him feel any different and he realises it’s going to take more than that for him to feel redeemed.
Also, at least one good serious moment when the Doctor can’t quite bring himself to lay a hand on Kes’ shoulder.
On the minus side, there’s also at least one unintentionally offensive line. (Janeway: “If this works, you’ll be joining an elite group of pilots. Orville Wright, Neil Armstrong, Zefram Cochrane and Tom Paris.” Paris: “I kind of like the way that sounds.” Like everything of importance in history was done by Americans? Honestly, never mind Wilbur Wright and Chuck Yeagher, it’s Yuri Gagarin who’s the one that they’re clearly avoiding mentioning. It’s like instead of counting the guy who broke the warp barrier, you mention the first guy to set foot in another solar system.) And the ending is a bit too with-one-bound-they-were-free: The Doctor says they won’t be able to return Paris to normal if they wait three hours, but he can do it fine after three days?
Torres finally calls Paris “Tom” when she’s got her Klingon DNA. Paris’ last request is a kiss from Kes, so he’s got his priorities right. (She sort-of complies, but he’s clinically dead at the time.) A rare (or at least rare for the era) example of Chakotay sitting in the captain’s chair: He usually seems to stay in his own seat, even when he’s in command of the bridge. I believe Paris throwing up his tongue was cut from the BBC broadcasts. Brannon Braga’s talk of de-evolution leaves me wondering if he ever saw Blake’s 7. (Cue best Jacqueline Pearce doing a voice of doom impression: “The creature you saw is not what Man developed from. It is what Man will become.”)
Oh, and Jonas sends details of the transwarp to the Kazon. Is anyone else picturing a bunch of them turning into giant lizards? (He isn’t just in the one scene, by the way: He’s in Engineering during the transwarp test and during the first attempt to cure Paris.)
@35/Eduardo: The “everywhere at once” bit is just another way of saying “infinite velocity.” The travel time between two points is distance divided by velocity, and any number divided by infinity is zero (or rather, the limit of any number divided by x as x goes to infinity is zero). Therefore, at infinite velocity, the travel time between any two points in the universe, regardless of their distance, would be zero, which means you would occupy every point at the same time.
As for why he returned where he started, well, Tom said “I saw that you were looking for me,” which suggests to me that in his omnipresent state, he was somehow able to choose his destination by focusing on it. Although later they were talking as though they didn’t know how to choose an exit point, so maybe that’s not it.
If we go with my “quantum leap” idea, that the shuttle transitioned from a finite velocity state to an infinite one, it maybe stands to reason that if it then dropped back down to a finite state, it would revert to the positional state it had before. After all, why wouldn’t it? Omnipresence means the shuttle has no definable velocity or momentum to change its position; paradoxically, infinite velocity effectively means zero movement, because you’re already everywhere and there’s nowhere to go from there. You’re not really in motion, you’ve just fuzzed out to overlap the entire universe. So why wouldn’t you snap back to where you started? There’s no particular reason to end up anywhere else. It seems like a conservation principle to me, that your starting point would be the natural default return point unless you exerted some kind of energy to direct yourself toward a different one.
Of course, that doesn’t explain the last hop and how they ended up in that system three days’ warp away. But by that point I’ve given up on trying to make sense of anything.
Breaking a new warp barrier might’ve given them an opportunity to do some surreal Twilight Zone kind of story. Maybe Paris meeting different versions of himself all over the ship? I don’t know, anything sounds better to me than salamanders.
The episode, as I recall, is actually pretty funny if you go into it like it’s a comedy completely disconnected from anything else.
If you engage your brain at any point, though, you’re gonna have an allergic reaction to make Mr. Paris’ look mild.
@38/JFWheeler: It occurs to me that Brannon Braga might’ve been happier doing something like The Twilight Zone. He liked stories with surprising or reality-bending twists, whether or not they made sense in a larger context, so a fantasy anthology might’ve been right up his alley. There are some parallels between “Threshold” and TZ’s “And When the Sky Was Opened,” another story about a pioneering spaceflight experiment having unimagined and inexplicable consequences.
Here’s a really stupid question – are we sure that they became *tiny* salamanders? I always got the impression (but it’s been years since I saw this dreadful episode) that they turned into roughly human-sized amphibanoids.
@40
Right, the one with Rod Taylor. That was a good episode. Unsettling.
