Threshold: The Complete Series

I don't share the previous reviewer enthusiasm regarding Threshold. I enjoyed Surface and Invasion a lot more than I liked Threshold. Perhaps that's because I had high expectations for this show and no expectation at all for the others. Brannon Braga, who made his early career working for most of the Star Trek shows and newer movies, certainly knows a thing or two about science-fiction and the presence of Brent Spiner in the cast of the show (Star Trek TNG 'Data') is another hint at the Star Trek connection...

Don't get me wrong: the pilot of this series is amazing. It is heavily influenced by the genius of the early X-Files... The first episodes are amazing visually and they offer first class TV. But I must admit I quit watching the show early enough too, and I was not alone since Threshold was cancelled fast enough...

The invading aliens transform human DNA in order to make us into them... And some of them are captured... And that's when the show becomes cliché... The 'aliens' are 'bad', 'agressive', 'angry', they're convinced they'll win, they despise humanity, and after they talk, you'll be expecting them to start laughing a demonic and psychotic laugh... 'Ah ah ahhh, you'll never stop us!!!' Oh, please.... So what started off as a brilliant sci-fi and hi-tech series transforms into something of a bad B-series sci-fi production...

I started watching this series when it first aired. I love that aliens try to terraform the planet and turn us into them. I liked the notion that they were having almost as much trouble transforming humans as humans were having in stopping them. Some of the cast was really well chosen. I've seen Peter Dinklage in several movies and it was great that they chose a little person for a key role without making his dwarfism a focus. Being the most popular character in the Star Trek franchise makes Brent Spiner sci-fi royalty!

Unfortunately, Spiner and other characters barely get any screen time. The less interesting characters, played by Brian Van Holt and Carla Gugino (who's gorgeous. If you want to see how gorgeous, watch "Sin City"), get undue attention. Apparently, Spiner's Dr. Fenway was to take over leadership of the group in season 2. It's ridiculous that they didn't give a big role at the beginning. Star Trek fans would watch the show just for him, I think.

The dialogue is uninspired. The first season goes by and you never see a full-fledged alien. Sadly, the best episodes were the ones that never aired. Finally, there's some real excitement: a half-alien vigilante, vegetables with human body parts, Alienville!

I think the main reason this series didn't do well is that you had to watch each and every week to know what is going on. So if you didn't catch the first one... Remember what happended to the "X-Files?" The station should've at least given them a few more episodes to end the series properly. There are some special features to watch, but if you liked this series and wanted closure, you won't see a wrap-up episode here.

Of the three network alien invasion shows that debuted in the fall of 2005, "Threshold was my favorite. That would explain why they only got nine of the fourteen episodes they filmed on the air, along with the fact the series was on CBS, which tends to cut bait earlier than its competitors these days. Fortunately when "Threshold," like "Surface" and "Invasion," came out as a DVD of "The Complete Series," fans finally get to see the episodes that never aired and to reconsider the strengths and weaknesses of this series created by Bragi F. Schut.

When a mysterious alien object attacks the USS "Big Horn" and its crew in the North Atlantic, the U.S. government protocols for project Threshold go into affect. Dr. Molly Anne Caffrey (Carla Gugino), the contingency analyst who wrote the protocols, becomes the head of the project. She puts together her Red Team, consisting of Dr. Nigel Fenway (Brent Spienr), a molecular biologist, Lucas Pegg (Robert Patrick Benedict), an astronautical engineer, and Arthur Ramsey (Peter Dinklage), an expert in linguistics and applied mathematics. Overseeing the group is J.T. Baylock (Charles S. Dutton), the assistant National Security Advisor, and the muscle of the team is Sean Cavennaugh (Brian Van Holt), a special agent. The team investigates what happened on the ship and learn that the alien probe sent out signals that has altered the DNA of the crew into a triple helix formation, a fractal triskelion-like pattern that will keep appearing throughout the series in blood, electronic signals, city lights, and ordinary household objects that get spilled on the floor.

Originally the top item on the Threshold agenda is to track down the missing crew members, but then the major concern becomes stopping the aliens from infecting more humans. So there was much more of an episodic nature to "Threshold" than its two competitors, which is one of the reasons I liked this show best. There is a sense in which the show was "The X-Files" if the government totally supported Fox Muldar, but a key dynamic is that trying to deal with the alien invasion is a "think tank," so that science is a key part of the problem solving. What makes the Red Team unusual is that they were basically drafted by Caffrey and as the series progressed each member developed problems that put them at risk. By the time the series ended the problems of Pegg had taken center stage, replacing those of Fenway early on, but those of Ramsey were clearly moving to the forefront. This show had a pretty good cast, especially getting Gugino to stay in television after "Karen Sisco" undeservedly crashed and burned, but having Dutton, Spiner and Dinklage in supporting roles was a real casting coup (getting one of those three would be great news for a series).

This is not to say that the show was not without its flaws. Molly suffers from Captain Kirk Syndrome, which is the insistence on putting herself in harm's way each week. That is bad enough when you are a Starfleet captain, but considerably worse when she is "the most important person on the planet." Caffrey and Cavennaugh make a nice team out there in the field, but she is the director of Threshold and should not be out there. There was an attempt to fix this in "Outbreak," one of the unaired episodes, by bringing on Catherine Bell as Daphne Larson, but that was too little, too late. Then there was the fact that an alien invasion as begun and Caffrey keeps going home. Not only do bad things happen there, which is one reason to stop going there, but once again the project director is someplace other than in the bunker doing her job. Having come up with a nice twist on the death of the National Security Advisor, the show then comes up with a new NSA, Ed Whitaker (Maurice Godin), who is your traditional politician who thinks they know everything and is going to get everybody killed with his arrogant stupidity. But then he disappears too, only without any explanation. So there are enough significant problems that I round down on this one.

So what you will see in the unaired (at least on this side of the pond) episodes are some attempts at retooling the show that did not go anywhere and did not stop "Threshold" from being cancelled. The special features on the DVD do a bit of a post-mortem on the series, which got off to something of a wrong foot when CBS at essentially the last minute decided they wanted to start the series off as a two-hour movie. So the great ending they came up with for "Trees Made of Glass" then became the fade out to the station break in the middle. The show was cancelled while filming the final episode, "Alienville," and the creators had time to work in one brief scene involving a dream where Molly is told that her protocols will work, but that she will not live to see victory. The creators also talk about what they were planning to do, both in terms of a specific episode for Ramsey and the initial three-year plan that would basically transform the series from "Threshold" to "Foothold" in season two and "Stranglehold" in season three. Clearly things would get worse before Molly dies and things get better (I read elsewhere that Dr. Fenway was going to end up in charge, just to make things really interesting).