A first-time viewer’s thoughts on Voyager’s “Threshold”

Star Trek: Voyager’s season two episode, Threshold, hasn’t gotten a lot of love over the years

In fact, this episode shows up on most of the “worst episodes” lists online and not just for Star Trek: Voyager but for all of Star Trek. But it was also an Emmy-winning episode. Along with that, Tom Paris hitting the Warp 10 threshold was included in the 30th greatest moments of all Star Trek by Geek.com. So the episode wasn’t without merits which is what made me what to finally watch it. And I didn’t hate it like I was thinking I would.

I know many, many fans feel differently about this episode and will never watch it again, mainly for the salamanders at the end, but I focused on the positive moments of the episode. And how Tom Paris was changed as a result of it.

Was it weird? Yes, but not necessarily any weirder than some other Star Trek episodes I’ve seen. Up until Paris captured Captain Janeway, it was fairly interesting. Admittedly, I did have an issue with Tom’s evolution as it’s hard to believe that humans will devolve into lizards in millions of years, especially when you consider the other Star Trek episodes that have shown species achieving higher consciousness through evolution. I’d like to hope that humans have a little more to look forward to. So that in and of itself was a bit off-putting.  Well, that and Tom coughing up his tongue.

"“My teachers at school, all the kids, everyone used to say ‘Tom Paris is gonna do something important when he grows up.’ Obviously, that didn’t happen.” —Tom Paris"

But the overall episode has some good moments like when the Doctor mistook Tom’s request for a kiss from Kes, when Neelix was able to help Tom and Harry fix the problem with the shuttlecraft, and Chakotay’s uncertainty about which salamander was the captain.  And Tom’s revelation at the end that he needed to work more on himself mentally was actually a little sad. Here is this man who feels like he’s never amounted to much and even though he achieved Warp 10 and Captain Janeway was putting him in for commendation, he didn’t feel complete, so to speak.

There were good moments and bad moments in Threshold, but then, we can find those in a lot of Star Trek episodes. So, for me, the episode was a 5 on a scale of 1-10.