Some funny random trivia about "Threshold"

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'd love to see some novel do for "Threshold" what The Good That Men Do did for "These Are The Voyages".

Not necessarily involving the holodeck this time, but just something - ANYTHING - to explain this shit.

 

[Ethros]

* Despite the show's later efforts to decanonize the events of the episode by claiming that no-one's ever broken Warp 10...

When did that happen btw?

 

[Christopher]

* Despite the show's later efforts to decanonize the events of the episode by claiming that no-one's ever broken Warp 10...

When did that happen btw?

It didn't. The only time after "Threshold" that warp 10 was even mentioned was in "The Voyager Conspiracy" when Chakotay refers to it as the speed of gossip.

However, later episodes did contradict "Threshold" more implicitly by portraying transwarp in an incompatible way that didn't involve salamanders or infinite speed. Then again, transwarp has been portrayed in multiple contradictory ways since it was first mentioned in The Search for Spock, leading me to believe it's best interpreted as a generic term for any faster-than-warp drive technology.

 

[Jeri]

I always think Robbie did an impressive acting job in this episode; as Tom is my favorite VOY character, I enjoy the show for all the Tom in it. Kind of like "Alice."

 

[SAndrews10]

This is the ONLY Star Trek episode EVER that I skip when I do rewatches!

 

[Lance]

* Despite the show's later efforts to decanonize the events of the episode by claiming that no-one's ever broken Warp 10...

When did that happen btw?

It didn't. The only time after "Threshold" that warp 10 was even mentioned was in "The Voyager Conspiracy" when Chakotay refers to it as the speed of gossip.

However, later episodes did contradict "Threshold" more implicitly by portraying transwarp in an incompatible way that didn't involve salamanders or infinite speed. Then again, transwarp has been portrayed in multiple contradictory ways since it was first mentioned in The Search for Spock, leading me to believe it's best interpreted as a generic term for any faster-than-warp drive technology.

Hmm, it appears I was misremembering a comment in a later episode ("Day of Honor"), in which I thought Tom explicitly denied he'd ever travelled at transwarp.... but looking it up just now, it turns out that the exact quote is that he hadn't travelled through a transwarp conduit before, which certainly leaves it much less ambiguous (ie, Tom isn't saying he hasn't travelled at transwarp before, merely that he hasn't done so through a Borg-style conduit system). So, there's no explicit decanonization of "Threshold" later in the series, then.

'My bad', as they say.

 

[JD5000]

Now I really want the "Threshold" action figure, especially if it comes with lizard offspring. To Amazon!

 

[JirinPanthosa]

One ridiculous thing about the episode that isn't talked about a lot.

If you are moving at infinite speed and are thus everywhere in the universe at the same time, how do you control where you end up when you decelerate?

 

[Christopher]

If you are moving at infinite speed and are thus everywhere in the universe at the same time, how do you control where you end up when you decelerate?

Well, "decelerate" isn't really the word. It would take an infinite amount of time to accelerate to infinite velocity or to slow down from it. Fortunately, there's a throwaway reference in the episode to "quantum warp theory." That almost makes sense, because the only way to reach an infinite velocity state is to make a quantum leap from finite to infinite velocity without going through the infinite number of intervening speeds. And position is part of a particle's quantum state. So if you could control your ship's quantum state enough to jump from finite to infinite velocity, you could control the quantum state at which it came out to correspond to a given position in the universe. It isn't really an engine at all, more a sort of quantum teleporter.

 

[JD5000]

I suppose that makes as much sense as any explanation, given the fact that there aren't any facts.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It would take an infinite amount of time to accelerate to infinite velocity or to slow down from it.

That's untrue.

More precisely, what you said is true only if the rate of acceleration is bounded and finite. If the rate of acceleration is allowed to increase without bounds, then acceleration to infinite speed from rest can occur in a finite amount of time.

