This was a terrific show with a wonderful cast and deserved a long run. Unfortunately, we were one of the three "alien invasion" series to air on the major networks that year (2005). All of us were competing for the same audience, and none of us lasted a full season.
But it was my first chance to write for a network (CBS) drama set in the present day. On Star Trek, you could never have a couple of characters complain about the weather or talk about what a crappy season the Red Sox were having, or invoke common colloquial expressions. As Jeri Taylor once said, wriiting Star Trek was like writing period drama. The dialogue, stories, sets and costumes existed in a different world with its own rules and conventions far removed from our own.
Threshold gave me the opportunity to see what it was like to write for characters who lived in the same world as I did, which was both fun and oddly refreshing.
As the resident alien expert, I thought it would be appropriate for me to write about Threshold from the alien’s perspective. Put you in their shoes, as it were. I’m speaking figuratively of course – the aliens have no shoes, let alone feet to put them in (on their home world, bi-pedalism is considered an utterly primitive form of locomotion, and especially bad taste on formal occasions). But they do have an agenda, and I think it deserves a fair hearing.
Let’s start with some fundamentals...
Planets like Earth are few and far between in this great big universe of ours. A lot of complicated physics has to go just right to create a world ripe for life: the planet has to be big enough to hold onto an atmosphere, but not so big that the surface gravity squashes everything. It has to be the right distance from the right kind of star so it doesn’t freeze or fry. Said star also has to be located in a life-friendly stellar neighborhood, i.e., the kind that doesn’t have too many cosmic rays or killer asteroids. The list goes on and on. Yes, I know, there are billions of stars in billions of galaxies, but that doesn’t mean there are hoards of planets out there you could happily call home. So many things can go wrong at so many stages of the process that the odds of making a world as lovely and lively as Earth are slimmer than a flatworm on Jupiter. Good planets are hard to find. That’s just the way it is.
As any Californian will tell you, there’s nothing like great weather and a nice view of the coast to jack up the price of real estate. And when you get more than one person interested in a given piece of land, the inevitable outcome is a bidding war. Sometimes the bidding war can get a little nasty, especially if the current owner of the property doesn’t want to sell.
But a reluctant seller never stopped a real estate deal that was meant to be. Ever hear of eminent domain? It’s a law that says the government can buy your house and tear it down to build something else, even if you don’t want to move. The aliens have their own version of eminent domain. They’ve been eyeing our property for quite some time, thinking how nice it would be to live here, and how much better off our Big Blue Marble would be if only they were running things (admit it, the place needs work, what with the pollution and overcrowding and global warming
and so on.)
But here’s the catch. These little green Donald Trumps don’t actually have the interstellar moving van technology to relocate their species. So instead they’ve decided to do the next best thing: knock on Earth’s door with an unmanned space probe that can rewrite human DNA, turning us into them! It’s kind of like buying a nice place out of town for your genetically engineered kids.
Someday, if all goes well (and when I say “well” I’m speaking of course from the alien perspective) humans will be transformed into a radically different form of life. At the moment, only a small number of people are in the early stages of this mutation, but it wasn’t so long ago that just a few Europeans crossed the Atlantic in three little boats to stake their claim on the American continent. And that turned out alright for everybody who was already here, didn’t it? Okay, maybe this isn’t such a good thing. But if this alien land grab is successful, at least we won’t have to wear shoes.