So to celebrate 30 years of this moment Travel Infamously, we decided to put the space amphibian sex jokes aside (except the ones we’ve already made — please, we’re only human) and look at one of those sparks of potential, a bright spot in an otherwise pretty silly episode: what “Threshold” has to say. sailorRebel CON officer, Tom Paris.
in the early seasons of Star Trek: VoyagerOne of the few recurring arcs that the show linked to from episode to episode on a regular basis was the reformation of Lieutenant Paris. Tom joins the show with a shockingly messed-up background: an ex-Starfleet officer thrown out of the service to cover up a piloting error, jailed for fleeing into the arms of a Cardassian resistance group known as the Maquis, and then paroled by Captain Janeway to conduct a brief test run for his new ship instead of traveling 70,000 light-years from an unknown quadrant of the galaxy.
almost everyone sailor In his early days it is imbued with a sense of sadness that his life and the future he had planned were destroyed in the blink of an eye, but not Paris. Paris is living his dream, piloting a top starship, yet he gets his thumb cut on the Maquis he joins sailorThe crew through necessary circumstances, and the only Starfleet authority to answer to is the woman who trusted him enough to give him a second chance in the first place. This manifests quite a bit in a particular way in those early seasons: Tom is like a huge, arrogant asshole, even when he’s sincerely trying to prove that the trust placed in him was justified.
This brings us to “Threshold” and Tom’s completely cocky, yet ambitious idea of finding a way to break the long-established titular Warp 10 threshold. star trek Lore is that warp drives cannot achieve faster-than-light speeds beyond that maximum. It’s a fascinating idea that a show with such a premise sailorThe Federation, about an isolated Starfleet ship stranded thousands of light years from space, is ready to tackle, even more so when one of its main characters is a cocky ace pilot with a chip on his padded uniform shoulder. This is a great way to include the show in yourself star trekIts wider heritage may be different from this.
But this is not the moment we are talking about. The moment comes when Tom’s first experimental test flights see him successfully manage a sustained speed above the warp limit – and is followed by medical complications as his body finally acquiesces to the rapidly beginning acceleration of the evolutionary process. Tom’s body slowly begins to break down, requiring non-stop medical treatment: his hair falls out, his eyes glaze over, his skin becomes patchy and crusty, and his joints and organs begin to fuse. The once-flamboyant young hero has been transformed into a broken, growing, yet undeveloped thing.
It is in this form that “Threshold” delivers its greatest moment. It’s a fascinating oddity: body horror is incredibly effective. Travel and it feels like this sailor Building on its surprisingly scary effects work with the Vidiians last season, it’s made even scarier by the fact that it’s one of our heroes who’s been made terrifying. But it’s the breakdown of Paris’s personality that is most effective. The wild changes he’s gone through almost feel like the mask coming off, both metaphorically and literally, as parts of his face come loose.
In one moment, he criticizes Captain Janeway for taking pity on her hideous appearance; The next, for him, is trying to undo what he has accomplished in breaking the previous warp. His ego, usually kept in check by his sincere desire to prove himself to the world and especially Janeway, runs rampant, making for a scene that is equal parts scary and sad as he oscillates between the man we know and this dystopian persona. It’s a great character beat for Paris that he finds himself again at the center of a disaster caused by his ego and responds to it by impulsively attacking the world around him – it’s just that this time the ugliness that marks his soul, and the filters he has created in an attempt to redeem himself, sailorThe initial days up to this point were spent in his despair and pain, now beginning to show out.
Of course, just then we arrive and kidnap Janeway, force her to go through the same process, and they have their first space amphibian sex. sailor Tries to move on from this, never to bring up the millennial workplace ethics nightmare again. But before the moment that would seal “Threshold’s” infamous legacy for decades to come, it shined with a moment of genuine genius. A good example of some of these star trekminimum is minimum minimum Some? Worth thinking about.
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