In today's TV market a show has to gather a large audience rather quickly or it is cancelled.  SF and horror shows seem to fair pretty badly in this environment, with a lot of them getting on the air and then being axed before their first season is even over.  Some of these are truly great like Firefly, and some are wretchedly back like Point Pleasant.  Falling somewhere in the middle of that range is a curious little show that aired on CBS for nine whole nine episodes in 2005: Threshold.  This alien encounter series has now been released on DVD including 4 epiosdes which where filmed but didn't air on network TV before the show got the axe.  Ironically those are some of the best shows of the series.

After a US tracking station discovers an object entering the Earth's atmosphere from deep space, an object that makes a few corse corrections as it proceeds, it's fairly obvious that the Earth is being visited by aliens.  The object is tracked to an area in the North Atlantic where the USS Big Horn, a naval vessel is located.  When the crew of the Big Horn can't be raised by radio, the government launches Threshold, a set of top secret protocols that outline the most efficient and safest steps to take when making contact with extraterrestrials.

The protocols were written by Dr. Molly Anne Caffrey (Carla Gugino), who is put in charge of the "Red Team" the small group who will try to establish contact with the aliens and determine what their intentions are.  The rest of the team consists of medical expert and curmudgeon Dr. Nigel Fenway (Brent Spiner), Lucas Pegg (Robert Patrick Benedict) a slightly insecure and rather geeky aerospace engineer, and the diminutive Arthur Ramsey (Peter Dinklage) who is a linguist and mathematician with an overactive libido.  Rounding out the team is Sean Cavennaugh (Brian Van Holt) a military officer and the muscle of the team and J.T. Baylock (Charles S. Dutton), the liason with the government.

When the red Team arrives at on the ship their worst fears are confirmed: five of the 13 crew are dead, horribly misshapen and disfigured, seven are missing, and one is found delirious.  The surviving crew member relates how the entire crew saw a strange object hovering above the sea.  It then emitted a strange sound and disappeared.  It turns out that the sound infected the crew members and started to rewrite their DNA.  The ones that couldn't adjust to the transformation died, but the others, including the crew member who was found, change into something different.  They are stronger, faster, and much tougher than a regular human and they have a desire to infect others.  The probe that the Big Horn discovered wasn't a greeting card, it was the start of an invasion.

With only a small group to command but unlimited resources, Molly has to track down the missing crew from the Big Horn before they can infect others.  That's easier said than done however, as there are multiple paths of infection, and only the transformed crewmen know what they are.

Though it owes more than a little to the movie Species, this show had a lot of potential and many of the individual episodes were good.  The problem was that it never found its voice and the series suffers because of it.  The episodes would jump around from genre to genre so you were never sure what would be coming up next.  There were police procedurals where the emphasis was on finding someone who had just become infected and all the steps that were taken to accomplish that.  Others played up the suspense and horror aspects of the show, starting the show with Molly trapped in the lair of an infectee and then showing how she got there.  Yet other stories are medical thrillers, such as the time a guard gets infected by some unknown route and the Red Team has to discover how it happened.  There were straight SF shows too, with the team having to deal with an entire town of aliens.  This constant switching was a bit disconcerting, and it was hard to get into the flow of the show because of it.

There were also a lot of subplots that were dropped.  That, along with the ever increasing way of someone becoming infected, gave the show a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants feel.  It didn't seem to have a well thought out plan from the beginning.  What about Molly's missing father, something that was mentioned three times in the pilot.  After that episode it's never brought up again.  What about the alien device they find?  They capture it and then it's never heard from again, and the same goes for the tone that is discovered that attracts infected people.  The last shot at the end of the pilot also strongly implies that most of Washington DC is already infected, which they obviously aren't.  The most disconcerting event of this type is the 'disappearing alien'.  At one point an alien is trapped in a basement with only one exit that is guarded, but when a team goes in, the invader is no where to be found.  If they can teleport out of a basement, why not the cells that the captured infected people are detained in?  While I'll admit that some of these may have been picked up in later episodes, the way it stands the show feels like it's going off in too many different directions with no resolutions in sight.

