TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > THRESHOLD > Behind the Scenes

	The creatures that Paris and Janeway turn into were based on salamanders. There were a lot of optical effects because Paris went through a series of transformations. The make-up department created stages of the make-up to reflect his mutation into the reptile, and the make-up artists added more bumps to his changing head with every progress point. A set of contact lenses was created for actor Robert Duncan McNeill to wear at the final stage of the change. They also had him rinse his mouth with a mouthwash made out of blue dye to emphasize his transformation.
	Jeri Taylor: "We're taking a lot of flak for that. There's been a real lashing out. I recognize that people who are on the Internet and who write us letters are a tiny portion of our audience, but when it is as overwhelming as it was on this episode, you begin to take notice. Some of this anger was misplaced, I thought. A lot of the ire seemed to be caused by the fact that we stated that no one had ever gone warp ten before, and people flooded us with letters saying, 'That's not true, in the original series they went warp twelve and warp thirteen. 'We should have had a crawl before the episode explaining all this, but it really was a recalibration of warp speed. Gene [Roddenberry] made the determination at the beginning of Next Gen that warp ten would be the limit, and at that point you would occupy all portions of the universe simultaneously, which always seemed like a wonderfully provocative notion. Then the question is 'What happens if you do go to warp ten, how does that affect you?' So we all sat in a room and kicked it around and came up with this idea of evolution and thought that it would be far more interesting and less expected that instead of it being the large-brained, glowing person, it would be full circle, back to our origins in the water. Not saying that we have become less than we are, because those creatures may experience consciousness on such an advanced plane that we couldn't conceive of it. It just seemed like a more interesting image, but it is not one that took with the audience. The fact that we were turning people into salamanders was offensive to a lot of people and just plain stupid to others."
	Brannon Braga believes that "Threshold" was a great story that suffered somewhat as a teleplay. "It's very much a classic Star Trek story, but in the rewrite process I took out the explanation, the idea behind the ending, that we evolve into these little lizards because maybe evolution is not always progressive. Maybe it's a cycle where we revert to something more rudimentary. That whole conversation was taken out for various reasons, and that was a disaster because without it the episode doesn't even have a point. I think it suffered greatly. I got the note that it wasn't necessary, but in fact it really had a lot to do with what the episode was about. Big mistake taking it out. "I wrote the episode, or at least the teleplay. It was a terrible episode. People are very unforgiving about that episode. I've written well over a hundred episodes of Star Trek, yet it seems to be the only episode one brings up. You know: "Brannon Braga who wrote Threshold!" Out of a hundred or so episodes you're going to have some stinkers. Unfortunately that was a royal steaming stinker. And it had some good intentions behind it. It had a good premise, breaking the warp 10 barrier. I don't know where this whole de-evolving into a lizard thing came from. I may have blocked it out. I think I was trying to make a statement about evolution not necessarily being evolving toward higher organisms. Evolution may also be a de-evolution. You know, we just take it for granted that evolution means bigger brains, more technology, you know, a more refined civilization, when in fact for all we know we're evolving back toward a more primordial state ultimately, who can predict? Unfortunately, none of this came across in the episode, and all we were left with were some lizard things crawling around the mud, so it was not my shining moment."
	One of the elements of the story that many fans found off-putting was the abundant technobabble in the script. It is an element that bothers not only fans but cast members like Tim Russ as well who, a fan of TOS, says: "As a matter of fact, it's one of the reasons that I never really got warmed up to Next Generation. I mean, how can you warm up to something that doesn't make sense? Half of that stuff is made up. It's based very loosely on real physics theory, but most of the stuff is made up. There are people who really live in that world and really dig that kind of dialogue. I think they really like it, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I think it's a waste of time in terms of explaining something. I think that they're hurting the broad base of their audience by doing that. I think that you have a broader base of audience appeal if you have a story where the audience doesn't have to think so much about the physics and try and interpret what was said in an entire page of dialogue. A whole minute and a half goes by, and all they hear is a bunch of gibberish instead of knowing what a device does or how it jeopardizes or helps the situation. It bothered me about TNG and it bothers me about Voyager. This show is checkered with it. You know, we have a scene about people and you have a scene about technobabble and you have a scene about people and then you get technobabble - back and forth, back and forth. I've heard explanations of gravity, of how gravity works in time and space, which is very simple. The guy said imagine you've got a mattress in front of you. You poke your finger into the mattress and then you put a ball on the mattress and the ball goes toward your finger because everything dips toward your finger. That's gravity. That's how gravity works in space. It's the same thing with a planet. It bends space to the point where it attracts things around it. You know, it's a very simple explanation. Occasionally you can use it, but I think they should use it a lot more sparingly. It takes the same amount of time to say the same thing but say it in a way that makes sense."
	The pitch (initial story idea) for Threshold did not come from an ordinary speculative script writer but rather the president of New Line Cinema, Michael DeLuca, who is a lifelong sci-fi fan.
	A scene with Chakootay "dressing down" Tuvok for being unaware of the gambling operation was cut from the episode.
	The usual model of a Type-9 shuttlecraft was used for filming, which was possible because, in the story, the Cochrane's engines are enhanced, not affecting its exterior appearance. The shuttlecraft Cochrane, named for the inventor of warp drive Zefram Cochrane, was named Drake in the script, but was changed at a late moment because it was belatedly recalled that the shuttlecraft called Drake was destroyed in an earlier episode, "Non Sequitur". The shuttlecraft Cochrane, should not be confused with Admiral Satie's ferrying starship Cochrane, Oberth class, in TNG "The Drumhead".