After breaking Warp 10, Tom begins to mutate.

Note from the Moderator: Tom is described as the first person to break Warp 10. I leave it up to you the Guild Members to deside if that is true or not
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By Cableface on Monday, March 01, 1999 - 2:46 pm:

Why couldn't they just rig the ship to transwarp home, and put themselves in stasis chambers.Even if this didn't stop the mutations, they could leave the doctor running and he could instruct starfleet on how to reverse the process.

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By Sharon Jordan on Friday, February 26, 1999 - 9:25 am:

I'm just wondering if Tuvok and Chakotay, could capture the mutated versions of Janeway and Paris, and cure them, but not their offspring? I mean, if Janeway and Paris could be reversed back, couldn't they turn these children into humans, and see how they turned out. I would think atleast Janeway and Paris would be curious, and concerned, of these offspring and wonder how they would be as humans. Am I mad to think about this?

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By D.K. Henderson on Thursday, May 13, 1999 - 5:51 am:

I would like to know where anyone got the idea that a mammalian primate would "evolve", first into a reptilian form, then into an amphibian. Not to mention that the term "evolution" implies moving forward and improving. It's considered an improvement to become a slimy, crawling creature who cannot speak, apparently cannot communicate any other way, and has no manipulative digits (i.e, fingers and thumbs)?
Completely implausible.

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By ScottN on Thursday, May 13, 1999 - 10:05 am:

From Piers Anthony's "Macroscope". The ultimate end of human evolution is a starfish.

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By cableface on Friday, May 14, 1999 - 1:32 pm:

Oh joy.

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By Doug23t on Friday, June 04, 1999 - 3:55 am:

I thought Rodenberry's 'vision' was of a bright, optomistic future. What kind of optomistic future is this? We're all going to turn into lizards! That's something to pass down to my descendants. This is one of the times that the fact that Star Trek is only fiction is actually comforting.
(By the way, the idea that humanity will turn into starfish isn't exactly appealing, either.) I would have expected Paris to end up something like the Q

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By cableface on Saturday, June 05, 1999 - 3:03 pm:

yeah, but then it would havebeen too much like every other episode where a crew member gets god-like powers after a strange experience.

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By BrianB on Friday, July 09, 1999 - 7:43 am:

The warp-10 barrier was broken in TOS's "The Changeling" & "By Any Other Name" and TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before" & "The Nth Degree" and perhaps more.
Having listed those examles, why does Paris evolve when the others haven't?
Paris kidnaps Janeway and escapes V'ger too easily. Can no one foil a shuttle (or transporter) escape fast enough or set off alarms whenever anyone disables the tractor beam?
Big points go to Janeway for letting Tom off the hook claiming he may not be responsible for mating with her after they evolved. Looks like "We'll Always Have Paris".
Janeway gives Tom a recommendation. Guess this means she forgoes the charges of kidnapping and rape.
GREAT LINES go to Chakotay & Tuvok respectfully...
"I'm not sure which one is the captain." "The female -- obviously." AND
"I don't know how I'm going to enter this into the log." "I look forward to reading it."

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By Mark Swinton on Saturday, November 06, 1999 - 3:57 pm:

Warp 10- the fastest anything could ever go- in a SHUTTLE!!??!?!?!?!???!? Not the best episode I have ever seen- "pretty disgusting" in places, to quote Tom himself... Did anyone else immediately think "The Fly" when Tom lost bits of his hair and then his tongue?
(And how groan-worthy at the end- "I've managed to eliminate the hyper-evolved DNA and reconsitute your original genome (with a hell of a lot of plastic surgery along the way)- congratulations, you're human again!" Then again, it shows just how great this Holodoc is...)

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By Robinson on Wednesday, February 02, 2000 - 1:58 pm:

When I saw this episode again (God forbid, UPN showed it in sindication!!!), I noticed somthing extremely interesting.

