musical star trek review

‘Star Trek’ made its first ever musical episode, but was it any good? Our writers discuss

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This article contains spoilers for “Subspace Rhapsody,” the ninth episode of Season 2 of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds .”

On Thursday, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Paramount+) debuted “Subspace Rhapsody,” which has been announced as the first musical episode in the franchise . (Some will, of course, remember Spock strumming on a Vulcan lute and Uhura singing in the original series or Data’s rendition of “Blue Skies” at Will and Deanna’s wedding in “Star Trek: Nemesis.”)

Whether or not one views this as an insult to or a delightful expansion of the series, it has become, if not quite de rigueur, not unusual for a comedy or drama or even a soap opera to get its inner “Rent” on. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was perhaps the most ballyhooed show to take this step toward Broadway, but all sorts of series have danced into the footlights: “Fringe,” “Psych,” “Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Futurama,” “One Life to Live,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Community,” “Transparent” and more.

Entertainment and arts reporter Ashley Lee, who knows a lot about musicals but little about “Star Trek,” and television critic Robert Lloyd, who knows quite a bit about “Star Trek” and less about musicals (at least any written after 1970), got together to discuss the episode.

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Ashley Lee: Because I love musical theater, I’m always intrigued when TV shows take the risk to make a musical episode. The task of creating original songs for the screen is already tricky enough, especially in a way that invites along the show’s weekly audience and still moves its stories forward. And then there’s the task of asking the actors to perform them, whether or not they’ve ever sung or danced onscreen before. It’s an episodic experiment that, over the years, only some shows have gotten right.

I admittedly put on the musical episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” with low expectations because, outside of “Little Shop of Horrors,” putting sci-fi to song hasn’t historically been so harmonious (R.I.P., “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”). Even though I had no prior connection to any of these characters, I found “Subspace Rhapsody” to be a pleasant surprise.

I loved how the songs, written by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce of the ’90s alt-rock band Letters to Cleo, poked enough fun at the oddity of suddenly breaking out into song without insulting the TV tradition. And I found it hilarious that the episode, directed by Dermott Downs and written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, deemed “confessing highly personal, emotional information” a legitimate security threat. (When you think about it, such can definitely be true in the real world!)

I’m surprised that, after all these years, this is the first ever “Star Trek” musical episode. Robert, as a longtime fan of the franchise, were you open to the idea?

Robert Lloyd: In sci-fi fandom, any unusual step is bound to raise some hackles. But as a TV critic since before flat screens, I have seen at least a few of these “special musical episodes” mounted in otherwise nonmusical series. I suspect the impetus came not from viewer demand but from the producers or the writers, who are always looking for something new to entertain the audience and, not incidentally, themselves and was seized upon happily by cast members, many of whom will have had backgrounds in or at least a love of musical theater, even if only from their high school production of “Guys and Dolls” (which I mention because it was produced at my high school — not with me).

History shows there’s no sort of show more likely than another to take on this challenge, but of all the “Star Trek” series, “Strange New Worlds” is perhaps the one most amenable to it. It’s got a strong vein of humor, and, as a highly episodic show, it’s subject to — in fact, embraces — tonal shifts from week to week. This season has been particularly … goofy? Two weeks prior to “Subspace Rhapsody,” they aired a crossover with the animated spinoff “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” in which cartoon characters became flesh and fleshly characters cartoons.

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I thought it was smart to give the musical element of the show a “scientific” rationale — if the usual “Trek” technobabble — with the Enterprise overwhelmed by feedback from a substance fault into which, on the inspiration of Carol Kane’s Pelia, they sent a playlist in an attempt to communicate musically.

And it’s quite appropriate for a season full of romantic subplots, including Ethan Peck’s Spock — who, you must know, is more about logic than feeling — having a thing with Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel, and security chief Noonien-Singh’s (Christina Chong) awkward reunion with a young James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley), who doesn’t recall their relationship from an alternative timeline. (That bit may have made no sense to you, Ash.) Appropriately, the story makes it clear that heightened emotion is what causes the characters to sing — which is, of course, the underlying rationale of music theater.

