Threshold

That's a weird one. Can't say I'm very fond of the salamanders and offsprings part. So yes, there are some gigantic flaws. But, after suffering throught Discovery S3, I have to say that Threshold now doesn't appear all that bad, and I'm gladly giving Disco the Worst ST Episode Award for... well, many ones deserve it. At least, Threshold managed to be entertaining.

Tom Paris breaks the warp 10 barrier.

This is a famously panned episode that entertains if you go into it with the right frame of mind.

If you take your Star Trek seriously and appreciate good thought-provoking sci-fi writing, you might find Threshold somewhat of an insult to the intelligence, but if you appreciate wildly implausible ideas brought to life by a professional cast you can still take some enjoyment.

It starts off strongly with a good premise that works with the dilemma faced by the Voyager crew. Tom's ambition of piloting at warp 10 fits perfectly with his character and the build up to the flight is as good as any character work in the show.

Then events turn ridiculous in so many ways it would take too long to cover. The plot contrivances, the scientific implausibility, the reset button ending, and the fact the writers have taken a great Star Trek foundation of the warp 10 barrier and done THIS to it.

Robert Duncan McNeill carries Brannon Braga's ideas (including a tribute 'The Fly') remarkably well in an entertaining performance. I refuse to believe he plays the ranting and raving Paris as anything other than a tongue in cheek homage to Seth Brundle. There is some development for the character in the episode's resolution and the makeup effects are excellent.

Where does it sit on the list of worst Star Trek episodes of all time? It's not great, but it cannot be accused of tedium and I have seen some far worse in Voyager, The Original Series, TNG, and Enterprise.

Honestly I was on board until they said the future of human evolution is salamanders

Threshold is really a halfway decent episode for the majority of its runtime. And that makes it all the more entertainingly tragic and bemusing when it goes off-a-cliff.

I didn't first watch Star Trek until around 2012. And I checked the IMDB scores along the way of my viewing. So I was expecting this episode to be much worse when I saw it's low score. And I think the low score is both deserved and not. It depends on the viewers frame-of-mind.

I find a lot of the story ideas in the first 2/3rds of the episode to be interesting. I like the idea of them trying to reach warp 10 and there being some odd consequences to Tom Paris succeeding. And I like Tom trying to achieve some distinctive accomplishment to undo his bad reputation from before he left on the Voyager trip, and him discovering that accomplishing that goal doesn't guarantee his happiness. They showed all of those story elements as if there was nothing odd that also happened along the way. And there are some REALLY odd things that happen along the way.

The main issue with this episode is that they don't explain the glaringly odd story decisions at the end. And it's difficult to understand why reaching warp 10 would cause humans to become lizards. They try to say that it's humans evolving into their future identity millions of years into the future once they've evolved. It's trying to be sort of like the opposite of that TNG episode where the characters de-evolve backwards.

Anyone who understands evolution will say that no one can know what their future ancestors long in the future will look-like. Because species adapt to avoid dying within their changing environment which they're forced to live within. And no one today will know what any species in the distant future will have to adapt-to, or if the species will succeed or go extinction. Also there is the chance of speciation events where our species could go-off in different directions with different populations to form different species. So how could someone's body know what it's ancestors will body will become? It just makes no sense. And what makes obviously even less sense is why the writers decided to entangle the Captain in this issue, and have Tom and the Captain produce offspring in their lizard bodies. They also don't sufficiently explain how the doctor managed to fix this odd problem and bring Tom and Katherine back to normal.

What we see at the end has a completely ridiculous tone that contradicts a lot of the serious human messaging that they were trying to convey through the rest of the episode. And that's what that makes the episode a failure and entertaining. Because they present the message and the distraction as if it's completely compatible and not really too odd or distractingly.

Unlike other bad Star Trek episodes which one should skip, this one is genuinely worth watching. It is entertaining and bizarre to watch in the best way possible. Other bad episodes like the season 5 boxer episode from voyager or the season 2 flashback episode for TNG are boring and best skipped. I'd argue that this isn't even the worst Tom Paris episode given that the Alice episode later on is bad and boring.

Threshold is a bad episode which is fun to watch and wonder, "what were the creators thinking?

It's sort of like the cult bad movie The Room which is also both bad and entertaining and a cult fun movie to see. This is fun bad cult episode that gets discussed far more that other episodes which Star Trek fans do their best to pretend don't exist.

The fact that some art is bad, but can also be entertaining unlike other bad art which is generally not entertaining or worth experiencing is sort of an interesting topic of discussion when it comes to what makes art good. At least it's an interesting question to me.

Because it's so clearly bad and entertaining I gave this episode a 5. But depending on how one is looking at the episode, one could easily give it a 10 stat or a 1 star score because it is both truly bad at what it's aiming to be, but entertaining anyway. And that's an odd combination to pull-off by mistake.

It's interesting too to note that Brannon Braga who wrote this episode, wrote a lot of top notch Star Trek episodes for both Voyager and TNG. And has had an overall very successful career. This episode is an obvious exception to his creative talent. And it's a reminder that sometimes the difference between brilliant and laugh-out loud bad is finer than we'd often like to recognize. Especially when it comes to trying to create original engaging art while dealing with deadlines. So keep that in mind before being too negative toward everyone associated with this episode. I also think it's unfair to criticize a lot of the acting or directing on this episode. I think the production team did a good job given the task of bringing this story life. The pre-production is where this episode failed to deliver what they were going-for.

I actually take Paris's transformation and struggle seriously, I think it's a very moving portrayal of mental suffering and the struggle on the part of loved ones to provide care.

If any of these negative nabobs who crap on this episode can appreciate Cronenberg or Carpenter or Barker then they should also be able to appreciate this.

I think Threshold is equally great viewed either as a serious drama or a comedy, there certainly is comedic timing, but as somebody who has had mental health problems and three day stays Threshold feels real.

There are families who have had to see their loved ones die in horrible ways, AIDS victims living long enough to have mold growing on their tongues, cancer patients transformed behaviorally by chemo and radiation therapy.

I'm honestly bothered by the lack of intelligence in these other reviews, even the ones that score the ep highly also go on to bash Voyager as a "bad" show and they call this a "terrible" episode --- I'm baffled!

Voyager is as excellent a show as Next Generation or DS9.

And it's not as though Next Gen didn't already give us "Identity Crisis" where Geordi very casually investigates his and another crew member's transformations.

It's great that in Threshold Tom Paris is believably wigged out by what's happening to him.

There's also the Next Gen ep "Genesis" which is not less whacky than Threshold but Genesis is without any real belivable reaction to the bizarreness that ensues, I think that Threshold is a much better episode than Genesis.

As for people pretending to care about science --- Star Trek has NEVER been scientifically credible, ultimately it's got more in common with the Globe Theater of Shakespeare's time than it does with science education, this is about performers on a stage creating human stories.

I give Threshold a 5/5, an excellent episode.