Making a case for “Threshold”: Character Transformations in Star Trek
By Ames
This week, A Star to Steer Her By and guest star Carl covered one of the most infamous Voyager episodes out there: “Threshold”. You all know and dread it: Tom Paris exceeds the warp-10 barrier, starts transforming into a horrible monster, and kidnaps Janeway, and then the two of them turn into giant salamanders and have lizard babies. It’s a tale as old as time travel. “Threshold” is currently the second-to-lowest rated Voyager episode on IMBD (the lowest is “The Fight” for those of you wondering), won Star Trek 101’s Spock’s Brain Award for worst episode of a series, and is perpetually cited on worst-of lists and hated by the general fandom. I won’t deny it: the ending is just that chin-scratchingly absurd and ruins a perfectly serviceable Paris plot.
But you know what: I’m gonna make the case for “Threshold” here by examining the use of character transformations throughout Star Trek, which we see a LOT. We make some good cases for this loathed episode in our podcast coverage (and bonus character transformation chatter starts at 1:08). Start mutating now, because things are going to get weird!
[images © Paramount/CBS, Star Trek Timelines, probably others]
Trek characters have been turning into monsters, transcending human bodies, or otherwise changing form through no fault of their own since the very beginning, and I mean the very beginning. We saw Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner turn into godly beings with tinfoil eyes, and that was way back in the second pilot!Â
We’ve seen at least eight episodes (so far!) in which people age or de-age. Count them here:
And another two episodes in which characters are made tiny for a lot of silly sight gags:
So yeah. The episodes in which we see characters transform tend to be silly. Often bad. Frequently absolutely preposterous. I’m not saying these are good episodes all the time, but there is a lot of substance when you take a deep dive into themes, character development, and other less jokey stuff than watching tiny Sulu try to operate a panel or aged Kirk trying to remember what he had for breakfast. So let’s analyze a couple examples to see how they’re serving their stories, and how they compare to the mindfuck that is “Threshold”.
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Omnipotent adolescent powers
In our coverage, Jake brings up the classic Original Series episode “Charlie X” as a good use of the character transformation. Charlie uses his godlike powers to make people disappear, turn Tina into an iguana, age a crewmember into an old woman (it was early, so we weren’t tired of the trope yet), and straight up take people’s faces off! The effects, though simple because it was 1960, were successful because they were so impactful and elicited some shock and terror. Just thinking about NOT HAVING A FACE is giving me palpitations.Â
Though we don’t really get to think about the psychological effects that their changes had on the helpless individuals (how much therapy did Tina get after she stopped eating bugs in the bio lab?), the intentions of seeing these transformations were to a) put the sheer power of Charlie Evans on display, b) portray how he lacked any kind of empathy whatsoever, and also c) show how powerless the people on the Enterprise were to stop him. We see this kind of activity from Q every so often (and even Riker when he gets Q powers in “Hide and Q”), and it goes to show you that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And also starts a trend for turning people into lizards, which is so appropriate for our chats on “Threshold” this week!
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Splitting apart
I’m Captain Kirk! But who exactly is Captain Kirk? While the character transformations of “Charlie X” succeeded in helping you understand more about Charlie, we’re going to see that the device is mostly used to expand on characters who themselves get transformed. And what better way to dissect a character than to bisect a character?! Caitlin brings up how classic TOS had Kirk get split into his various personality facets in “The Enemy Within” and how that served up a great deal of conflict in how even his negative traits are necessary to make him himself and a complete person. And while the episode itself had us scratching our beards a bit in how it tried to do a Jekyll and Hyde and failed, the character transformation aspect of it allowed us to see the Freudian fight that happens within all of us to be half-decent people.
A similar and even more literal split happens to Torres in Voyager episode “Faces” in which she’s split between her Klingon DNA and her human DNA. Putting aside for a second how biologically confounding that is, let’s enjoy some of the excellent work it does for B’Elanna’s character! She’s someone whose biracial identity has made it hard for her to really know who she is, and pulling those races into two separate beings really let her pick herself apart a bit. We overall enjoyed this episode, but recognize that only focusing on the negative aspects of each facet left us a bit wanting. Humans and Klingons are each more complex than the sum of their parts. Seeing the inner conflict in both Kirk and Torres was at least on high display in these episodes. More like “The Conflict Within” amirite?
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Borgification
Chris takes a moment in the episode to talk about humans (and other species) getting assimilated and becoming Borg, a character transformation that is about as horrifying as having your face vanished. By the time we get to the special effects that a movie like First Contact can afford, we can actually see how assimilation changes you from the inside out, and it is cringey and weird and alien and excellent. But think about what turning into a Borg means for the individual: you lose exactly that. Your individuality. Gone. Everything that made you who you are. Assimilated. We are Borg. Resistance is futile.
