Threshold
Via TrekToday comes the hilarious news that Brannon Braga's new TV show, named Threshold, is about humans evolving because their junk DNA is activated.
Unfortunately, this is surprisingly similar to what is almost certainly the worst episode of Star Trek, ever, an infamous Voyager episode, written by Braga, coincidentally also called "Threshold."
In "Threshold," we are told that Tom Paris, along with B'Elanna Torres and Harry Kim, has developed a way to break the "Warp 10 barrier" and achieve infinite speed, whatever that means. After a test run in a modified shuttle, Paris returns to the ship and starts "evolving," gets a forked tongue, kidnaps Captain Janeway and runs away with her in the shuttle. When Voyager finds them, three days later, they've both evolved into giant amphibian thingies and they've had sex and produced mutant amphibian babies.
Needless to say, the Doctor uses some technobabble voodoo to turn Paris and Janeway back, and we never heard about the incident again.
So, not a particularly auspicious beginning for Threshold.
This all raises the question of what the hell happened to Brannon Braga? He was once the golden child of The Next Generation, penning, among others, the innovative TNG episodes "Reunion", "The Game", "Cause and Effect", "Parallels", and "All Good Things". He also wrote my favorite Voyager episode (and one of my all-time favorite episodes in the Star Trek canon), "Living Witness".
But his work on Voyager and especially on Enterprise has been mediocre, cliche-ridden, and really quite awful. It seems that he was much better as a staff writer on TNG than as a showrunner for Voyager and Enterprise.