Threshold

Brannon Braga always says "what was I thinking" when he discusses this episode. No way! In fact I liked it, quite a bit. But not for the reasons you are thinking.

Tom is a pilot first and foremost, on top of being a jerk most of the time. In this episode, it appears that he is spearheading a team that has been planning hard designing a shuttle that can do something extraordinary, and he is the man that will pilot this. This is the flight that will give him something that he has wanted since he was a child, a feeling of accomplishment by doing something nobody else has. He is very sincere in all of his efforts and his arguments with Captain Janeway award him the chance to do this thing. But he is almost prevented from doing it because The Doctor thinks he has developed some form of brain-measles. Fortunately, and because we know Tom Paris' character well by this point, he is able to talk himself back into the pilot's seat.

However, what begins as a quest to break an ultimate speed barrier, takes a sharp twist and "devolves" into insanityland.

And I have never laughed so hard for a Star Trek episode, ever!

People simply don't appreciate the humor of this episode, especially the non-standard and possibly unintentional (but probably, actually intentional) comic acting by Robert Duncan McNeil. He nails this, if he had not pulled out all of the stops, the episode would have been perceived worse than it has been. But I never have thought of this episode as bad, only as drastically insane. Which was something that we needed at the time due to the serious turns in Trek during this period, with the Dominion and the Founders and Maquis and other threats in Deep Space Nine, to the destruction of the Enterprise D and the Borg Attack in the Next Generation movies of the period. With all of the seriousness of the state of the Federation on the Alpha quadrant side, we really needed something totally crazy to happen in the Delta quadrant side. And this was simply the first time they did it in Voyager, they had some other totally whack episodes after this, but nothing as crazy as this episode. It set a new standard for insanity. Which is why I personally love it.

And the ending is just way beyond the pale, when you think it can't get any crazier, it does, and then it even gets more absurd and insane after that, up until the very last scene which is the most incredibly crazy thing that we've ever seen any Star Trek, ever.

Y'all simply don't have a sense of humor, enjoy this for what it is, high comedy and absurdity, Star Trek style. Get out the popcorn when this episode plays, pretend like you are watching mst 3000, and enjoy it. I always make a point to watch this at least once every six months, it really lifts me up when I am in the dumps. Whaddya think this is? The last episode of Game of Thrones or something? (Which I also liked).

It truly is astonishingly bad. But knowing that going in, it is rather surreal.

You'd think the shuttle reaching "infinite" speed would be as loony as it could get, and then Tom morphing into a Sleestak would be as loony as it could get.

But, wait, there's more!

Tom kidnapping Janeway, them turning into salamanders and having babies.

Luckily, despite the "infinite" speed thing, Voyager is able to track them down, and luckily the Doctor has a hypo spray to cure millions of years of evolution.

You'd think somebody was extremely high when they wrote this, but the production is extremely solid! The makeup on McNeill is top notch, and he acts the heck out of it.

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.

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.

Interesting premise, goes off the rails about 15-20 mins into the episode, never recovers. Despite that there are at least a dozen episodes in TOS that are worse, and another dozen in TNG that are worse. You have to suspend all expectations of plausibility and just enjoy the insanity for the last half of the episode.