All else aside, how did the music strike you? It was odd that although the music they fed into the fault was the “Great American Songbook” — the standards of early to mid-20th century popular song, often written for musicals — none of the songs in the episode were actually modeled on that tradition. Not much in the way of Jerome Kern or Rodgers and Hart there. It all sounded post-Andrew Lloyd Webber to me.

Lee: Haha, you’re right! While I did appreciate the use of Cole Porter’s show tune “Anything Goes” as a very literal cue to the audience of the storytelling “rules” ahead, many of the tunes were more contemporary than Golden Age. The one that’s most “vintage” in style was the sweet duet “Connect to Your Truth,” when Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) shared key leadership advice with Lt. Kirk.

Regarding the romances, I admittedly became deeply invested in these will-they-won’t-theys by the end of their musical numbers. I particularly loved La’an Noonien-Singh‘s song “How Would That Feel,” about contemplating vulnerability; it was like an introspective, angsty version of “Company’s” “Being Alive” in the musical style of “Wicked” (and is a promising preview of her music — Chong just released a debut EP). And the stark differences in genre between Spock’s brooding electropop ballad “I’m the X” and Nurse Chapel’s Amy Winehouse-esque fellowship celebration “I’m Ready” definitely maximized the tension amid their miscommunication.

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Beyond those, the opening number titled “Status Report” was so strong — a perfect example of musicalizing a familiar routine of the world (think “Opening Up” from “Waitress” or “Good Morning Baltimore” from “Hairspray”) — and the choral, orchestral rendition of the show’s main title was a delight. Also, the double meaning of communications officer Nyota Uhura’s anthem “Keep Us Connected” was very satisfying and, in my opinion, only scratched the surface of Celia Rose Gooding’s vocal abilities (she earned a Tony nomination for her performance in “Jagged Little Pill”).

If “Star Trek” ever officially makes the leap to the stage, I imagine these three songs in particular would transfer well. (Though if so, I’m gonna need a full expansion of that brief interlude of autotuned, rapping Klingons.) Bravo to Hanley and Polce for writing all the music and lyrics of this episode; while many have attempted it over the years, only a few pop stars and rockers have successfully walked the tightrope of writing effective and entertaining stage musicals (e.g., Cyndi Lauper, David Byrne and Elton John).

Overall, did you enjoy “Subspace Rhapsody”? Was the first musical episode of the franchise worth the wait?

Lloyd: I can’t say I was waiting for it, but I certainly enjoyed it. I’m all about nutty “Star Trek,” going back to “The Trouble With Tribbles,” and also found it a really effective way to embody the emotional crises being faced by “Strange New Worlds’” eminently likable characters. Certainly, the cast bursting into song (and the occasional dance), with music dropping in from … somewhere, is no more nonsensical than about, oh, a hundred things that have happened to the various starship crews over nearly six decades.

But let me ask you, did it make you liable to keep watching the series? (No judgment.)

Lee: Robert, these subplots were so genuinely compelling, even when concisely moved forward in song, that I’ll likely start this series from the beginning and continue on past this episode. Plus, I’m so intrigued by Lt. Kirk and Noonien-Singh’s romance in that alternate timeline!

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Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and Poynter’s Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others. She is currently working remotely alongside her dog, Oliver.

Robert Lloyd has been a Los Angeles Times television critic since 2003.

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You likely have to be a fan of the musical theater genre in order to connect with “Subspace Rhapsody” — but while this episode is not going to be for everyone, I strongly believe that all fans should applaud Strange New Worlds for undertaking this venture.

When Star Trek takes risks, it creates opportunities for unique experiences and episodes that allow the franchise to try new things and connect with its audience in different ways. A musical might not work for you, but the courage it takes for the franchise to decide to create a musical episode may then make possible another experiment that does. And if this experiment does not work for you? Well, you still have nearly 900 other episodes of Star Trek to enjoy.

