The Great Chronological Run-Through

[Christopher]

It makes me wonder if the episode might've been recoverable without all the trouble that swirled around its filming; keeping the romance subplot with Masters so they wouldn't have to stretch to fill time with nothing, not having the chaos of Barrymore's flaking out that forced them to rush in filming and made Brown's performance so harried. Would it at least be watchable without all the mess around it?

Probably not, since the script wasn't that much different in its earlier forms.

http://www.orionpressfanzines.com/articles/alternative_factor2.htm

http://www.orionpressfanzines.com/articles/alternative_factor.htm

And really, the romance subplot was almost beat for beat the same as "Space Seed," with the female officer being captivated by the charismatic visitor and seduced by him into betraying her duty. So it might've diminished "Space Seed" by making it seem repetitious.

Also, Brown's performance wasn't the problem. He just had fundamentally stupid and incoherent material to work with. I doubt John Drew Barrymore would've done any better, especially given his personal issues. (Has anyone seen him acting in anything from the period? How did his talent compare to Robert Brown's?)

 

[LordJuss]

an episode so awful that the producers themselves quietly swept it under the rug -- much like Voyager's "Threshold" decades later.

I think there are ways to justify Threshold (though not improve it). The first third is ok. It's tempting to challenge Christopher to explain it in a novel as he's so good at making sense of otherwise nonsensical episodes (and yes I'm looking at you Omega Glory).

LJ.

 

[Christopher]

My initial rationalization for "Threshold" was that the whole salamander-mutation thing was a trick played by the Q to keep mortals from intruding on their turf. Later on, I had the thought that maybe everything after the transwarp attempt was a hallucination experienced by Paris. But then, that wouldn't explain why they didn't just keep researching the drive. Hallucination or otherwise, Paris (and Janeway?) came through it with no lasting ill effects. Surely a brief bout of treatable hallucinations (or mutation) would be worth going through if it meant the crew could get home.

So I prefer to follow the producers' lead and simply disregard the episode. Although without it, it's hard to explain where the new shuttle design of the Cochrane came from all of a sudden. (Although it was later retconned as a pre-existing class of shuttle.)

 

[LordJuss]

My view is that the episode is based on several misconceptions. As I understand it, each level of warp takes you deeper into. Subspace. Warp 10 actually behaves exactly as it should: the shuttle disappears completely. Being everywhere is the same as being nowhere specific.

The mutation thing seemed to me to be caused by the planet Paris ended up on rather than the subspace trip itself. The crew misunderstood that and assumed the two were linked.

It's not perfect but avoids the need to retcon the episode.

 

[Idran]

My view is that the episode is based on several misconceptions. As I understand it, each level of warp takes you deeper into. Subspace. Warp 10 actually behaves exactly as it should: the shuttle disappears completely. Being everywhere is the same as being nowhere specific.

I don't think that works, because if that were the case, the rescaling of the warp factor scale between TOS and TNG wouldn't make any sense. And what would non-integral warp factors be if that were it? It's usually presented as a threshold-of-energy thing, where the amount of field distortion needed to travel at warp increases severely from warp X to warp X.99, and then drops suddenly once you pass the boundary to warp X+1. Like how certain gears of a manual transmission engine are only efficient in certain speed ranges, and as you approach the upper end of the range for a certain gear, the engine starts to struggle to keep up until you shift up into a higher gear.

The mutation thing seemed to me to be caused by the planet Paris ended up on rather than the subspace trip itself. The crew misunderstood that and assumed the two were linked.

Paris started to mutate before they ever even reached the planet, though; they were nowhere near it until they followed Paris's shuttle to it.

 

[Christopher]

My view is that the episode is based on several misconceptions. As I understand it, each level of warp takes you deeper into. Subspace. Warp 10 actually behaves exactly as it should: the shuttle disappears completely. Being everywhere is the same as being nowhere specific.

I don't think that works, because if that were the case, the rescaling of the warp factor scale between TOS and TNG wouldn't make any sense. And what would non-integral warp factors be if that were it? It's usually presented as a threshold-of-energy thing, where the amount of field distortion needed to travel at warp increases severely from warp X to warp X.99, and then drops suddenly once you pass the boundary to warp X+1. Like how certain gears of a manual transmission engine are only efficient in certain speed ranges, and as you approach the upper end of the range for a certain gear, the engine starts to struggle to keep up until you shift up into a higher gear.

