I Actually Like VOY 2x15 "Threshold"

What's your worst episode of Star Trek? I did my first watch-through of Star Trek: Voyager a year or so ago. I grew up watching reruns of the original series and The Next Generation playing in the living room often. Then I watched Deep Space Nine in adulthood and absolutely loved it. Voyager was a good time, too. I like to check the wiki, Memory Alpha, after every episode for all the trivia, production notes and to find out what people think. (Spoilers for this episode ahead.)

Season 2 Episode 15, titled "Threshold", sees Lieutenant Tom Paris achieve a feat thought impossible: he pilots a shuttle at Warp 10. This amazing success is short-lived as his body seems to undergo some horrifying transformation. They eventually determine that he's experiencing a kind of ultra-rapid evolution. What he becomes is not recognizably human, but is something that humanity may become eons down the line. The ending is, admittedly, a bit silly. Paris and Janeway both become these strange reptilian critters and mate on some remote planet before being scienced back to normal, hoping to never think about this again.

I was so completely into this episode. It made me feel some things. It touched on some specific fears and some favorite themes of mine. I think I actually cried a little? I didn't even mind the ending. Sci-fi is going to get silly from time to time, and I thought it was a reasonable direction for this strange conflict to go.

I whipped out my phone to check Memory Alpha, only to find out... everybody hates this episode. The actors hated it. The writers hated it. The fans hated it. It's on "worst Star Trek episodes" lists. There is hardly a kind word to be found about "Threshold" online. I was a little bit heartbroken. I was also surprised that there was no mention of any of the influences I thought may have inspired the episode. It turns out they only influenced my reaction to the show.

Bear with me.

Cosmic Horror

H.P Lovecraft and his contemporaries, the "Lovecraft Circle", pioneered a subgenre of weird fiction driven by cosmicism. This literary philosophy is all about how insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of things. Our limited understanding of existence doesn't even scratch the surface. There are very old things, sometimes very powerful things, and sometimes from very far away (but other times, right beneath our feet) that couldn't care less about us if they could even notice us. Those things can be "gods" like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, but they can also be the universe itself.

Star Trek as a franchise does not venture into cosmic horror very often. While its universe contains countless species that are not biologically human, they are all largely humanoid and sapient. It's a people-centric story. Even when something very strange happens to our heroes there's usually an identifiable force behind it, like the Q or the Caretaker or, my personal nightmare-fuel, Nagilum. That's why "Threshold" caught me so off-guard. I'm just not used to watching my beloved Starfleet adventurers confront the truly awesome and terrifying. They're used to the unknown; they rarely touch the unknowable.

You could argue that the rapid evolution that Paris undergoes is not strictly unknowable. Scientists could someday choose to recreate the circumstances and conduct tests to find out why it was triggered and why humans are destined to become little wet lizards. I would argue that you're missing the point. When Lovecraftian protagonists are brought to their knees by the unimaginable, they don't have the luxury to stop and think, "Gee, I bet scientists a hundred years from now will be able to study this thing," and so neither does the reader. These questions will never be answered because the story dictates they cannot be answered. I find that to be chilling.

Junji Ito

When I got to the point in "Threshold" where they explained what was happening to Paris, I felt a horror-flavored punch to the gut. My next stop after Memory Alpha was Google, to search the heck out of the publication history of "Long Dream" by famed horror mangaka, Junji Ito. I thought surely one of them had to have influenced the other. It turns out that is extremely unlikely. As far as I can tell, "Long Dream" was first published in either November or December of 1997 while "Threshold" first aired on January 29, 1996. I have no idea what the overseas broadcast history of Star Trek looks like (though, now that I've mentioned it, I'd kind of like to know), but I'm guessing the chances these ideas crossed paths is next to zero. (I will now spoil the entire story. Sorry!)

"Long Dream" goes like this: A hospitalized man complains of experiencing dreams that last increasingly long, over a year now, even though in reality he is only asleep for one night. After a few nights he speaks as if he has come from another century and has trouble remembering the present day. Once, he wakes up screaming for a wife he doesn't have. He had dreamed of a fellow patient as his wife and they lived together for "thousands" of years. His appearance changes; the dreams seem to age him as if he really experienced them in full. He becomes less and less recognizable until one morning his body finally crumbles to dust.

I don't remember whether it's explicitly stated or not, but it implies the question, "Is this what a human would become if they lived for thousands of years?" The doctors in the story are witnessing a body undergo eons of physical changes over the space of a few weeks. Sure, that's not exactly the same as "evolution", but you have to admit the parallels are striking. Additionally, I found Star Trek's makeup and effects job jarring, similar to the way Ito's art affects me. Some people are just good at spooky.

Okay, let's talk about the lizard sex.

Wherever I look, "Threshold" is referred to as "that episode with the lizard sex." I'm sensing that this ending didn't read well to the audience, who found it goofy. Man, I'm really bummed about that. This is an excellent episode of sci-fi horror in a franchise that's relatively horror-light (or, at least, it reserves its horror for maximum impact). But all that people are going to remember is the Captain and the playboy turned into frog-things and had babies.

My feeling is that it's an appropriate relief for an intense story. There's a visceral transformation, it unfolds slowly and painfully, and it confronts the unknowable idea of extreme human evolution... and then everything is okay. What could be a more natural conclusion than two newly evolved animals doing what nature compels them to do? Sure, it's terribly awkward for the parties involved to admit that it happened, but there's no blame here. The big scary thing that happened was actually kind of normal, in the grand scheme of things. It's bringing you back to good ol' Star Trek after a trip through cosmic horror. I'm not even mad about that; I don't expect Star Trek to commit to the bleak outlook of the genre it's playing with here. Ultimately, this episode that nobody likes resonated with me, and that's great.