After Tom wakes up (from 12 hours of relaxing DEATH) the first thing we notice is that he now has two hearts. Now I know where the Time Lords will come from!

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By juli k on Thursday, May 18, 2000 - 6:41 pm:

After this episode aired, I happened to read a chapter on evolution in a book called "Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos." In this chapter, the authors outlined some common misconceptions that a lot of Americans (including Trek writers!) have about evolution, and cited this episode as a glaring example.

One of the misperceptions is that evolution=progress. Apparently Darwin never said anything like that. There is no inherent programming in our DNA to make us evolve to produce ever more complex "new and improved" organisms. There is no inherent "direction" in evolution, as in "up/down" or "forward/backward." We are simply programmed to *adapt* to our environments.

So the real evolution nit in this episode is less Paris' and Janeway's ending up as lizards, and more the Doctor's perception of DNA as "a tablet on which the whole of mankind's evolutionary past and future is inscribed" (quoted from the book). We won't know into what direction we will evolve until we get there, and presumably the humans colonizing all corners of the galaxy in Trek will evolve into many different directions according to the environment of the planets (or space) that they must adapt to.

I recommend the book. Interesting and informative reading!

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By Al-X on Monday, July 03, 2000 - 12:09 pm:

Don't just assume that humans are the most evolved species on the planet, though.

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By John A. Lang on Monday, July 10, 2000 - 12:21 am:

So what happens to the "kiddies"?
Will they eventually evolve into human beings or what?

If they did, I can see them wanting revenge for
being left behind

Season 7 episode maybe? "Revenge of the Mutants"

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By Matt Pesti on Friday, July 14, 2000 - 11:21 pm:

Evolution: I would guess that Tom was Evovling to a Form best suited for a Starship, and then when he hit the planet, the best for the planet (Explaining the Salamander form, and dead is the best form to be in for a Red Shirt.)

I say no for the Warp 10. Warp 10 is Impossible. Unless you have an infinet amount of fuel, You can not Be everywhere at the same moment. It was just a theoretical number at the end of the Warp Scale of 1-10. And it is not the same as Transwarp. Transwarp is using a Warp Conduit rather than using a Warp Bubble as the subspace medium of travel, similer to a wormhole. What the Borg use is Transwarp, what the Excelsior tried to do was Transwarp. Warp 10 is not transwarp.

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By Rene on Thursday, August 10, 2000 - 6:29 am:

Some people say Warp 10 was achieved in the Classic series....Um....the warp scale was obviously changed between Classic Trek and TNG.

Having said that....this is a very dumb episode. They could have easily cure the crew after using Warp 10 to get home.

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By NarkS on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 1:32 pm:

The Doctor said the only difference between natural evolution and that of Paris is the timeframe.

Sorry, Doc, but a more important difference exists: people don't evolve. The science behind this episode is just as bad as Genesis.

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By Jwb52z on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 3:04 pm:

NarkS, people do, just not alone without help by past generations. Natural selection is what generally guides evolution or changes in any species.

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By Anonymous on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 7:50 pm:

In theory...and unproven theory at that.

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By Jwb52z on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 8:26 pm:

Anonymous, go over to the science boards if you think that. You're not using the scientific definition of a theory. In science terms, a theory has done everything but been proven 100 percent.

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By Rene on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 8:29 pm:

Okay then a theory that follows no logic whatsoever...better?

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By Rene on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 8:29 pm:

Okay then a theory that follows no logic whatsoever...better?

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By Mark Morgan on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 10:41 pm:

Sigh. A hypothesis is a potential explanation for something. A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and passed that test. A scientfic fact is a theory that has been tested so much that you'd have to be a complete doof to deny it--but it still could be wrong, or incomplete.

The discussion of evolution in this episode is bad, but that's typical of trek. To start with, individuals don't evolve, groups (actually, populations) evolve. A whale with feet is a whale with feet. A separate group of whales with feet have evolved.