We can definitely read it as a very literal take on cultural homogenization because what you’re left with is a culture that is bland as hell, a process that is emphatically nonconsensual, and a people who are utterly destroyed (in this case in a physical and mental sense, but the metaphor still holds). The whole idea that this is the objective of the Borg – to add the uniqueness and technology of a species to their own – is an interesting statement in how advancement doesn’t have to be positive, just as how the evolution in “Threshold” didn’t have to go forward. Damn, son. This one got deep.
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De-evolution
Let’s get de-evolved this time with TNG’s “Genesis”, an episode that swings erratically in the other direction and stays pretty super shallow. I’ll say this about “Genesis”: The makeup looks absolutely terrific. And I’ll say this other thing about “Genesis”: What the actual hell is ever going on? While we’ve made some poignant observations in previous examples of character transformations, it’s time to get pretty mindless with this one. I could try to find some hidden meaning about saving ourselves from the past, but I’m sure the idea behind this episode was “what if Barclay were a spider?” and then it got out of control from there. Like “Threshold”, this episode won the Spock’s Brain Award, and for pretty good reason. The science is simply appalling and if there’s a statement here, I’m not sure what it is. Moving on.
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Mutation into another species
Let’s knock off a couple of honorable mentions in this discussion that I just felt compelled to bring up, starting with characters being turned unwillingly into other species. We see La Forge turn into a glow-in-the-dark ape creature in “Identity Crisis” and we’ve also seen Kirk and Spock turned into fishpeople in “The Ambergris Element”. Neither episode goes really that deep in the implications to the individuals involved, save to say that neither scenario would have allowed the Starfleet officers to live the normal lives they are accustomed to and the kind of loss of the self applies like we saw anytime the Borg assimilates someone. Kirk and Spock at least get to keep their wits, while Geordi turns into a non-sapient neon Tarchanne, driven by instinct alone. Which of them has it worse in that regard is up for debate.
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Character transcendence
Finally, we see beings evolve past their normal humanoid bodies in both The Motion Picture when Decker merges with the Ilia probe to become a whole new type of sparkly lifeform, and also in TNG’s “Transfigurations” which is complete with some really lazy costuming and effects for the John Doe character to transcend into a being of weird, lumpy energy. These kinds of transformations make me feel hopeful that people can be more than just the sum of their parts and there is still room to grow. Quite the opposite of “Genesis” in that regard then. Beyond our fleshy meat suits, we are all the same and we can accomplish whatever and all that jazz, be it as a mechanical being learning something outside of its programming or a as guy in a yellow spandex suit trying to remember who he is and discovering it’s more than he could imagine.
To some extent, we also see this character transcendence with Captain Sisko in DS9’s “What You Leave Behind” when he turns into a prophet or whatever, and also with Commander Ransom in Lower Decks’s “Strange Energies” but we haven’t covered that one on the podcast yet, so no spoilers for the other hosts. Winky face.
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Voyager: “Threshold”
And that brings us to the topic of the day, this week’s episode on “Threshold”. After looking more at “Genesis”, it really doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, there’s a lot that’s really good about Paris’s character transformation here if we ignore the last like five minutes of episode that make it go off the rails. Can something unnatural happen to a human body taken to some extreme? Sure why not? We saw it in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and never even questioned it. What’s more, we get to see some fun makeup effects and a ton of excellent character work and acting from Robert Duncan McNeil, which was refreshing.
Considering his character starts off on some pretty low rungs, Paris gets to see a bit of redemption in his act of heroism and then come quickly to terms with who he is and isn’t as a person – who he’s succeeded in being and who he has failed to be – when he starts to mutate out of his body. In this instance, the character transformation, like “Faces”, shines a beacon on who you are as a person by changing some of the superficial elements on top. This was an episode for Paris to learn that the only person he needs to prove himself to is himself, and it took looking at his life from another perspective to see that, and that’s some excellent sci-fi concepts that even lizard babies can’t take away. Okay, they can try.
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Don’t worry, we’ve saved your energy pattern in the transporter buffer to turn you back into whatever creature you started out as, so don’t go changing on us. Keep it right here as we continue on our trek through Star Trek: Voyager and for more introspective blog posts in the future. Listen to new episodes every week on SoundCloud or your favorite place to listen to podcasts, hail us on Facebook or Twitter, and transform and roll out!
