Threshold
(Star Trek - Voyager episode production code 132)
story by Michael De Luca
teleplay by Brannon Braga
Hehehe. Here we are at one of the most maligned episodes in Voyager's
entire run.
Before I join in the bashing, I just want to give this story a point
for bringing up a detailed discussion of Star Trek's warp factor scale,
and generating audience interest in whether or not Voyager could be made to
speed up and perhaps break a perceived barrier here. In itself, that's
not at all a bad launch point for an episode, and in terms of discussing
the warp scale, almost refreshing since all other Trek episodes seem to
want to gloss over such background detail.
But perhaps there should have been more thought put into where they were
going to go with all this dramatically. What will each scene along this
journey really be about? The episode skips all over the place without finding
a genuinely intriguing focus. Some scenes are all technobabble concerning
ship structure. Some are about medical techniques and biological mutations.
There's an astronaut's thread about being the first to achieve a new
technical feat in Mankind's ability to travel - which feels quite forced
and not quite true to the characters, particularly in the artificial triggers
for some of these scenes. Dramatically, the story is all over the place.
Scientifically, today's holes are gaping and so ridiculous that I doubt if
anyone will be following this one and believing in it. Perhaps the first
and most obvious one is why they even attempt to achieve Warp 10 and/or beyond.
They don't really need to go so fast as to get home instantaneously. Surely
there's a Warp 9.995 or something that can get them home in 7 minutes, or
70 hours. Anything to improve on the projected 70 years, even slightly,
would be worth it.
Is the whole mutation section here simply to give reason why Voyager will
abandon this line of investigation in future episodes and return to its
"Gilligan's Island Syndrome" status quo? Or is it here because Braga and co.
like the anthology-style thought provoking mess it digs deeper into? Or both?
In the end, this feels like a really cheesy "Outer Limits" episode, where
no matter what the story was, the producers & network were sure to throw a
funky monster in there somehow. And as with so many anthology-style stories
that Braga shoe-horns into the continuing-character-style of one Star Trek series or
another, he ends up
reaching for the reset-button again so he can put his toys back before bedtime,
and it has a particular lack of thought and believability behind it this time.
Though I might buy some kind of compressed time / accelerated evolution
beyond the Warp 10 barrier, the story needed a more unrepeatable way of
achieving Warp 10 in the first place, many more generations of humans
through which evolution could show itself, and the ability to not even go
there with a regular character. Let it be a guest crewmember or minor
recurring character who endures the flight, such that he doesn't undergo a
magic cure at the end ...if there's sufficient reason to believe it can work,
which I'm not sure there is. Really, what will the actual drama be about,
scene for scene? I'm not sure there is or ever was a good answer to that
with the material here. The mutation angle is the most problematic and
disposable element here, and should have been dropped.
Perhaps we could have achieved a good, non-Warp-10 speed with this episode,
ended the Gilligan-come-home arc, and started a new Voyager-led exploration
of the Delta Quadrant on purpose, complete with new arcs concerning all the
races so far discovered. If so, maybe save this one up for the season finale,
or the penultimate story of the season that leads into the finale. But of course,
we know they didn't dare to dream of going there.
Yup, this one's a stinker. Interesting enough to see once. It does reinforce
an ongoing information leak to the Kazon, if that contributes much to the overall
season, although of course the Kazon don't do anything with this discovery either.
Otherwise, this episode is just not great. The most you can do is laugh,
in a this-is-so-bad-it's-almost-funny/good kind of way.