The characters also were a bit on the thin side too, with each one having a particular character trait and not much else.  There weren't any shows where you got to know the individual members of the Red Team and that would have helped a lot.  As it is, the characters aren't that appealing or interesting.  (Especially Molly Caffrey, she's the most bland character in the cast, and she's leading the show.)  In the programs defense though, it really wasn't around long enough to examine many of the characters and they were going in that direction when it was ended.

While there was lot wrong with the show, it's not all bad.  The horror aspects worked more often than they didn't, creating some chilling moments in the show.  The cockroaches on board the Big Horn walking around and around in the alien fractal pattern was creepy, and the group of children that attack Molly in Blood of the Children was chilling.  Many individual episodes are very good, especially the last four which never aired.  The Burning, where a mental patient that was having dreams associated with early stages of infection escapes was very eerie and had a nice resolution.  My favorite installment though was the last one, Alienville, where Molly and Sean are trapped in a town of people who have turned.  A very good show that grabs your attention.  Though the series isn't all wrapped up at the end of its final episode, the creators did have time to tack on a short ending that gives a sense of closure to the show.  It was a nice way to wrap things up.

The actors generally did a good job, though they weren't given a lot to work with.  Brent Spinner, from Star Trek: The Next Generation fame played a much different character from the role that made him famous, and carried it off very well.  While watching him I never thought of Data, which shows what a talented actor he is.  The person who really stole the show was Peter Dinklage.  The show was always interesting when he was on screen and his personality was the most developed one on the show.  Funny and yet intense, he did a great job.  I was also glad to see that the show never referred to the fact that he's a dwarf, much less make fun of his stature.

Audio:
 
This show comes with Dolby Digital soundtracks in both 5.1 and surround stereo.  I screened the show with the 5.1 track and was very pleased with it, especially since this was a TV show.  The program made use of the full soundstage, but usually only during action scenes.  There was some nice panning of bullets whizzing around and the explosions had a nice *umph* to them.  The subwoofer is also used during the title sequence that has a nice low rumbling that sounds ominous and threatening.  A very nice touch that sets the tone for the show.  The soundtrack isn't very busy during most of the show however with the dialog scenes coming across as basically a stereo mix.  Audio defects were not to be found, making this a nice sounding set.

Video:

The 1.78:1 widescreen anamorphic image looked pretty good overall.  The level of detail is nice, the color are solid, and the blacks are strong.  The contrast level a little to be desired, with details sometimes disappearing in dark areas and the shades of color being a bit limited in dark interior scenes.  There was also a bit of digital noise and some minor aliasing, but these weren't significant.

Extras:

For a show with such a short life, there are some nice bonus material included.  First off is a commentary on the two hour long pilot with Executive Producers David Goyer and Brannon Braga.  This was fairly interesting.  The two producers talked about the troubles that the series had, what they were trying to do with it, and told some interesting behind the scenes anecdotes.  Most revealing was the fact that the first episode was originally supposed to be only an hour long, and then a decree came down from the network that it had to be a two hour special.  That explains why that introductory story had a strong first hour and then took a dip in quality.  They also describe how much they tested the show and would re-edit it depending on a test audience's reaction.  I think that was a big mistake.  Instead of just telling a good story, they tried to please everyone with one product.

The pilot episode also has some deleted scenes that never made it on air.  In the commentary the producers talk about the original one-hour pilot that apparently was quite different from the two-hour show that was finally aired.  I wish that had been included too.

The rest of the extras are on the fourth disc.  These include a four part featurette about the show: The Threshold Brain Trust which runs a little over half an hour all together.  This looks at how the show came to be, the cast and the horror aspects of the show.  The most interesting was the fourth part, Possibilities, where they talk about plans for future episodes and the long term vision for the show.  It sounded like they had some interesting ideas that the show would have gotten stronger as it progressed.

Threshold: Visual Effects is a ten minute look at how they created some of the images for the show, and the bonus section wraps up with Behind the Fractal, a short introduction to the mathematics and properties of fractal patterns.

Final Thoughts:

This program never really got a chance to come into its own.  Cancelled after only nine episodes, the program never really found its voice, which is too bad.  It had a lot of potential, and the creators had some interesting things planed for the coming seasons if it had continued.  These 13 episodes are a mixed bag, and work better as individual stories than they do as a series.  Even with the dropped plot lines and silly aspects of the show, it's an enjoyable program for SF and suspense fans.  Recommended.