Here's the thing that confuses people: "Warp 10" is supposed to mean infinite speed. That's why you're everywhere at once -- because the reciprocal of infinity (or rather, the limit of 1/n as n goes to infinity) is zero, so at infinite speed, it takes zero time to get between any two points in the universe, which is the same as saying you occupy them simultaneously.

The use of a finite number, 10, to represent infinite speed has been confusing fans for a generation now. The problem is that in early TNG, warp 10 was nebulously defined as an insurmountable finite speed limit (note "We're passing warp 10" in "Where No One Has Gone Before"), but it was later retconned to mean infinite speed, so we ended up with that very misleading nomenclature.

 

[Idran]

My view is that the episode is based on several misconceptions. As I understand it, each level of warp takes you deeper into. Subspace. Warp 10 actually behaves exactly as it should: the shuttle disappears completely. Being everywhere is the same as being nowhere specific.

I don't think that works, because if that were the case, the rescaling of the warp factor scale between TOS and TNG wouldn't make any sense. And what would non-integral warp factors be if that were it? It's usually presented as a threshold-of-energy thing, where the amount of field distortion needed to travel at warp increases severely from warp X to warp X.99, and then drops suddenly once you pass the boundary to warp X+1. Like how certain gears of a manual transmission engine are only efficient in certain speed ranges, and as you approach the upper end of the range for a certain gear, the engine starts to struggle to keep up until you shift up into a higher gear.

Here's the thing that confuses people: "Warp 10" is supposed to mean infinite speed. That's why you're everywhere at once -- because the reciprocal of infinity (or rather, the limit of 1/n as n goes to infinity) is zero, so at infinite speed, it takes zero time to get between any two points in the universe, which is the same as saying you occupy them simultaneously.

The use of a finite number, 10, to represent infinite speed has been confusing fans for a generation now. The problem is that in early TNG, warp 10 was nebulously defined as an insurmountable finite speed limit (note "We're passing warp 10" in "Where No One Has Gone Before"), but it was later retconned to mean infinite speed, so we ended up with that very misleading nomenclature.

Oh yeah, for my explanation I meant the values from warp 1-9. That's what I always gathered from the chart in the TNG Tech Manual, at least. (I know the Tech Manual isn't canon, but Enterprise had a near-identical-in-concept chart very visible in "First Flight", so it seems like that chart at least has carried through.)

I suppose that, carrying forward this analogy, it's possible that perhaps warp 9 is simply the "highest gear" that the current model of warp drive can handle, and since there is no integral factor above 9 for it to slip into, it started to be used as an analogy for infinite speed. But that's really starting to go into the wilds, I suppose. (Maybe warp 20 or something held the same value in the TOS scale? 14 was the highest specific speed that was ever called out by number, wasn't it?)

 

[Christopher]

(Maybe warp 20 or something held the same value in the TOS scale? 14 was the highest specific speed that was ever called out by number, wasn't it?)

That was warp 14.1, to be precise.

Warp 36 was mentioned in "The Counter-Clock Incident," but I consider that episode apocryphal because nothing in it makes a damn bit of sense. (Including the fact that the Enterprise is somehow able to lock a tractor beam on a ship travelling at that impossible speed.)

 

[Sci]

I don't exclude "The Alternate Factor" from my personal continuity. I just insert a scene at the end of it, where Kirk wakes up in his quarters and thinks to himself, "Damn, I need to lay off the Rigellian mushrooms next time."

 

[LordJuss]

That'll teach me to explain my thoughts on the far side of wine. So...

Warp factors. The power thing is true but doesn't explain why it's the case. We've heard about subspace layers and I've always felt the two are linked. It takes more energy as you push into each layer then you transition and the energy requirement drops. Hence warp 10 is when you leave ordinary space entirely and can reenter at any point - infinite speed.

As for the planet, we only saw it late in the episode but it only ever made sense to me if Paris had been there on the first trip too. Otherwise how would he know to go there. I reasoned that the mutation and need to reproduce was implanted there, much like the Loque'eque virus.