“Subspace Rhapsody” works for me. In addition to being a full-on musical complete with big songs, dance numbers, and grand finales, this episode is also a deep character episode that continues, and in some cases concludes, character arcs from season two to this point. It is not a throwaway triviality of a Strange New Worlds episode, but one that is integral to the threads and relationships that have been cultivated across the first two seasons. And it’s fun that so much of that comes to a head through song.

While investigating a naturally-occurring subspace fold — in the hopes that it will unlock the secrets to real-time subspace communication across the Federation — the Enterprise accidentally dislodges a “quantum uncertainty field” that creates a new reality in which people sing uncontrollably.

Obviously, there is going to be some element of contrivance in order to maneuver a Star Trek episode into a musical, but you know what? This one works for me. It’s technobabbly, it’s connected to the era of Strange New Worlds and the canon of Star Trek — why yes, real time subspace communications would be great! — and it opens the door to a lot of fun.

The ten original songs of “Subspace Rhapsody” — written by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce — range from solos (“Keeping Secrets”) to ensemble numbers which feature the whole crew (“We Are One”). Each has something to like about them, though a few are more forgettable than others. My personal favorite of the whole episode is the opener (“Status Report”), primarily because it blends the unique language of Star Trek with actual music in a way that I personally enjoyed a lot, but Uhura’s big number (“Keep Us Connected”) and Chapel’s song (“I’m Ready”) are also real standouts.

And while the episode potentially feels a little smaller than many fans would have expected from a Star Trek musical as there are not a lot of big choreographed set pieces, that actually feels appropriate for me for this big character episode that focuses more on individual relationships rather than the ship as a whole.

“Subspace Rhapsody” is, at its heart, a character episode. It brings the Spock/Chapel relationship to its apparent conclusion, and provides some exceptional material for La’an and the emotional fallout from her relationship with the alternate James T. Kirk.

When Chapel gets accepted into a fellowship for archeological medicine run by Doctor Roger Korby — who TOS fans knows has some importance in Chapel’s life — this seems like it is the end of the road for her dalliance with Spock.

It is rewarding to see her make decisions that are for herself and not related to Spock, and after what we learned about the character’s experiences during the Klingon War in last week’s episode, it’s tough not to feel like Chapel deserves the happiness (and the career potential for her future career) that she is currently feeling. Chapel’s song is also one of the standouts of the episode, with the most advanced chorography of any of the songs and a really great musical performance from Bush.

And for Spock, it appears we have reached the end of his short-lived experiment with indulging his emotions. Chapel’s decision to leave the Enterprise for three months, which probably means bringing her relationship with Spock to a halt, drives the Vulcan science officer back to pure logic (“I’m the X”) in an effort to cure a broken heart.

Strange New Worlds has added a rich layer of complexity to the Spock/Chapel relationship from the Original Series that I have enjoyed, but everything about it has felt a tad rushed — a consequence of having only ten episodes to tell their (and all of the characters’) story.

One of the advantages of a longer season is that shows had more breathing room to allow things to develop, rather than barreling through the story before time ran out for the year. Despite that, I still think the Spock/Chapel relationship has been a rewarding arc — and I’m thinking there will be more story to tell whenever Season 3 rolls around.

But while the Spock/Chapel breakup is probably some viewers’ biggest character moment in the episode, for me La’an has the most fulfilling emotional arc of this episode. She begins the episode wanting to shut down any singing because of her fear about the emotional release it creates — but by the end of the episode, the security officer has opened herself up fully to her emotions for the first time, and reached out for connection to those around her.

“Subspace Rhapsody” also lobs a bit of an unexpected curveball which dovetails really nicely with Star Trek canon — because while Kirk feels the same connection that La’an does, his current relationship with Carol Marcus, and her pregnancy with his son, make any exploration of that connection impossible.