Yeah, I agree, Braga would’ve been a good fit for TZ. Maybe he should give Jordan Peele a call.
Warp 10 causing an object to be everywhere in the universe simultaneously does not make sense based on what we already know from physics. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that matter cannot be created — so having an object suddenly appear everywhere in the universe at once violates this principle. Matter can be converted to energy, but adding matter to the universe that doesn’t already exist is not possible. It would require adding an infinite number of atoms to take up space, when these atoms already exist.
This is why time travel is also not possible. Every atom that comprises your body already existed in other objects in the past, so if you could travel to the past you would be adding additional atoms to the universe.
However, even though the science in this episode is garbage, I do not think the episode is at the bottom of the barrel. It is an interesting idea that a person can be so driven to a goal that he loses his humanity in the process. I think this is the moral lesson the episode tries to convey.
I would put this episode above “Code of Honor” which is so racially insensitive i think there would be public outrage if it were produced today, and I bet most black actors would refuse to be in it.
…Well, this is still light-years better than “Plato’s Stepchildren” (that god-awful episode actually gave me nightmares as a child).
The episode starts out pretty fun. I love the mess hall scene with B’Elanna, Harry, and Tom spitballing, with Neelix even providing inspiration. The scene where Paris sacrifices his dignity and whines to Janeway about his childhood is even forgivable. I love the part where the shuttle leaves Voyager, Voyager’s nacelles go up, the shuttle goes to warp, and then Voyager goes to warp. Beautiful, to me the best part of the episode. The warp barrier is broken, and then it all goes to shit.
Well, not all to shit. The EMH is in top-form here, (really, when is he not?). And I did enjoy Paris babbling before his “death.” I also really liked it was B’Elanna in Sickbay with Tom; the seeds were firmly planted for a genuine friendship between Tom and B’Elanna (and more, but we’ll get there in due course).
I won’t even engage on the infamy of the “evolution” , Lizard-Paris and Lizard-Janeway mating (shudder), or the “science” of infinite velocity turning you into a lizard.
This is a truly abysmal episode, though. It deserves all the hate it gets.
I’m very confused! How did you manage to do a rewatch of an episode that absolutely positively resolutely definitively categorically very much doesn’t exist?
It’s interesting that this trans-warp drive and warp 10 limit gets mentioned along with quantum-warp theory. Maybe there was a solid idea here.
Consider our model of the atom from classical physics, which made a hydrogen atom look like a tiny solar system with one orbiting electron. Along comes Maxwell whose theories say that can’t be right, add in some particle-wave duality and Bam! the electron becomes a standing wave — but still not like a mini solar system. Eventually quantum mechanics evolves a better picture of that electron existing in a probability cloud, where certain locations (radii, really,) are more likely to contain that electron if you could somehow freeze time and reveal its location.
Warp 10 would be like that. It’s not that you’re everywhere in the universe at once, it’s that you could be found anywhere in the universe if you suddenly drop out into real space again. And that’s the real problem with this episode: they tell Tom to get in a shuttle and go warp 10 thataways without a real plan to navigate and choose a destination. That was a terribly irresponsible thing to do. If there was any justice done to the science, Paris would emerge from his first test in some weirdo galaxy halfway across the universe just to say, “We didn’t think this through.”
Hmmm… not that I disagree with this warp factor rating, but now I’m curious and pondering…I wonder if there will be any Voyager episodes that will get a “zero.”
This is probably the only Voyager episode I really remember vividly. Mostly because I think this is about where I gave up on the show and stopped watching. Even as a teenager discovering a love of Sci-Fi this was just such a dumb episode, despite the promising start, that I was just done. I caught other episodes in later seasons if they happened to be on when I was flicking through channels as I remember watching some of the later Borg related episodes, but I stopped watching them as they first aired in the UK after this one.
The only logical (Watsonian) explanation for this episode is that one of the Voyager crew – who cannot be named but is almost certainly The Doctor – was asked if Tom Paris really broke the Warp Ten barrier, had presumably grown sick of being asked that d— question and therefore decided to give a much more interesting answer.
Why the Doctor? Well who else has the right mixture of dislike for Mr Paris, tendency to resort to sardonic humour and a record as a medic prestigious & weird enough for an unsuspecting audience to keep listening when Tom Paris starts turning into a newt?
