A question about the episode "Threshold"

[The Borg Queen]

Ok, excuse me ignorance, but I am brand new here... what on earth is this 'canon' thing you talk about??? Lol, I'm lost!

"Canon" is the official this-really-happened part of any fictional Universe.

In Star Trek it's limited to the TV shows and movies, not including the cartoon series. Anything that happened in the show, is a "real" part of the history of Star Trek.

 

[Lucy of Nine]

Ah ha! So books, the cartoon etc is not 'canon'...

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

Couldn't the Paris/Janeway offspring have been collected and turned into real children using the same technique that "cured" Paris/Janeway? I mean, they presumably had just as much residual human DNA, and with all the other flaky science, I don't see why they denied these baby salamanders both parents and a chance to be human, which is Janeway's personal crusade.

 

[kimc]

Couldn't the Paris/Janeway offspring have been collected and turned into real children using the same technique that "cured" Paris/Janeway? I mean, they presumably had just as much residual human DNA, and with all the other flaky science, I don't see why they denied these baby salamanders both parents and a chance to be human, which is Janeway's personal crusade.

It sounds like Chakotay made the decision to "leave them in their natural habitat" while he was acting captain. I found it strange that neither Janeway nor Paris brought up their fate during their closing scene in sickbay.

 

[Silvercrest]

Honestly, why can't the writers come up with decent explanations for some of the episodes that apparently made 'no sense'?

Easy! Any VOY or TNG episode that doesn't make sense is actually one of Barclay's holodeck programs. It may be based on something that really happened, but it didn't happen exactly the way we saw it.

Any ENT episode that doesn't make sense is one of Riker's holodeck programs.

Any TOS episode that doesn't make sense is one of Bashir and O'Brien's holosuite programs.

Any DS9 episode... I dunno. Pick someone.

 

[ria 75]

Any ENT episode that doesn't make sense is one of Riker's holodeck programs.

Any TOS episode that doesn't make sense is one of Bashir and O'Brien's holosuite programs.

Any DS9 episode... I dunno. Pick someone.

Quark's?
Weyoun's??
.

 

[AznAstronaut]

First time post, I had to get this off my chest.

My biggest problem with this episode has nothing to do with them turning into salamanders, Janeway and Paris getting it on, any pseudoscience BS. What I found the most bothersome was that they essentially found a way to get home overnight and it completely passed by their attention. If the hyperevolution is reversible via the application of an antiproton beam, simply modify Voyager to reach warp 10 (or use the prototype drive in the shuttle to transport a few crew members at a time), and then have the Doctor begin treating everyone with antiproton beams (or send out an automated distress signal upon reaching Earth saying, "Please irradiate it with us antiprotons to save our lives," lather, rinse, repeat.)

At the very least, if they do not want to take the risk of sending anyone else via the transwarp drive, they could rig a probe, or a shuttle, to make the transwarp jump by itself with an automated distress signal explaining Voyager's situation upon reaching Earth. (I have yet to watch VOY past Season 2 yet, so I know of the Pathfinder project via Memory-Alpha, but I don't want it ruined for me completely.)

Am I the only one who noticed this? What they've essentially recreated were the FTL drives of the Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons (super awesome by the way); the jump is instantaneous, however it killed whoever was aboard, requiring their resurrection over a period of days/weeks (or their recovery from the hyperevolution via the application of an antiproton beam and a few days in Sick Bay in the case of Star Trek.)

It is with good reason that this episode has (for all intents and purposes) been excised from canon, officially or not. Any method of (near) instantaneous travel essentially ruins Star Trek, because we no longer have the need for ships going boldly where no one has gone before.

 

[Timo]

However, Stargate is based on that very idea of instantaneous access - which meant that when starships were introduced to that show, it didn't really matter to the drama that they very quickly went from Trek-slow to nearly infinitely fast. Rather, the instantaneous travel cut off "dead wood" from the plots.