Lj

 

[Idran]

That'll teach me to explain my thoughts on the far side of wine. So...

Warp factors. The power thing is true but doesn't explain why it's the case. We've heard about subspace layers and I've always felt the two are linked. It takes more energy as you push into each layer then you transition and the energy requirement drops. Hence warp 10 is when you leave ordinary space entirely and can reenter at any point - infinite speed.

That still doesn't really fit with the rescaling, I don't think. If the amount of energy to transition is a principle of the universe instead of a principle of the drive, then I'm not sure how the scale could change.

Plus we've heard of messages getting pushed into deeper layers of subspace to increase their range before emerging back into normal space, but they definitely don't travel at below warp 9 normally or else there'd be no point to them; if messages are slower than ships then they may as well deliver messages with courier ships. Let alone near-real-time communications, which are definitely above warp 9 but still not infinite speed.

As for the planet, we only saw it late in the episode but it only ever made sense to me if Paris had been there on the first trip too. Otherwise how would he know to go there. I reasoned that the mutation and need to reproduce was implanted there, much like the Loque'eque virus.

Lj

Honestly that interpretation just makes the episode come of even worse, though; that what was really going on was literally never mentioned anywhere in the events of the episode. If in my view what really happened had nothing at all to do with what the episode presented as what happened, that writing would be something like...literally elementary-school level from my view; you must think Braga's even worse a writer on that episode than the rest of us do to have utterly failed at presenting things to that horrible a degree.

 

[LordJuss]

I did say the interpretation didn't improve it, just try to make it make sense.

Lj

 

[Christopher]

As for the planet, we only saw it late in the episode but it only ever made sense to me if Paris had been there on the first trip too. Otherwise how would he know to go there. I reasoned that the mutation and need to reproduce was implanted there, much like the Loque'eque virus.

Well, technically he was there, because he was everywhere. But if he could've picked up that mutation disease there, he would've picked up countless other diseases from the countless other planets he intersected with simultaneously.

Also, none of it accounts for the Doctor's completely nonsensical explanation of how evolution works -- the idea that our evolutionary path over the next several million years is a preprogrammed set of changes that can be triggered to occur faster, rather than a process of randomly arising mutations over many generations that are selected from by the survival demands of whatever environment those future generations happen to occupy. The only interpretation that rationalizes that bit of lunacy is my suggestion that everything after the flight is Tom's hallucinations or dreams.

Or maybe including the flight. I said before that if the only side effect were weird hallucinations/nightmares, that would be too minor to justify abandoning a possible way home. So maybe the drive never actually reached transwarp -- Paris just imagined it did.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

But what of Lazarus, people?

What of Lazarus?

 

[Cap'n Crunch]

I've always just considered "Threshold" to be one of The Doctor's early holonovels.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I've always just considered "Threshold" to be one of The Doctor's early holonovels.

Genius. I love this idea.

The story takes total liberties, both with realism and with fellow crewmembers, up to and including the Captain, it focuses on bad and humiliating things happening to Paris; I could easily detect the photonic hand of the Doctor in this.

One wonders, though, why the Doctor would so mangle evolutionary biology... unless this was some commentary on holograms, somehow. Programming that takes you in unexpected directions?

 

[Idran]

Well hey, doctors are often awful scientists; maybe the Doctor just doesn't know evolutionary biology.

 

[Christopher]

Well hey, doctors are often awful scientists; maybe the Doctor just doesn't know evolutionary biology.

Except he's not just a doctor, he's an emergency medical program with the entirety of Federation medical knowledge in his databanks.

But hey -- the first Voyager crewperson we saw writing a holonovel (not counting Tuvok, since his was a security simulation) was Tom Paris. Maybe this was one of his. Although he never published it because the bit about him having babies with Captain Janeway would've gotten him in all sorts of trouble.

 

[Idran]

Well hey, doctors are often awful scientists; maybe the Doctor just doesn't know evolutionary biology.

Except he's not just a doctor, he's an emergency medical program with the entirety of Federation medical knowledge in his databanks.

Ah, but evolution is biology, not medicine. Technicality!

(To be fair I wasn't entirely serious before anyway. )

 

[20fridge]

Nah, you're all wrong It's actually one of Janeway's weird nightmares from "Coda".