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Thirty years ago, Star Trek: Voyager broadcast one of its most controversial episodes ever: “Threshold,” the episode that is now infamous as “The One Where Captain Janeway and Tom Paris Mutate Into Amphibians and Have Babies.” Over the years, revisitation has allowed the chance to reframe “Threshold” from one of the worst things that Star Trek has ever done to a charmingly memetic moment of camp to an episode that, while deeply flawed, still has sparks of potential.
So to mark 30 years of this moment in Trek infamy, we decided to put aside the space amphibian sex jokes (aside from the ones we’ve already made—please, we’re only human) and look back at one of those sparks of potential, a bright spot in an otherwise very silly episode: what “Threshold” has to say about Voyager‘s rebellious conn officer, Tom Paris.
In the early seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, one of the few recurring arcs the show engaged with on a regular basis from episode to episode was the reformation of Lieutenant Paris. Tom joins the show with a shockingly messy background: an ex-Starfleet officer drummed out of service for covering up a piloting error, jailed for pettily running into the arms of the Cardassian resistance group known as the Maquis, and then paroled by Captain Janeway on what was meant to be a brief trial run for her new ship rather than a 70,000 light-year journey home from an unexplored quadrant of the galaxy.
Almost everyone on Voyager in its early days is operating with a sense of grief that their lives and futures they’d had planned were destroyed in the blink of an eye, but not Paris. Paris is living his dream, piloting a top-of-the-line starship, still getting to bite his thumb at the Maquis who joined Voyager‘s crew through necessary circumstances, and the only Starfleet authority to answer to is the woman who trusted him enough to give him a second chance in the first place. This largely manifests in one particular way in those early seasons: Tom is kind of a huge, cocky asshole, even when he is sincerely trying to prove the faith put in him was justified.
That brings us to “Threshold” and Tom’s perfectly cocky, yet aspirational, idea of figuring out a way to breach the titular Warp 10 threshold—the long-established Star Trek lore that warp drives could not achieve faster-than-light speeds above that maximum. It’s a fascinating idea that a show with a premise like Voyager, about an isolated Starfleet vessel trapped tens of thousands of light-years from Federation space, is primed to tackle, even more so when one of its main characters is a cocky ace pilot with a chip on his padded uniform shoulder. That in and of itself is a brilliant way of the show engaging with Star Trek‘s broader legacy even while it’s isolated from it.
But that’s not the moment we’re talking about. That moment comes after Tom’s first experimental test flights successfully see him manage a sustained speed above the warp threshold—and then have medical complications as his body undergoes what is ultimately revealed to be a rapid-onset acceleration of the evolutionary process. Tom’s body starts breaking down bit-by-bit, requiring nonstop medical treatment: his hair falls out, eyes glaze over, skin mottles and flakes, and his joints and limbs start fusing together. The dashing young hero of the hour has been turned into this broken, evolving-yet-devolving wreck of a thing.
It’s in this form that “Threshold” delivers its greatest moment. It’s a fascinating grotesquerie: the body horror is incredibly effective for Trek and feels like Voyager building on its stunningly creepy effects work with the Vidiians the season prior, made all the more chilling by the fact that it’s one of our heroes who has been rendered horrifying. But it’s the breakdown of Paris’ persona that is most effective. The wild changes he’s undergone almost feel like the dropping of a mask, both metaphorically and literally, as parts of his face slough off.
In one moment, he rails at Captain Janeway for taking pity on his gruesome form; the next, for her trying to diminish what he’s accomplished in breaking past warp 10. His ego, usually kept in check by his earnest desire to prove himself to the world and Janeway in particular, runs rampant, making for a scene that’s chilling and tragic in equal measures as he vacillates between the man we’ve come to know and this wretched figure. It’s a great character beat for Paris to find himself again at the heart of an accident caused by his own hubris and to respond to it by impulsively lashing out at the world around him—it’s just that this time the ugliness that marks his soul, and the filters he’s built up as he tried to redeem himself in Voyager‘s early days up to this point being stripped away in his despair and agony, are now reflected on the outside.
Of course, that’s when we get to him kidnapping Janeway, forcing her to undergo the same process, and them having space amphibian sex before Voyager tries to move on from it, never bringing the workplace ethics nightmare of the millennia up ever again. But before that moment that would seal the infamous legacy of “Threshold” for decades to come, it shone with a moment of genuine brilliance. A fine example of even some of Star Trek‘s lowest lows having at least something worth thinking about.
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James Whitbrook
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