I welcome suggestions of alternate candidates for the role of Chief Leg-puller in the construction of this particular Tall Tale!(-:
@41/LadyBelaine: The salamanders are definitely not “tiny”:
It’s hard to tell exactly how big they are from that shot. Their bodies seem close in size to human torsos, but they do seem to have lost most of the mass of their limbs, at least.
@43/rms81: “Warp 10 causing an object to be everywhere in the universe simultaneously does not make sense based on what we already know from physics. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that matter cannot be created — so having an object suddenly appear everywhere in the universe at once violates this principle. Matter can be converted to energy, but adding matter to the universe that doesn’t already exist is not possible. It would require adding an infinite number of atoms to take up space, when these atoms already exist.”
Well, of course traveling at infinite speed is impossible, but not for this reason. It’s not violating a conservation law, because technically the matter isn’t newly created, it’s just passing through, moving so fast that it’s everywhere at once (see my above comment — as velocity goes to infinity, travel time goes to zero). It’s impossible to reach infinite speed because it would take infinite energy. (Not to mention that warp drive is not actual “motion” in the classical sense anyway — it’s altering the topology of spacetime to reorient an object’s position relative to the rest of the universe.)
“This is why time travel is also not possible. Every atom that comprises your body already existed in other objects in the past, so if you could travel to the past you would be adding additional atoms to the universe.”
No — I used to believe that too, but this is flatly wrong. Conservation laws only say that you can’t add mass or energy to a closed system. If two different points in time and space are connected by a wormhole or other time warp, then they’re both parts of the same connected system and can exchange mass and energy. After all, there is no absolute time standard in physics. Relativity says there’s no way to objectively define two different parts of spacetime as being simultaneous to begin with, so physically it doesn’t matter which one is in the relative past of the other.
And subatomic particles are interchangeable anyway — there’s no physically meaningful difference between a pair of different particles and two copies of the same particle coexisting. The universe doesn’t care about that. (Richard Feynman even hypothesized once that all subatomic particles of a given type actually are the same single particle eternally bouncing forward and backward through time, and that when it’s moving backward, it’s an antiparticle.)
@7 KRAD
As you mention the EMH would be unaffected and could likely revert the human salamanders back after arriving home, however we only know what would happen to the humans. Tuvok, Torres, Kes, Neelix, Chell, Lon Suder, the unborn Naomi Wildman etc. all would have changed in different ways, perhaps lethally.
As a new watcher of this series and seeing these episodes for the first time, I’ve been waiting for this infamous one that everyone has been telling me is “bottom of the barrel.” In that regard, I have to say I agree more with @36 cap-mjb’s positive points. This episode was so much more entertaining than some of the earlier ones, even if its science was twisted beyond recognition. It was almost as if the season were following the same kind of progression that other shows have done. Many of the dramadies that I enjoy have allowed at least one episode per season that its just all-out fun fantasy in some way—silly if you will. I laughed aloud at the EMH waking up Paris, and guffawed at the ridiculous newts.
But if we’re going to take it seriously, then what about Paris and Janeway’s recovery? They apparently recall their mating and offspring . . . how do they cope with that memory? Where’s the discomfort in each other’s presence? Where’s the regrets? The reactions from the rest of the crew, who want to know “what it was like”?
@52:
But if we’re going to take it seriously, then what about Paris and Janeway’s recovery? They apparently recall their mating and offspring . . . how do they cope with that memory? Where’s the discomfort in each other’s presence? Where’s the regrets? The reactions from the rest of the crew, who want to know “what it was like”?
As we have seen before and will see again, heh, Continuity, Character Development, and reality ensuing are like the Wicked Witch in Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz: They have no power here!