The Doctor also misses another key difference between Paris's evolution and natural evolution: there is no natural selection involved here, it's forced by technology. For more on evolution, there is always the tediously long debates over at Religious Musings, or you could read up on it at The Talk.Origins Archive.

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By Adam Bomb on Sunday, March 18, 2001 - 1:10 pm:

Highest warp speed-14.1 in TOS "That Which Survives."

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By ScottN on Sunday, March 18, 2001 - 2:29 pm:

What warp factor did they reach in TOS "By Any Other Name"?

Also, commented on before, but do you think that Voyager wishes they had the original Enterprise's (no bloody A, B, C, or D!) warp drive? In "That Which Survives", they covered nearly 1000 light years (990, to be precise) in a matter of days.

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By Jwb52z on Sunday, March 18, 2001 - 2:41 pm:

Remember the warp factor scale was recalibrated. 14.1 would be another warp factor now.

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By Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Tuesday, July 10, 2001 - 3:05 am:

At the end of the episode when Paris and Janeway' s children escape into the water it appears that they travel without using their legs.
Especially in the profile shot, it looks like their little legs don't even touch the ground, but their bellies seem to dig a trough.

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By Teral on Friday, August 10, 2001 - 3:58 pm:

Not necessarily a nit, more an observation: the Voyager don't use forcefields in it's shuttlebay like the Enterprise-D. When Paris leaves the ship for his illfated transwarptest Janeway orders the shuttlebay depressurized. Since the Intrepid-class is never than the Galaxy-class does this mean that the use of forcefields is an inferior way of operation for a shuttlebay ?

Though the science of this episode is awful it did however have a pretty funny scene:

Janeway: Can you wake him up?
Holodoc: I can't see why not. [leans in close to Paris' ear] WAKE UP, LIEUTENANT!!


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By Beater of dead horses on Friday, November 23, 2001 - 8:24 pm:

This has probably been mentioned, but I didn't see it here--they could have stuck with going warp 9.99 and avoided the whole problem.

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By Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Sunday, March 03, 2002 - 6:52 am:

Tom says they found a new form of dilithium. How do they mean "new form"?
The name Dilithium implies 2 atoms of Lithium, so how many forms can it take?
There is a mineral that some mineralogists want to call Dilithium. It has 2 atoms of Lithium & one of Tellurium (Li2Te), so maybe Tom means a mineral with 2 atoms of Lithium & some other element, but I'm not sure that that would be called Dilithium.
Another possibility would be crystal structure. Depending on heat & pressure minerals can develop in different crystal structures, so maybe the dilithium they found had been formed under a very great heat (since it was said that it could withstand higher temperaures) although that brings to mind the lump of very dense dilithium that they found in the classic Trek episode Obsession. (IIRC even a phaser blast couldn't cut it.)

Why exactly would projecting a warp field cause a structural failure of a ship?

OK, you have a successful test in a holodeck, what would be the next natural step? Can anyone say a probe programmed to return after acheiving warp 10?

Amazing that with all the things Tom saw, he somehow missed the Borg.

According to dialogue the shuttle's sensor's only seemed to record that sector. According to the Star Trek Omnipedia a Sector is a cube 20 LY x 20 LY x 20 LY. And yet, despite the fact that normal ship's sensors should be able to scan the sector, Janeway thinks they should make new star charts from this.

When Janeway comes in to see mutated Tom does anyone else think he resembles The Toxic Avenger?

Anyone else think that the 'tongue' Tom pulled out of his mouth looked incredibly fake?

Using anti-protons to zap alien DNA. Wouldn't that just cause a matter/anti-matter explosion when the anti-protons hit protons? Wouldn't it just be easier to use the transporter to beam out all the mutated DNA & restore him to a previous transporter trace?

Maybe they should have used anti-proTOMs instead?

Watching this again (the things I do for nitpicking) the creatures' bellies didn't seem to dig a trough, but there was a slipway in the rock that they slid along.

