The salamanders' nature and their connection to Paris’ flight are never mentioned, nor is the fact that they simply abandoned their genetic offspring to the wild without a second thought. The disposable nature of the entire affair is the last touch for a concept that had gone wildly astray long before. RELATED: Fallout's Weirdest Event References One of Star Trek's Most Iconic Episodes They simply remark how little of the experience they remember, and the ship flies on to the next Voyager episode. Chakotay stuns them and returns them to the ship - leaving their offspring behind - while the Doctor restores them to their human forms. Moreover, they have bred, and their spawns are found nearby. The crew finds them three days later on an uninhabited jungle planet, transformed into six-foot-long salamanders. As the physiological changes take hold, Paris abducts Captain Janeway and returns to the shuttle to repeat his warp 10 feat. It lacks any causal connections to Paris’s flight and turns its intriguing mystery into an utterly ridiculous one.īut it gets worse. The word “quantum” floats around the entire episode, another term Star Trek often uses as a catch-all explanation for whatever concept it wants to explore, but the change still comes out of left field. Tom’s flight succeeds, but it has untold effects on him, resulting in a slow transformation into a seemingly amphibious humanoid with a good deal of body horror included to keep the tension high. Positing the question isn’t the episode’s problem. That comes with the answer, which “Threshold” at first seeks to defer in favor of more suspense.
RELATED: Star Trek: Every Time William Riker Commanded the Enterprise The tension comes in what his flight will do to him.
That helps the episode skirt around its omnipresent Gilligan’s Island question: the audience knows that Tom will fail since Voyager can’t return home just yet. The science is shaky, even for Star Trek, but the suspense admirably builds, and the dialogue plants just enough hints about some kind of Frankensteinian consequences should Paris succeed. “Threshold's” early scenes play that tension well, as Tom, Harry and B’Elanna first test their theories in the holodeck before Tom ventures out in a shuttle to break the barrier himself. Tom’s increasingly fixated efforts to cross the barrier reflect a disregard for the potential safety problems. The episode makes an obvious nod to Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. After the ship discovers refined dilithium on a new planet, Tom Paris thinks he can use it to hit warp 10 and bring Voyager home to Earth in an instant. The barrier to that is warp 10, a point where, as Harry Kim explains, an object touches all points in the universe simultaneously. For instance, a ship traveling at warp 6 moves more than twice as fast as it would at warp 5, which is more than twice as fast as warp 4 and so on.
According to the franchise’s rules, warp factors exponentially increase speed.
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