@47/erikm: Perhaps one of those “Fair Haven” episodes in season 6 will get the elusive 0 rating. I’ve heard bad things about them and I myself have never tried to watch them because they just sound bad. But who knows, maybe they’ve been classics all this time that I’ve been depriving myself of! Lol
@52/srEDIT: “The reactions from the rest of the crew, who want to know “what it was like”?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamander#Reproduction_and_development
So the female just picks up something the male left lying around. So it’s like the less fun part of being married. ;)
CLB @29: Absolutely fair point. I’ll definitely concede that the newts are “rapey” (or, at least the Paris-newt is). But, riffing off of Perene @26, what responsibility does the restored Paris have for his actions? If you get drunk and force someone to have sex, that’s rape both morally and legally. But what if someone slips you something without your knowledge that impairs you? Morally, I would argue you’re a victim here, not a perpetrator. (I’m not a lawyer, so I have no idea what would happen legally.) I don’t think “I’m going to turn into a newt, abduct my Captain, and have kids with her” is a foreseeable consequence of testing a new transportation method. :-)
I believe this is incorrect (from a legal standpoint, although—once again—not a lawyer). Felony murder developed from a philosophy that would agree with this statement (and morally, I agree with it, FWIW), but felony murder is a specific legal statute that has to be explicitly laid out. Per Wikipedia, 4 states don’t even have a felony murder law on the books, so it’s not an absolute in the U.S.
@56/bad_platypus: Those are fair points. I wasn’t really saying it was definitely forced, just that I question whether you could really call it consensual. You make a good point that neither of them was in control of their choices, so in that sense it wasn’t consensual for either one.
Although given that salamander sex doesn’t involve any actual touching (see my previous comment), I don’t think we can really apply human definitions to the act at all.
@54:
I just watched the Fair Haven episodes over the past month. They weren’t too bad. By far the worst episode was when Voyager makes first contact with a species who has no tradition of art. They are impressed with the Doctor’s singing abilities and have him perform on their planet. About 25-30 minutes is just watching the Doctor sing opera. It’s a gratuitous vehicle for Robert Ricardo to showcase his singing abilities. Nothing more, and these aliens are forgotten after the episode.
@58 / rms81: I remember that episode. It might not get a “zero” because of how often Robert Picardo continues to impress (I love how the occasionally-upstart Doctor gets humbled and crawls back to Voyager in the episode) but yes, it is somewhat boring.
A singing hologram doctor? Really? Why would they waste time programming him to sing? Or why would he spend time learning how to sing instead of using time learning new medical science? It was just a forum to showcase Picardo’s singing abilities. I hate episodes obviously designed for just showing off.
@60/rms81: The EMH/Robert Picardo’s singing ability will be used to maximum comedic effect in “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy”, which is widely considered one of the best episodes of the series. And he does a bunch of singing lessons with Seven of Nine as part of her lessons in humanity in various episodes. So I have no problem with the show showcasing the talents of its cast if it feels organic and natural.
@60: The Doctor has already been programmed with all medical knowledge. He wasn’t intended to be active continuously, just a programme that was turned on and off as required, so he’d have to automatically know everything, and if something else was discovered (a new technique or disease), the information would presumably be automatically downloaded to his programme. It’s part of his growth as a person for him to want to learn and do things outside his field and him learning opera singing is part of that, stretching at least as far back to Season 3.
@60/rms81: “Why would they waste time programming him to sing?”
You have watched the show, right? The Doctor’s entire arc through the seven seasons of the series is about growing beyond his initial programming, learning things because he wants to evolve as an individual rather than just serve as a medical tool.
@60/rms81: for that matter, have you watched any Star Trek? One common thread that connects the series is growing and learning, not just in space exploration, but as individuals. From Spock, to Data, to Odo, to the EMH here, each series has individuals exploring growth through learning and experience, and a desire to be more, to realize their (and by proxy, our) full potential. The EMH is no exception to this.
This science is ridiculous, but at least the episode is not boring, something that cannot be said of other episodes.
The absurdity of evolution without natural selection really got to me on this one. I know trek just hand waves science and I’m a physicist so I should be daily bothered, but most of what they have wave is at least high school level physics. Natural selection is like middle school though. Come *on.* I’d avoided this episode at first because I was forewarned it was bad. I did not like it for all the reasons I was warned, the creep factor with the lizards, and the body horror of paris’ transformation was also really unpleasant, but the bogus evolution explanation is really what made me mad.
What’s interesting is that the unexpected twist of evolving into super-clever salamanders was supposed to be just that, an unexpected twist. (I wouldn’t say I’m 100% insulted per se, it is an interesting plot twist, but I certainly am not a fan of it, and yes, I’m at least grossed out and 100% insulted by the mating scene.) But not only did lots of people lash out, some were confused and thought that it was de-evolution.
Here it is, the worst episode in all of the first five series.
And then they took the worst aspects of this episode, distilled it into its purest form, and turn high-warp bio-horror into the setting of Discovery.
