By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary. That gives you an idea of just how successful the franchise has been and how it has delivered one killer moment after another for the better part of a century. Of course, Trek has also had its share of stupid moments, too. This ranges from Spock’s brain being removed from his body in The Original Series to an autistic alien’s tantrum destroying warp drive in Discovery. Most fans agree the stupidest moment is when Janeway and Paris turned into lizards in Voyager. However, the fans are completely wrong, and the writer has revealed why this infamous moment is secretly brilliant.
The Voyager episode “Threshold” breaks one of Star Trek’s biggest rules. Beginning with The Next Generation, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry established that ships couldn’t travel to Warp 10. This is why we have so many episodes where a ship is pushing its engines to the max to travel at Warp 9.9. But in Voyager’s “Threshold,” Tom Paris goes past Warp 10, and his body starts changing. He kidnaps Janeway, takes both of them past Warp 10, and they both turn into weird lizards. Fortunately, their human bodies were restored, leaving the fandom to wonder what the hell going fast enough can turn someone into an intergalactic amphibian.
Taking The Captain Over The Threshold
It’s not hard to see why many consider this Star Trek’s stupidest moment. It doesn’t really make any sense that traveling past Warp 10 would turn two healthy humans into rejects from the pet store. Why did breaking this franchise rule turn Janeway and Paris into dumb animals? As it turns out, it didn’t! Audiences took one look at their amphibian forms chilling and made assumptions about their intelligence. But according to the writer of “Threshold,” we were all wrong about what was happening onscreen.
“Threshold” was scripted by Brannon Braga, one of the best and most prolific writers in Star Trek history. On the special features for the Season 2 Voyager DVD set, he spoke about his intentions regarding “this whole ‘de-evolving into a lizard’ thing.” According to Braga, ”I…was trying to make a statement about evolution not necessarily being evolving toward higher organisms, that evolution may also be a de-evolution. You know, we kind of take it for granted that evolution means bigger brains, more technology, you know, more refined civilization. When in fact, for all we know, we’re evolving back toward a more primordial state.”
Now, real talk? From a scientific perspective, what Braga is saying here sounds absolutely insane. But from a Star Trek storytelling standpoint, it’s actually pretty brilliant. The franchise has often reminded us that just because something looks very different than us, that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthwhile. In The Original Series, the Horta were rock-eating blobs of color, but they were revealed to be highly intelligent. In The Next Generation, the crew encountered a living oil slick and a giant killer crystal, each as smart as it is evil. What’s the lesson here? Don’t judge a book by its cover, and treat everything with respect.
Welcome To The Lizarding World
Transforming Janeway and Paris into lizards forces fans to grapple with their own morality and arrogant assumptions. We have to figure out for ourselves if they are worth any less after being transformed into animals. For that matter, we can’t necessarily assume those animals were as dumb as they look. After all, Braga removed the script’s speculation that evolution might eventually go backwards. That leaves it up to fans to determine how smart these critters really are. For all we know, they might be smarter than everyone on Voyager combined!
In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, our heroes get a lecture about the dangers of treating the Federation as a “homo sapiens only club.” The message is clear: that we should look beyond the exterior and realize that the universe is vaster and far more complex than our assumptions. “Threshold” drove this idea home by transforming two beloved characters into something completely unrecognizable. Unfortunately, this writing was a little too smart for its own good; to this day, fans hate this story, and Brannon Braga has lamented that this episode is all the fandom remembers him for!
