The Greatest Second within the Worst Episode of ‘Star Trek: Voyager,’ 30 Years Later

Thirty years in the past, Star Trek: Voyager broadcast one in every of its most controversial episodes ever: “Threshold,” the episode that’s now notorious as “The One The place Captain Janeway and Tom Paris Mutate Into Amphibians and Have Infants.” Over time, revisitation has allowed the prospect to reframe “Threshold” from one of the worst things that Star Trek has ever performed to a charmingly memetic moment of camp to an episode that, whereas deeply flawed, nonetheless has sparks of potential.

So to mark 30 years of this second in Trek infamy, we determined to place apart the area amphibian intercourse jokes (except for those we’ve already made—please, we’re solely human) and look again at a kind of sparks of potential, a shiny spot in an in any other case very foolish episode: what “Threshold” has to say about Voyager‘s rebellious conn officer, Tom Paris.

Within the early seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, one of many few recurring arcs the present engaged with frequently from episode to episode was the reformation of Lieutenant Paris. Tom joins the present with an incredibly messy background: an ex-Starfleet officer drummed out of service for protecting up a piloting error, jailed for pettily operating into the arms of the Cardassian resistance group generally known as the Maquis, after which paroled by Captain Janeway on what was meant to be a quick trial run for her new ship quite than a 70,000 light-year journey dwelling from an unexplored quadrant of the galaxy.

Virtually everybody on Voyager in its early days is working with a way of grief that their lives and futures they’d had deliberate have been destroyed within the blink of a watch, however not Paris. Paris resides his dream, piloting a top-of-the-line starship, nonetheless attending to chew his thumb on the Maquis who joined Voyager‘s crew by essential circumstances, and the one Starfleet authority to reply to is the girl who trusted him sufficient to present him a second likelihood within the first place. This largely manifests in a single explicit means in these early seasons: Tom is form of an enormous, cocky asshole, even when he’s sincerely attempting to show the religion put in him was justified.

That brings us to “Threshold” and Tom’s completely cocky, but aspirational, concept of determining a method to breach the titular Warp 10 threshold—the long-established Star Trek lore that warp drives couldn’t obtain faster-than-light speeds above that most. It’s an interesting concept {that a} present with a premise like Voyager, about an remoted Starfleet vessel trapped tens of hundreds of light-years from Federation area, is primed to deal with, much more so when one in every of its fundamental characters is a cocky ace pilot with a chip on his padded uniform shoulder. That in and of itself is an excellent means of the present partaking with Star Trek‘s broader legacy even whereas it’s remoted from it.

However that’s not the second we’re speaking about. That second comes after Tom’s first experimental take a look at flights efficiently see him handle a sustained pace above the warp threshold—after which have medical problems as his physique undergoes what’s in the end revealed to be a rapid-onset acceleration of the evolutionary course of. Tom’s physique begins breaking down bit-by-bit, requiring nonstop medical therapy: his hair falls out, eyes glaze over, pores and skin mottles and flakes, and his joints and limbs begin fusing collectively. The dashing younger hero of the hour has been changed into this damaged, evolving-yet-devolving wreck of a factor.

It’s on this type that “Threshold” delivers its biggest second. It’s an interesting grotesquerie: the physique horror is extremely efficient for Trek and seems like Voyager constructing on its stunningly creepy results work with the Vidiians the season prior, made all of the extra chilling by the truth that it’s one in every of our heroes who has been rendered horrifying. However it’s the breakdown of Paris’ persona that’s handiest. The wild adjustments he’s undergone virtually really feel just like the dropping of a masks, each metaphorically and actually, as elements of his face slough off.

In a single second, he rails at Captain Janeway for taking pity on his ugly type; the following, for her attempting to decrease what he’s achieved in breaking previous warp 10. His ego, normally stored in examine by his earnest need to show himself to the world and Janeway particularly, runs rampant, making for a scene that’s chilling and tragic in equal measures as he vacillates between the person we’ve come to know and this wretched determine. It’s an ideal character beat for Paris to search out himself once more on the coronary heart of an accident attributable to his personal hubris and to answer it by impulsively lashing out on the world round him—it’s simply that this time the ugliness that marks his soul, and the filters he’s constructed up as he tried to redeem himself in Voyager‘s early days up up to now being stripped away in his despair and agony, are actually mirrored on the skin.

In fact, that’s once we get to him kidnapping Janeway, forcing her to endure the identical course of, and them having area amphibian intercourse earlier than Voyager tries to maneuver on from it, by no means bringing the office ethics nightmare of the millennia up ever once more. However earlier than that second that will seal the notorious legacy of “Threshold” for many years to come back, it shone with a second of real brilliance. A high quality instance of even a few of Star Trek‘s lowest lows having at the least one thing price occupied with.

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