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By Trike on Monday, April 01, 2002 - 11:38 pm:

Oh, this episode was so incredibly bad. I have no idea why I watched it again. Now I remember. It was because I couldn't remember how bad it was.

Nits: Janeway says Paris will join people such as Orville Wright, Neil Armstrong and Zephram Cochrane by breaking the Warp 10 barrier. Chuck Yeager would have fit the analogy much better than Armstrong.

Leaving the babies on the alien world has to be a huge violation of the Prime Directive. Who knows what damage they could introduce to the eco-system? (More bad writing, for example).

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By We are shutting down on Tuesday, May 20, 2003 - 7:18 pm:

I love this episode

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By 2-Cents Worth on Tuesday, May 20, 2003 - 8:38 pm:

If at warp 10 you occupy all points in the universe simultaniously, (wink, wink) How come nobody noticed Tom Paris 'clutterng up' the universe?

Also, if Tom stays at the macroscopic level and not shrink down to subatomic proportions at warp_10, then wouldn't that spread his mass throughout the known universe? and at Warp 10, the acceleration is gotta be off the scale! Does anyone want to fathom what this 'TOM' Force would do?

Starfleet Command: The greatest threat to earth in the last 50 years wasn't the Borg or the Dominion as we thought, It appears to be the fact that Tom's butt takes up several galaxies now...

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By Stone Cold Steven Of None on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 11:53 am:

"It's considered an improvement to become a slimy, crawling creature who cannot speak, apparently cannot communicate any other way, and has no manipulative digits (i.e, fingers and thumbs)?"

_I_ thought the GMCs (Giant Mutant Catfish:-0!) DID have fingers. I'd taped the ep and checked it out recently and it sure looked like they did.

"Janeway gives Tom a recommendation. Guess this means she forgoes the charges of kidnapping and rape."

That scene was easily the worst nightmare of anyone who's had to walk through an empty parking lot at night.

"Amazing that with all the things Tom saw, he somehow missed the Borg."

Amazing that he somehow missed Starfleet Headquarters, and the opportunity to tell the brass that Voyager is in the Delta Quadrant, too. What a candy@$$.

Also, if the entire universe was mapped by the shuttle, why couldn't Voyager have charted a course around:

The Nekrit Expanse?
The Radioactive Strawberry Milkshake Nebula from One?
The Krenim Imperium?
The Devore Imperium?
The Void?
And Borg space altogether?

And what happened to that chart anyway?

"Season 7 episode maybe? 'Revenge of the Mutants'?"

Oh, I _wish_.

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By Thande on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 - 1:35 pm:

The shuttle gets up to warp 7 before Tom engages the transwarp drive, i.e. its normal warp drive is capable of warp 7. This is ridiculously high for a shuttle and is never referred to again.

As for using antiprotons against the alien DNA...oddly enough, after this episode aired, there's been a scientific breakthrough in using antiproton beams to fight cancer, would you believe? Though that's not quite the same thing...

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By prlwctd on Saturday, June 10, 2006 - 10:46 am:

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By NarkS on Saturday, September 23, 2000 - 02:32 pm:


The Doctor said the only difference between natural evolution and that of Paris is the timeframe.

Sorry, Doc, but a more important difference exists: people don't evolve. The science behind this episode is just as bad as Genesis.
--------------------------------------------------

At least Genesis was watchable(the sequence with Worf hunting Picard had me on the edge of my seat)with an ending that WASN'T insulting.

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By Mr Crusher on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 5:44 pm:

How was Genesis more watchable than this episode and how is the ending of this episode insulting?

Lighten up. Its just TV.

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By Polls Voice on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 8:50 pm:

Shouldnt that be lighten up, its just Nitcentral?

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By Kermit fan on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 9:17 pm:

I remember an episode of "The Muppet Show" where they have some alien muppet talking to Kermit the Frog, and the alien is saying that on his planet they "evolve" to become like their surroundings.

As he's talking, the alien is changing his appearance to look more and more like Kermit, until at the end of the sketch he looks exactly like Kermit.