Ultimately, falling into bed with Kirk is not the obvious route the episode chooses to take, and consummating the romantic connection between the characters is not where the emotional benefits of this experience lie for La’an. This version of Jim Kirk is not her Kirk, but this experience has allowed her to understand that it is possible for someone to see La’an as herself — and not just part of Khan’s legacy.

We already know from the Original Series that La’an was never going to end up in a forever romantic relationship with Kirk, but the events of this episode might make such a thing possible for her with someone else. That’s very smart writing, because it creates a greater depth for the character and thinks beyond the cheap thrill of giving Kirk a romantic liaison on the Enterprise crew — and it is backed by a terrific, emotional performance from Christina Chong, an accomplished singer who threads the musical and dramatic moments of this episode together wonderfully (“How Would That Feel”).

Jim Kirk’s role this week was a wonderful one — both with La’an, and his first-officer bonding time with Una (“Connect to Your Truth”) — but it feels like the show is running out of plausible reasons to get him aboard the Enterprise . I like how Paul Wesley is portraying the future starship captain, but after four appearances in the the last two seasons, it’s time to let Kirk have his time on the Farragut.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• The soundtrack for this episode is available through many streaming services.
• The reference to the crew poofing into bunnies appears to be a wink to perhaps the most well-known musical television episode, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “One More With Feeling.”
• Captain Batel finally gets her first name, Marie, spoken aloud this week; it previously appeared on a screen graphic back in “Ad Astra per Aspera.”
• Kirk mentions his sometimes-relationship status with “Carol,” who of course is Carol Marcus, the Project Genesis scientist seen in  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan — and her yet-to-be-born child is Kirk’s son, David.
• The Klingon ships seen this episode were called “ K’t’inga -class battlecruisers” — introduced in  Star Trek: The Motion Picture — instead of the more period-appropriate D-7 designation.
• Spock’s diplomacy with the Klingons, which began in “The Broken Circle” and is picked up on here — and it nicely foreshadows the critical role he will play in the two civilizations’ peace process in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country .
• It’s nice to get another look up the Jeffries Tube shaft, using current-day visual effects to let us see the rest of the tube in the way that The Original Series could only hint at.
• The Klingon general aboard the boy-band warship was played by Bruce Horak, who portrayed Hemmer last season (and again in this year’s “Lost in Translation”)

“Subspace Rhapsody” is Star Trek at its most experimental, and it is to be applauded and enjoyed and supported for that. The cast and crew clearly had a blast making this episode, and their infectious joy seeps through the whole episode to make it a rewarding affair.

Coupled with some compelling character work, a few very catchy songs, and boy band Klingons, this musical outing is a triumph. I don’t think a reprise of this format would work as well as the first, but I hope Strange New Worlds never stops taking risks.

900 episodes of Star Trek later, the franchise continues to find new ways to tell stories.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 concludes with “Hegemony” next Thursday, August 10 on Paramount+.

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REVIEW – Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody”

Star Trek has officially done a musical episode! It’s very exciting and was the episode I was most excited about this season. The latest edition to Season 2 is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody” . Before we get into the quality of the job that director Dermott Downs and writers Dana Horgan & Bill Wolkoff did, we need to acknowledge what a gambit this was. There have been many experimental episodes and out-there concepts, with something like “Spock’s Brain” being the worst example.

Even as far as crossovers like the one earlier this season go, a musical episode is still very, very risky. In a season full of crazy ideas, this stands out a lot, and that says something. So how much did this risk pay off? Is “Subspace Rhapsody” an instant classic or an episode that’s best left ignored? All of this and more in this review for the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds .

WARNING: This review contains full spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9 – “Subspace Rhapsody” . If you’ve not seen the episode, please turn away now!

NOTE: This is being written amidst the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes . Without the work of those on strike, this episode could not exist. Any praise for this episode should be considered praise for the writers, actors, and other artists involved. As far as I can tell, independent reviews like this (made without the use of studio-provided screeners) are not against strike rules. I fully support both unions’ fight for fair working conditions and adequate compensation. Do not support studios during a strike.