As an example, consider a collision between two point masses, acting under Newtonian gravitation alone. Let them begin at rest at some positive and finite separation. When released, they will begin falling towards each other along the line between them. Because their separation is finite once they start moving, and because their speeds will only increase, they must collide in some finite amount of time. The equation describing the conservation of energy indicates that, in the limit approaching collision, their speeds approach infinity. The law of universal gravitation indicates that, in the limit approaching collision, the forces of attraction also approach infinity, which provides the explanation for how acceleration to infinite velocity can occur in finite time.

 

[Ithekro]

Didn't Paris state how he came out of Transwarp in the episode?

 

[Christopher]

All he said was, "I saw that you were looking for me, so I took the new engines offline and ended up back where I started." Which kinda makes it useless as a means of travel if that's what happens when you turn it off.

 

[Beawild]

In a 2011 interview Braga said that he considered "Threshold" to be his worst episode.

What episode of Voyager are you happiest with to this day and which one would you just as soon forget?

Braga: Of course, the one I'd just as soon forget is called "Threshold." That's the one in which Janeway and Paris turn into lizards. That's a real low point. I was trying something. I don't want to get into what I was trying to do, but it didn't quite work. It was my homage, I guess, to David Cronenberg's The Fly, but it really backfired on me. It was poorly executed by me. I think very fondly of episodes like "Timeless" or "Deadlock." I thought "Deadlock" was classic Star Trek and whatever crew would have been in that episode, it would have been a good episode of Star Trek. "Timeless" was specific to Voyager. It couldn't really have been done on any of the other shows. I thought it was really good. We tried to make Voyager more epic and so we did a series of two-parters, like "Dark Frontier," which I thought were really cool. And a special favorite to me was "Someone to Watch Over Me." That was really a very simple character piece, with no space battles and not much science fiction at all. It showed Star Trek could be funny and touching.

http://www.startrek.com/article/brannon-braga-from-tng-to-terra-nova-part-1

 

[Lance]

^ I do have to give Brannon credit that, to my knowledge, he's never tried to lay the blame anywhere else. Every time I've seen him talk about "Threshold" he's always fessed up that it wasn't great and he's always taken responsibility for it's failure. I like that.

 

[Christopher]

Writers are usually their own worst critics.

 

[hux]

The idea of exploring something like "The Fly" hadn't even occurred to me. Tom's transformation seems more comical than creepy (despite the ickiness of the tongue removal) but hearing Braga's reasoning, i kinda see what he was getting at

It obviously doesn't work as a story about that (not sure how much it changed from the initial idea to the episode) as it doesn't look at Tom's change adequately enough for me. You need a full episode to explore something like that

I definitely think a Gregor Samsa story would have been quite interesting to watch but Trek is sometimes too light for its own good and can't really pull off that sort of thing

 

[Beawild]

I think that it would have worked better if they had shown Tom slowly transforming into the amphibian without adding the subplot of him kidnapping the Captain and having salamander babies with her. If it was supposed to be a homage to The Fly, then they should have concentrated on that plot.

One of the creepiest moments of the movie was when the erstwhile scientist, who is now a fly, is trapped in a spider web. As the spider is approaching he yells "Help me! Help me!". Due to his tiny size, it comes out as only a squeak.

 

[Richard Baker]

I likes the beginning of Threshold although I do wish they had added some greebly to the experimental shuttle to make it look like an engineering test instead of just saying it was super fast now.
What killed it for me was Paris changing into a lizard. No problem with having some dramatic negative side effects from the everywhere at one journey, but it they had made him start to loose cohesion like in 'Altered States' and they found a way to stabilize him back into his previous form it would have been so much better.
What would have saved the episode would have been if the into a lizard thing was a lesson from Q. He would have not even needed to actually been in the episode, just a reflection of him in a panel in Sickbay as the Doctor takes credit for the 'cure'.

 

[Christopher]

I likes the beginning of Threshold although I do wish they had added some greebly to the experimental shuttle to make it look like an engineering test instead of just saying it was super fast now.

Except that "Threshold" was actually the debut of that particular shuttle type, which was much sleeker and "faster-looking" than the previous model. It was even named Cochrane. Implicitly, they designed and built a whole new class of shuttlecraft just for the experiment. The fact that the design continued to be used afterward for ordinary shuttles kind of undermined that implication, though.