And personally, I don't think the above problem would be disastrous to drama at all. It's rather simple to come up with a reason for why transwarp as depicted doesn't actually work. Namely, we can easily argue that it's impossible to navigate on that drive mode!

We saw just two flights performed using that drive. In the first one, Tom Paris flew essentially nowhere: he started at one point and ended up at that very same point. In the second one, Paris and Janeway ended up at a random planet, there being no indication that they really wanted to go to that specific destination.

It could well be that this type of transwarp takes you nowhere, or has a roughly equal chance of taking you anywhere, be it Earth or Milliways.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jgdst]

Its the last 10 minutes of this episode that kill it.

... From Lizard to Human in a line of dialogue. Instantly. EVERYTHING IS BACK TO NORMAL?...and Chakotay just leaves the kids on the planet?

As is being discussed in another thread at the moment... Chakotay seems to have no qualms abandoning kids that aren't his

Hell, he's just getting practice in for not caring about Seska's baby a couple of weeks later (You'd think he'd have had some kind of emotional attachment before he found out it wasn't his... He even has a vision quest about it dammit!)

I'm also holding him personally responsible for the infamous Borg Baby disappearing. If you can lose that many shuttles, what's to stop you misplacing an entire baby?

 

[Lucy of Nine]

I think the borg baby slipped down behind the seat in one of Chakotay's lost shuttles. It's behind there with the keys to the delta flyer.

 

[Unicron]

To make a long story short: because the transwarp drive on the Excelsior was never shown to work, because there's no real evidence any Starfleet vessel was ever designed around a transwarp drive after that, and because the term "transwarp" has been used to refer to dissimilar systems of dissimilar origin and thus must be assumed to be a general term referring to any drive "beyond" the more familiar Trek warp drive.

The only reason it didn't work in TSFS is because Scotty disabled it. It wasn't referenced again until the Borg were shown to have it in TNG's "Descent," so that led some fans to assume the Excelsior's drive must have failed. But the fact is there's no real evidence in canon to show it didn't work, and it's a plausible explanation for why the warp scale was altered in TNG. If transwarp was successful to some degree, then it would make sense that the scale would have to be modified to represent the "new" top speed.

 

[2 of 10]

Each and every episode of Trek, from TOS to Ent has had it's own
"Spocks Brain" it would be very unlikely to have a series that each and every week is really great, great, ok, not bad...ect sometimes crap creeps into even our favorite Trek shows. And "Threshold" was the Spocks Brain of this wonderful series

 

[USS Fardell]

Hello everyone, this is my first post!

My observation while watching this episode was about the "Transwarp" issue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Excelsior have transwarp drive? If it had that capability, then why is it such a new thing in this episode?

The drive tested on the Excelsior was different to the drive tested on the shuttle Cochrane. They could have worked in different ways.

 

[Timo]

It does seem that "transwarp" merely means "better than warp", and that whenever such a technology is encountered and the creators of that technology are not around to tell our heroes what it REALLY is called, they label it "transwarp".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jgdst]

It does seem that "transwarp" merely means "better than warp", and that whenever such a technology is encountered and the creators of that technology are not around to tell our heroes what it REALLY is called, they label it "transwarp".

Timo Saloniemi

I'd agree with that. We've seen other "faster than warp" methods which are given their own names - quantum slipstream, subspace corridors. Transwarp just seems to be a catch-all for everything else, regardless of how the warp 10 barrier affects it.

The Voth in Distant Origin appear to have a form of transwarp technology, allowing them to follow Voyager's course from the past year and catch up with them in a relatively short time.

The Borg also possess transwarp technology, but judging by Endgame, appears to be supported by a network of physical hubs.

I should've checked before starting the post but it seems Memory Alpha's article on transwarp pretty much backs up what Timo said.

 

[voyagerfan]

Wouldn't it be better to call it superwarp and would it create effect similat ro breaking the sound barrier as supersonic aircraft did?

I too founf it odd, that they didn't take the kids home, but they did discuss about the "having children" which I thought was a bit odd to be honest