I think I actually saw this one when it aired — the only episode of Voyager that I ever caught when it was in its first run. I was horrified what had happened to Star Trek. On Netflix rewatches, I’ve never managed to make it all the way through this series and this episode is a big part of why. It’s astonishing to consider that this lump of Targ crap was made by the same people who did TNG and DS9. And even Enterprise.
In TNG’s “Where No One Has Gone Before”, moving beyond warp ten moves you into an over-reality where your imagination is the only real limit of existence. It was a beautiful allegory, and an ode to a belief in the growth and maturity of humanity. In VOY, moving beyond warp ten turns you into a lizard. Such a radical shift of philosophical tone!
C’mon now, THAT isn’t how you get babies!
(I joke, but also, there’s essentially a depiction of assault on-screen, or its aftermath, and that is never addressed.)
The “science” in this episode does not even seem to line up with what happens in the episode itself, much less anything else. The first symptom of a transformation into a semi aquatic creature is an allergy to water. It just seems that they brainstormed the most bizarre tnotions they could think of without considering if it made sense in the end.
Could humans eventually evolve into such a lifeform. Possibly, but that not for an entire interstellar civilization. If all the world’s in the Federation were somehow reduced to below stone age technology and the populations separated for a million years, maybe some populations might evolve into a form with lesser sentience, and one of those might go toward salamanderoids (or giant hairless otters?). The populations on other worlds would go in a thousand different paths, depending on environmental conditions.
I do have something good to say about this episode: It prompted me to search for reviews and find that TOR is doing a Voyager re watch! And I’m only about two and a half months behind, instead of several years like I was when I did my DS9 re-watch. Almost makes the episode worthwhile. Heck, it DOES make the episode worthwhile.
As for the episode itself – yeah, it was pretty surreal. I agree that the beginning was actually pretty good. It sure did go off the rails after that, though. But my daughter (who is not a huge ST fan, but who has occasionally enjoyed sitting in on an episode of my DS9 re-watch here and there during quarantine) and I both found the episode hilarious. I had read some offhand comments about an episode of ST where going over a certain warp speed caused people to turn into salamanders, but I never knew how much stock to put into that talk. So we watched with increasing amusement as the episode unfolded and it turned out to all be true. Our main take away was that there must have been some mind altering substances involved at some points in the creative process.
Another fun byproduct of the episode is reading some of the reactions from Braga and McNeill about the episode on the internet. Seems like they were as flummoxed as any of us at the episode and they have some great wry comments about it.
Methuselah: welcome! Just FYI, there’s also rewatches for the original series (including the animated series and movies) that ran from 2015-2017, for The Next Generation (including the movies) that ran from 2011-2013, and for Deep Space Nine that ran from 2013-2015.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode is a TEN!!! What’s everyone complainin’ about?! But of course since warp 10 allows things to be everywhere in the universe simultaneously, this episode is a dud of epic proportions. Zero all the way.
Thanks, Krad. Your reviews and the comments were a great accompaniment to my DS9 re-watch. Once I finish Voyager, I think I’m going to check out the animated series. I haven’t seen an episode of that since I was a kid in the late ’60’s & early ’70’s. If I remember right, it would come on during Saturday morning cartoons.
I remember reading about Threshold in The Star Trek Fact Files but it actually didn’t occur to me how dumb it was until I actually sat down and watched it. By the end of it, my head was reeling (but not in a clever Inception way) when the Doctor informs us it’s all a product of natural evolution. I like to think Chakotay’s “What!?” in Act 5 was Robert Beltran’s reaction when he first got the script. 16: Don’t forget that both Threshold and Genesis were penned by Brannon Braga and both cover the topics of human evolution and de-evolution and in both cases, Braga’s knowledge of science is abominable. It only further reinforces to me Braga is stronger on theory than he is on practical application. 55: The male really dropped the ball on that one.
@75/David Sim: “Don’t forget that both Threshold and Genesis were penned by Brannon Braga and both cover the topics of human evolution and de-evolution and in both cases, Braga’s knowledge of science is abominable.”
There’s no reason to assume it’s about knowledge. These are works of fiction, not classroom essays. Lots of writers explore fantasy concepts that they know are untrue in real life. For instance, Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, is a skeptic about UFOs and psychic powers, not a believer. He didn’t write about those things because he thought they were true, but because he thought they made for entertaining stories.