Obviously what he was doing was "shapeshifting" rather than evolving. I tolerated the wrong terminology because the Muppet Show was always entertaining, more often than Voyager was.

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By Mr Crusher on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 6:25 am:

HA! Yea maybe if you are in pre school!

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By ScottN on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 9:09 am:

The Muppet show was a prime-time variety show. It was (and still is) much more entertaining than most of the stuff on TV.

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By Polls Voice on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 9:56 am:

I even have the Muppet show episode with guest stars of C3P0 R2D2 Chewie and Luke's cousin on DVD.

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By adsf.,mnds on Friday, September 29, 2006 - 11:05 pm:

By Mr Crusher on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 06:44 pm:


How was Genesis more watchable than this episode and how is the ending of this episode insulting?

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What we saw in Genesis wasn't evolution, which is the explanation for Threshold's events and, thus made it insulting.

I'm surprised you didn't like it, Mr. Crusher, since a relative of yours directed it.

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By ScottN on Friday, September 29, 2006 - 11:57 pm:

That wasn't me.

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By LUIGI NOVI on Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 9:20 am:

Actually, the events in Genesis were said to be devolution, which was just as inaccurate.

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By afd on Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 11:40 am:

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Actually, the events in Genesis were said to be devolution, which was just as inaccurate.
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Perhaps, but that episode was still more enjoyable than watching Paris become a Brundlefly wannabe.

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By Mr Crusher on Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 4:38 pm:

I liked both episodes.

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By Adam Bomb on Friday, October 06, 2006 - 7:20 am:

Check this out, particularly for Braga's opinion of how this episode turned out.

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By Torque, Son of Keplar on Friday, October 06, 2006 - 9:35 am:

I read up through page 3 but it just hung when I tried to go to any higher page. Anyway, I did notice something odd about this review.

Quoted from the article:

"But there's trouble, because the shuttlecraft's "nacelle" is pulling loose. In case you don't know, and I sure didn't know this myself until maybe a few years ago, a "nacelle" is that cylindrical thingee at the back of a Star Trek starship that glows bright blue, and gives us sweet, sweet warp power. Yep, somewhere along the line, the Trek writing staff actually saw fit to give a name to those things. But I suppose it was only inevitable. After all, somebody had to come up with "aglet". So who am I to judge? "

Actually, nacelle wasn't a word created by the trek writers, its a word that is commonly used today for those pod things that surround the engines.

His criticism of calling them nacelles would be like criticizing the writers for calling the control room the bridge.

I'm sure there's more errors in that person's review but since its not letting me go to page 4 or above, I can't find them...

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By LUIGI NOVI on Friday, October 06, 2006 - 10:24 am:

Even in reading just to page 2, it seems that he's not so much reviewing the episode as providing running commentary throughout its entire length. He makes some nice comments here and there, but seven pages isn't a "review".

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By Polls Voice on Friday, October 06, 2006 - 11:18 am:

On Luigi's note, its kind of odd to invest that much time to something you hate. I'd think that if it was so bad as to be worthy of what is said, one wouldn't even bother dignifying the episode with a response. (Maybe he secretly enjoyed it...

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By LUIGI NOVI on Friday, October 06, 2006 - 10:40 pm:

I dunno, I think some people simply like to articulate why they feel a certain way, which is why some people will discuss episodes or movies they don't like. I suppose you have a point in that he doesn't really have to explain every scene in the episode, though......

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By vcgxzb on Monday, October 09, 2006 - 7:35 am:

He must've taken a cue from Jabootu's website by doing that.

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By Polls Voice on Monday, October 09, 2006 - 12:25 pm:

Perhaps this episodes only redeeming value was to justify the construction of a new shuttle craft type.

That Doc is a miracle worker, he even got Paris' $ Janeway's hair to the same lenght it was before they evolved.

