threshold day

So I watched "Threshold" with Aware today bc of course we did. I've never seen it before, because I knew Threshold Day was a thing and I wanted to celebrate in style, that style being "having An Experience."

And it sure was one. Watching it ended up being kinda like watching Oedipus the King or Romeo and Juliet for the first time, having grown up in a culture where they're iconic. The dramatic irony was intense. When Chakotay asked, "are we even ready?" I just about lost my mind because I knew the answer was absolutely not.

But here's the thing: I really like it.

Seriously, unironically, this is probably my favorite episode of Voyager to date. I haven't yet seen a couple that I know are fan favorites (e.g. "Equinox") but like. This was genuinely good. The character development, the acting, the horrifying turning-into-a-salamander makeup.

I mean, it is clear that the writers did not understand how evolution works, but honestly, if you switched it out for "going infinite fast releases Turns-You-Into-A-Salamander Gas" or "Tom, being everywhere, passed through the Turns-You-Into-A-Salamander Nebula," it wouldn't acutally be a weird episode, Star-Trek-adjusted. And I certainly found the bad evolution less jarring than, say, the weird time loop stuff in "Time and Again."

The two things that did bug me were (a) Tom's awkward "the lesson I learned was..." speech at the end and (b) them leaving the salamander babies. I would not have left the salamander babies. I think leaving the salamander babies was bad.

And I mean, I did liked the realization at the end. I just hated the wording of it. It was really explicit in a kind of awkward way:

PARIS: Breaking the threshold. It was incredible. But somehow it doesn’t mean as much as I thought it would.

JANEWAY: Oh?

PARIS: I guess I went into this looking for a quick fix. I thought making history would change things. Not just my service record, my reputation.

JANEWAY: If I’m not mistaken, you’ve changed quite a few minds on this ship. You’ve earned a lot of people’s respect and admiration.

PARIS: Yeah. But I’m starting to realise that it’s not other people’s opinions I should be worried about. It’s mine. It seems, Captain, that I still have a few barriers to break. I just hope they’re not theoretical impossibilities.

Like. That sounds like the moral from the end of a picture book. It’s good that he picked up on that and it’s important that we understand he picked up on that, but I wish it had been conveyed differently.

It worked that he shared this in a talk with Janeway. Throughout the episode, we really do see him having kind of imprinted on her as a surrogate parent figure.^[1] I just wish he’d said something different.

1. Which, TBH, makes the lizard babies more hilariously awkward.^{^}