Star Trek biology and evolution were already nonsensical long before Braga came along. Humanoid aliens. Interspecies breeding. Organic beings evolving into godlike incorporeal balls of energy. Rapid aging that can be reversed by a shot of adrenaline. It’s a universe that’s always taken extensive poetic license with life sciences. Braga presumably pitched his writing to the same extremely low level of accuracy, because it fit the universe he was writing in. But that is a storytelling choice, not a reflection of real-life knowledge or ability. We know he’s capable of a more scientific orientation when he chooses to be; he’s the showrunner of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos revival, after all.
I think this episode can be summed in four words..
What The Actual F**k ?
There are levels of mistakes made in most TV series at various points but this one is off the charts.
I mean… What?
Just .. What the hell where they thinking?
I mean What???
@krad: Not to defend this episode, but it’s possible Janeway mentions Orville Wright and not Wilbur because it was Orville who won the coin toss and was the pilot of that first flight at Kitty Hawk, and Tom was also a pilot.
That is, that’s the assumption I’d make if I thought Brannon Braga even knew that little factoid, but there’s no good reason to assume that.
This episode sets up the end of the Federation, the destruction of the planet Earth, and the extinction of the human race 1,000 years hence – when the descendants of the Janeway/Paris lizard babies leave their planet and rampage across the galaxy wreaking terrible vengeance for the offhand coldness displayed to those abandoned children.
michael @@@@@ 79
Would watch.
Star Trek: Amphibipocalypse.
I think this episode is unpopular for its highly Oedipal themes (in both the mythic and Freudian senses) more than anything else. It gets into a weird psychological area where Trek rarely ventures.
Consider:
The infant Oedipus is rejected by his father Laius, the King of Thebes due to an unfavorable oracle. Oedipus is left to die of exposure in the wilderness. Eventually, he is taken in by a foster family and gains esteem and renown.
The perceived hostility shown to Tom Paris by his father, Admiral Owen Paris, leads to a series of events where the former is effectively disowned by the latter.. He winds up in the Delta Quadrant, where the oppressive nuclear family unit he was raised in is replaced by the surrogate family of the Voyager crew. He gains responsibility and respect as the chief helmsman of Voyager.
Years later, Oedipus comes across Laius and ends up unknowingly slaying him to gain passage over a bridge.
In the process of crossing the threshold/bridge, Tom overcomes the burden of his father’s doubts and unfulfilled expectations, metaphorically slaying Owen Paris (for this episode at least).
Oedipus is forced to solve the riddle of the sphinx to gain access to Thebes, becoming king in the process.
Paris solves the structural problems inherent in the transwarp shuttle, thus achieving Warp 10. He gains (shipwide) renown in the process, being referred to alongside such luminaries as Orville Wright, Neil Armstrong, Zefram Cochrane, and ascends to a higher state of evolution.
After (unwittingly) slaying Laius, Oedipus ends up taking his mother Jocasta as a mate, fathering children with her.
After overcoming the absent Owen Paris, Tom absconds with Captain Janeway–the surrogate mother figure–and fathers inhuman spawn with her.
After learning the truth, Oedipus ends up abdicating his throne, and becomes an ascetic in the wilderness where he was first abandoned, abandoning the children Jocasta birthed along the way
Tom ends up returning to his lesser-involved form, shuns all acknowledgement and renown of his historical feat, and returns to a life of human anonymity aboard Voyager in the Delta Quadrant, right back where he started. In the process, he abandons the children he and Janeway birthed.
I know this comment is coming two years after the rewatch; I’m currently doing a second Voyager rewatch myself. Any Star Trek fan who hasn’t yet seen the brilliant TAS-style animated take on this episode (published in June 2022) must drop everything and watch it immediately.
Finally here! Like others here coming to this episode after decades of negative reviews, I did not find it as offensive as I can imagine it being on going in cold. One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the body horror: I was surprised/pleased that they went so hard on making Paris a mess and really breaking him down. It felt more ‘real’ than some other times Trek has tried to do similar things.
This was the first ever episode of star trek that i watched. and that episode is how i fell in love with the entire franchise. so, despite its less than realistic science, it still holds a special place in my heart. id rank it a 10 out of 10 just for that.
The camera negatives of this episode need to be utterly destroyed.
[Sorry I’m a few years late to the party!]