I’m not much of a musician, but know enough to know that the music here was amazing. The soundtrack isn’t due for release until tomorrow, but I’ll definitely be streaming it for a while. It’s full of a really good mix of songs, from show-stopping ballads to hilarious smaller numbers. I loved it, especially considering most of the cast aren’t known for their musical talents. The voice training they went for with the entire cast, even with the smaller characters paid off in droves. There’s scarcely a note off-key.

The biggest exception to the “not a musician” rule is La’an ( Christina Chong ). She has released some music recently that I find myself obsessed with. Her number in Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody”, entitled “How Would that Feel”, had my jaw on the floor. I knew she had an amazing voice, but wow. It managed to pack in so much emotional power into a few minutes. By far, it’s my favourite of the episode. It was equal parts exhilarating and emotionally devastating, with all the punch of one of the ballads from Falsettos. I loved it.

Songwriters Tom Polce and Kay Hanley really knocked it out of the park. I appreciated how distinct all the songs were, with none of them feeling the same. There’s flashes of all sorts of genres, but the Klingons stand out the most. I’m also fairly certain they managed to integrate Bruce Horak into that scene, which was amazing. The integration of science-fiction nomenclature was also fun, this being the only musical I know of to do that. There’s a variety here that, much like this season, is of very high quality.

Spock and Christine

I’ve made no secret of how I feel about the romance between Spock ( Ethan Peck ) and Chapel ( Jess Bush ) this season. That being said, this episode really put everything in perspective, carefully explaining why Spock is so hurt by Christine. We finally get word of the as-of-now unseen Dr Korby accepting Chapel into his fellowship program. We know from The Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” that she ends up engaged to him. I wait in anticipation for his appearance, and the actor they choose to portray him.

Their breakup here felt a little forced, but also understandable. I’m not a fan of their relationship at all, still, seeing the silence between them at the end was gutwrenching. As funny as all the maths jokes were in “I’m the X”, Peck did a great job, considering he got broken up with through song. Vulcans are said to only express strong emotions like this, which made it all the more devastating. Him getting broken up with through song was pretty sad, but also a little on the funny side.

I’m curious to see what Chapel joining Dr Korby does to Spock. Compared to my previous indifference, I’m now incredibly invested in their relationship. With how quickly they broke up, it’s as if every awkward moment between them in TOS is completely recontextualised. I’ll never be able to watch the older episodes the same way, and I love that. It really is astounding that all these characters are in the same place, years before the events of T OS. Seeing the change in relationship dynamics over that time is equally astounding.

Una ( Rebecca Romijn ), outside of a lovely musical number mostly plays second fiddle to the other characters in Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody”. She’s there to support Jim, who’s beamed over from the USS Farragut trying to move up the ranks. And then she’s there to support La’an through her breakup. Although I guess it plays into what she sings about, getting closer with her officers. Even though this was a thing that was shown gradually onscreen over the past two seasons, it’s nice to have it in the form of song as well.

The song also plays into her obsession with Gilbert and Sullivan, which gets namedropped here. The song, while less opera, it definitely has more in common with something like The Pirates of Penzance than Wicked . It’s probably the most distinct song in the musical in this way, and I think I mostly enjoyed it. Seeing Romijn, who can also actually sing, perform something like this is awesome.

While most of the cast aren’t experienced singers, having people like Romijn, Chong, and Gooding sing to their known strengths was a great choice. It’s a side of the actors’ skillset that most Star Trek fans may not be aware of, so it’s great outlet for them to show off that side of themselves. Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody” also created a musical universe in this anomaly, something that they could easily revisit in another series years down the line for more fun. That being said, this should definitely remain a one-off for a while.