The scene where the Doc is watching the anti-proton procedure is a bit lame. I doubt there is only one camera he could watch from and the one that was damaged was probably imbedded into the walls so hitting it isn't likely either.

This episode was such a joke that I really don't know where to begin, so I will concentrate on two points.

As some here pointed out here: Evolution is adapting to your surroundings. and in the show the Doc says Evolution is a predetermined map of where we are going.

Well either way you look at it this episode doesn't have a clue what it is doing. during his transformation Tom becomes allergic to water and soon becomes intolerant of a oxygen/Nitrogen Atmosphere and the doc has to stick him in a force fielded area with air consisting of (I think) Chlorine and some other elements. so how can DNA contain a map of where we are going evelutionwise? unless some cosmic even spontaneously changes earth's atmosphere then according to the Doc's findings Humanity would all die once they could no longer breath.

Now if we follow the course that Evolution is adapting to our surroundings..... well the show still doesn't make sense because what reason could tom's body possibly have to adapt it;s way into being allergic to water and oxygen---AH ha! I get it now, Tom WAS trying to adapt, the Universe doesn't want tom in it so Tom's biology was trying to kill him off so he would better fit the mold the cosmos has planned for him!!

and the other thing that bothered me about this episode is when the Doc started the procedure to cure Tom he became very agitated when someone suggested delaying the operation. The Doc shouted that if they delayed even a few hours there would be nothing left of Tom's DNA to restore. yet Tom escapes, grabs Kathy and Super warps away. The crew finds them 3 days later....3 DAYS later. yet there is no trouble at repairing them at all apparently.

Why do people hate this episode so much i mean it's not very good but it's more watchable than much of Voyager's first or second season.

I thought it was a nice idea to make warp 10 their equivalent of lightspeed ie the impossible speed.

In terms of Paris and Janeway into lizzards in the swamp, they evolved to suit the swamp habitat not the habitat humans will inabit in the future. Tho I agree Paris's evolution on the ship was rediculous.

I thought it was a nice idea to make warp 10 their equivalent of lightspeed ie the impossible speed.

This was set down during the preproduction for the next generation. The warp scale was re-calculated for TNG, with warp 10 being infinite speed.
Basically all the writers did was to grab this right out of the technical manual and use it as a mcguffin.


The reasons why this is almost universally considered the worst single episode of all Voyager - if not all the trek shows - is quite simply because it makes no sense.

The writers show themselves to have the imagination of a dead goldfish, no ability to write plausible plots and to have the scientific knowledge of a 2 year old.

Two of the common objections are;

That evolution and natural selection work to make species better suit their environment. They do not work to some higher plan. Nor can evolution or genes somehow predict what traits will be useful to a species at some point in the future. The same mistakes were made in TNG and Ent episodes.

If you manage to get to infinite speed, and hence occupy every point in the universe at once, then the odds of appearing right next to the ship you just left are roughly the same as all the oxygen in your house spontaneously turning into gold. This problem arises twice, in the last case it would be rather like being given the ability to fly anywhere in the world instantly...and deciding to move from the couch to the chair next to it.

The basic plot idea seems to be that if you go fast enough you'll turn into a newt. Was this meant to be the universes version of a speeding ticket?

More to the point one has to seriously ask what the people who thought up this idea were on at the time...and just as importantly what the idiots who gave the script the green light were on at the time.

Brannon Braga wrote this piece of cr*p. Why he wasn't booted out the door because of it is beyond me. perhaps if they had gotten rid of him at this point, the franchise might not have been so badly damaged.

Instead of firing Braga, they put him in charge of Voyager when Jeri Taylor left? Why!?!? This episode clearly exposes him as the no-talent hack he is.

This was set down during the preproduction for the next generation.
Luigi Novi: Actually, Cyber, it was done well after NextGen had already aired a good number of episodes, because in Where No One Has Gone Before(TNG), they exceeded Warp 14, or something.

All people have different tastes, so there's no way to know if there is "one reason" why all those who dislike this episode do so. Little about Trek is "plausible", after all. Traveling at Warp 10 is no more plausible than traveling at Warp 9.999. Is it possible that it's because it makes no sense? I dunno, maybe. Sure the evolution in the episode exhibits about as much rhyme or reason as a 50-car L.A. Freeway pileup, but to attribute the episode's failure to this would require, I think, the assumption that the average viewer understands how evolution works, and I think plenty of surveys about the public's knowledge of evolution, and scientific literacy in general, shows that it probably does not.

Me, I think the episode fails because it's just a series of thematically inert events that do not flow logically from character or plot points. In short, it isn't "about" anything. Paris' deep-seated need to be the one to perform the Warp 10 flight in the beginning of the episode, his mutation and mating with Janeway--none of this contributes in any way to an understanding or change in his or Janeway's character, or in an overall arc for the episode or the series. His "revelation" at the end of the episode about not caring what people think about has nothing to do with what came before it; it's just thrown in there as a clumsy ABC Afterschool Special-esque moment.

I don't konw if this is the reason others disliked it. Even if it were, I don't if there's any way to know it, because most people don't articulate their feelings about stories on the level of analytical detail I do, and tend single out more superficial things like the aforementioned science. But somehow, I have a feeling that if the plot and character work in it were better, that no one would've cared as much about the mutilated science. This is illustrated by the fact that the science in Trek in general is pretty lousy, but it has survived decades because of the allegory and characters.

"Luigi Novi: Actually, Cyber, it was done well after NextGen had already aired a good number of episodes, because in Where No One Has Gone Before(TNG), they exceeded Warp 14, or something."

"Captain, we're passing warp 10!" :-) I was thinking the same thing. Warp 14 came in All Good Things, after the Warp 10 limit was firmly established, just to mess with us and suggest a further recalibration of the scale, I think.

I just rewatched that scene and you're right. I wasn't thinking of All Good Things..., though. I'm familiar with that line of dialogue in that ep; It was Warp 13, not 14. I was convinced that there was an early TNG ep featuring a line of dialogue with a Warp factor in the teens. I think perhaps my memory was conflating it with the pre-recalibration By Any Other Name(TOS), which featured a scene in which they were going at Warp 11.

On the other hand, how can Geordi know when they're passing Warp 10? If the warp scale stops at 10, how can it be passed? Would this imply that it does not stop at 10? Given how surprised Geordi was, I imagine not, but then how does he know it was passed. (Probably less-than-perfect word choice on the part of Geordi/the creators; he should've said reached or achieved.)

I think we can conclude that between the first and third seasons of TNG the upper part of the Warp scale was reclassified. The reasoning is that;

In encounter at farpoint, and certainly during the first season, the cruising speed of the Enterprise was warp 6 and the ship was capable of a maxiumum safe speed of warp 9.4.

By the best of both worlds the Enterprise was capable of traveling at warp 9.6 for several hours, and was quite capable of warp 9.9 in later seasons.

While the apparent increase in speed could be explained by increased power output or just refinements to the engines (the Enterprise in EAFP was a brand new ship after all). Such an apparently huge jump in performance would either require a sudden jump in warp technology, or a recalibration of the upper part of the warp scale - since warp six remains the ships cruising speed.

Nit - Given that the Enterprise must get speed information through its sensors. And that those sensors must be limited to the same kind of speed as subspace communications (warp 9.9996 I think) then logically the ship would be incapable of registering speeds above this. The same must, logically, apply to the shuttle in this episode.
This is to say that the ship would not and could not register a speed higher that that of its sensors. If you have a car with a speedometer that only goes up to, say, 55mph it will not and can not tell you that you are going faster than 55mph.

Logically this means that not only could you not say 'I'm passing warp 10' if that speed is faster than the sensors. But that even a nearby ship would not be capable of registering anything moving faster than the sensors. Radar, for example, could not detect something moving faster than the speed of light. Since the radio waves can only move at the speed of light.