Kirk and La’an

After “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” put La’an in a relationship with an alternate Kirk ( Paul Wesley ), I’ve been intrigued to say the least. I wasn’t sure what to make of it initially, but I finally see what they were going for. A bit like the relationship between Spock and Chapel, it feels like a lot of the plot points this season has introduced are being closed off. The scene between them was sweet, and I’m glad it didn’t descend into song.

It’s pretty much the only scene of the episode that did this, to the point where the conversation they had stands out as one of the few traditional scenes of the episode. As much as it turns out Paul Wesley has a nice singing voice, I’m glad this scene remained pretty serious. I’m also glad that they chose not to add another romance into the fold, with the series feeling a little crowded in that department already. As nice as it is to have closure, it’s gutting for La’an, to the point where I’m wondering where she goes from here.

We know that she’s not in TOS , is it possible that she resigns after Kirk takes command?They also referenced Carol Marcus. We here at Trek Central thought this might happen before the season even came out. While she didn’t appear, I did appreciate the nod. There’s no big need for the character to appear, just knowing that Carol’s out there and pregnant (with David) is enough for me. It’s as far as they need to go, and for Kirk to keep the ‘deadbeat dad’ reputation for The Wrath of Khan , it’s probably as far as they can.

The journey of Uhura ( Celia Rose-Gooding ) this season has also been a lot of fun. The character finally feels like she’s coming into her own. I think the crossover episode, “Those Old Scientists” , in which she met both Boimler ( Jack Quaid ) and Mariner ( Tawny Newsome ) changed her for the better. The second she heard she was considered a legend, her confidence has increased tenfold. Watching her as more of a phone operator this week was the ultimate sign of this, working quickly, effectively, and well… confidently.

It ties in to how we see her in TOS , where she was played by the brilliant Nichelle Nichols . The series has built on a lot of her most iconic moments from the series. I guess that also includes the singing talent that she displayed during “Charlie X” . This was on such a bigger scale, turning every musical number the series had ever done up to 11. Honestly, my biggest complaint is the lack of references to songs and musical moments like that.

It’s safe to say Uhura was not as much of a character in TOS . She was there, but was never really the focus for more than the occasional scene. It’s great to have her more fleshed out. Seeing that she has the capability to inspire the whole of the crew to sing as one, in a moment that was absolutely awe-inspiring. It’s the song that’s going to get stuck in your head, probably more so than Uhura’s solo number. They’re able to cram so much into an hour of television, so many songs and yet still recognisable as an episode of Star Trek .

It didn’t surprise me to learn that the director this week, Dermott Downs, has prior experience with special musical episodes. He’s also had a lot of experience with the scale of science-fiction, directing a lot for the superhero genre. One of these episodes he previously directed was “ Duet ” for The Flash . Interestingly, it featured a similar premise – the series regulars being dragged into a musical before fighting their way out. However, I consider this to be the superior product of the two, by far.

While both episodes are enjoyable, this one’s less of a novelty and the songs actually drag the plot forward. As well as this, Downs has clearly become more experienced when it comes to spectacle. The way the Klingons were framed when singing was amazing, and the shots of the dancers moving around the hallway during the final number was nothing short of epic. It was all amazingly well choreographed, even the ships spinning in time with the music was such an inspired choice.

If the franchise were ever to do anything similarly theatrical, I’d expect him to at least be considered for the director’s chair. That being said, I hope this doesn’t happen again. I loved it, but we don’t want to risk Star Trek becoming too much of something its not. Variety is a great thing, especially with the shorter episode count that these newer series have. However, adding musical to the list of formats that the series uses regularly isn’t special.

This exceeded even my expectations. It was so much fun. I loved how, unlike musical episodes like The Flash ‘s “Duet” , and Buffy the Vampire Slayer ‘s “Once More with Feeling” , this was really special. “Subspace Rhapsody” in no uncertain terms propelled the plots forward, inching the characters closer to their TOS starting positions. It did this and also had a lot of fun singing, dancing, and prancing around the Enterprise. Lots to love here.