Therefore we can conclude that;

Everyone was lying through their teeth about the shuttle getting anywhere near warp 10. That or Nelix's cooking had triggered mass hallucinations in the entire crew.

Voyagers sensors can scan at infinite speeds. By the logic of the episode this should mean that Voyager should be capable of scanning every point in the universe instantly - something that would call into question the need to build ships to do any exploring. After all everything you might want to know, you can find out from your living room.

In general, the speed was inconsistent among the TNG eps and seasons, and with Voyager. Shortly after entering the void in Where Silence Has Lease(TNG) (a second season episode, mind you), the crew decide to return to their prior course, and set a course at impulse. As the crew begin to realize that they’re not going anywhere, Picard increases the speed to Warp 2. After a short while, Picard asks Data how far they’ve travelled, and Data says 1.4 parsecs. Data says this exactly 43 seconds after Picard told Geordi they were increasing speed to Warp 2. A parsec, or parallax second, is 3.25 light years, so 1.4 parsecs is 4.56 light years. This is far faster than Voyager's premise of traveling 70,000 light years in 70 years at Warp 9.975, which is 2.79 light years a day.

Luigi - you're right, 13, not 14. Was it That Which Survives which had Warp 14? The amount does sound familiar...

Let's face it, there are a lot of problems with warp scales.

In That Which Survives, the 1701 (no bloddy A, B, C, or D) travels 990 light years in a day or so, yet Voyager requires a year to travel the same distance.

Even without the exaggerated speed caused by the "transporter error", Spock and Scotty didn't seem too concerned about the distance.

I think their supposed to have recalibrated the scale in all good things so you don't have to say engage at warp 9.999999999996 which would take forever lol. The speed limit was different in Next Gen as it was said would take them 300 years to travel several million light years as opposed to voyager establishing the speed limit at about 1000 light years per year. The same episode also said it would take about 50 years for their distress call to get to starfleet command meaning voyager should have been able to get a message home in a year or two.

I will agree the ep is ridiculous but at least its not annoying. Nelix is barely in it. Tho it did give them a viable way home which was completely ignored so I can see why that rankeled everyone.

My lack of total hatred of this episode might be something to do with me being 7 or 8 when I first saw it so I still haev echos of my childhood perception of it.

"Brannon Braga wrote this piece of cr*p. Why he wasn't booted out the door because of it is beyond me. perhaps if they had gotten rid of him at this point, the franchise might not have been so badly damaged. Instead of firing Braga, they put him in charge of Voyager when Jeri Taylor left? Why!?!? This episode clearly exposes him as the no-talent hack he is." - Tim

Yeah, what he said. And he later got to sleep with Jeri Ryan to boot, but I don't know exactly when that started or ended. Was that after her politician husband made her go to a sleazy sex club and made her perform all sorts of sex acts (as well as have them done to her) against her will? Man, that must have really driven her into the arms of a man who "understood her pain and suffering", huh? And it just happened to be "Mr. Threshold", here. Nice work if you can get it, huh?

In Braga's defense, however, he himself admitted that this was the "worst script he had ever done" and that this was probably "one of the very worst of the series overall". And that he laments the fact that people still, to this day, give him a hard time over it. Well, you reap what you sow, after all. At least he seemed to actually have remorse about it though, much like Sly Stallone saying that "Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot" was the worst film he ever did and that he made "Rocky Balboa" to make up for how terrible "Rocky V" had been. Well, I guess I could give him some credit for that. But what about "Rhinestone", "Paradise Alley", "F.I.S.T.", "Night Hawks", "Daylight", "Get Carter", or "Judge Dredd"? (I'll give him a pass for "Demolition Man", that one was actually good. And funny!")

Apparently somone at Paramount either totally forgot or chose to overlook the fact that reaching Warp 10 is completely impossible and that theoretically, "one would occupy all points of the Universe simultaneously". And nobody wants that to happen to them, right?

Two words: Salamander People! AAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!