I mentioned a few times now, not just in this article but over the last few weeks, that Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody” was the episode I was most excited for. What can I say? I’m a fan of musicals, of course I was going to love this. Whilst the format isn’t for everybody, and can even be a bit of a turn-off, I had a lot of fun here. It’s essential viewing, especially for the novelty component. That being said, I wouldn’t call this my favourite episode of this season. Although with how strong it’s been, that’s hardly a criticism.

I’m glad this came in the series when it did. If it were done at the other end of the season, it wouldn’t have succeeded as much as it did. It definitely worked better when we knew what to expect from the characters, and what sort of dramatic moments would happen. It managed to get a laugh and smile out of me more than your regular episode. This was well worth the hype and secrecy, it was so much fun and was just the lighter pick-up I needed after last week’s very dark episode.

Where to Watch

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds  streams Thursdays via  Paramount+ in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Latin America, Brazil, South Korea (via Tving), France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland & Austria. As well as CTV Scifi / Crave in Canada, & TVNZ in New Zealand. And on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Central and Eastern Europe.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9 Review – Subspace Rhapsody

Star Trek's first musical installment is silly, heartfelt, and perhaps the most fun the show's ever been.

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This Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review contains spoilers.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continues to swing for the fences in its second season, repeatedly going where literally no one has gone before in this franchise. And if you thought that things couldn’t possibly get more delightfully chaotic than the episode that brought several Lower Decks animated characters into the world of live action, you definitely weren’t prepared for the series’ foray into musical storytelling, an installment that is potentially the most purely fun hour of Star Trek I’ve ever watched. Is it silly? Absolutely. Occasionally cringe-worthy? Kind of. But somehow still perfect in spite of it all? 100% yes.

Most viewers likely assumed that the much-ballyhooed Star Trek musical episode would basically be a marketing gimmick, a silly, largely disposable hour with little to offer besides the chance to see our faves sing and dance together. And I don’t know that any of us would have actually minded too much if that’s all it had turned out to be! But instead, “Subspace Rhapsody” is a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of community and connection, an hour that’s not only wildly fun to watch, but that wholeheartedly embraces the format it’s chosen, using the larger narrative framework of traditional musical theater to say something meaningful about its characters and their various journeys this season. 

Life in Starfleet doesn’t often lend itself to overt emotion, which is probably why so many of its members are closet alcoholics. I kid, I kid—mostly—but while Strange New Worlds is a show that literally runs on heart, a certain brand of stoicism does tend to rule the day on the Enterprise . Yes, there are certainly plenty of emotional moments , but getting people freely admitting and talking about their feelings isn’t something that happens particularly often. (I mean, Una basically reverse engineered her own arrest in order to come clean about her Illyrian heritage and her reasons for lying to Starfleet. We just found out about M’Benga’s dark past as a sort of Special Forces assassin last week .) And musicals are made for big, messy, emotions—we sing when we feel so much we can’t keep it inside anymore, when it’s the only way to possibly convey what’s in the depths of hearts. So this is an hour that’s over the top entertainment, yes, but one that’s also full of deep seated and necessary truths. 

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Smartly, Strange New Worlds fully leans into the ridiculousness of the situation the Enterprise crew finds itself in, a phenomenon brought about by a rare subspace fold and the unfortunate application of a classic Cole Porter track. The songs are hilariously peppered with references to deflector shields and phaser banks, simultaneously incredibly broad and hyper specific. And the episode repeatedly underlines how much no one actually wants to be singing their feelings out in front of their crewmates, gleefully giving various characters cringe-worthy and painfully self-aware public confessionals. Anson Mount, truly making a solid case that someone should just cast him in a romantic comedy already, continues to be the show’s MVP when it comes to subtle humor and deadpan reaction shots.

The overall quality of the episode’s musical numbers is…well, it’s a Star Trek musical, it’s about what you’d expect, with songs about connecting to your true self and the importance of trusting one another. The series’ cast is game for anything, and most of them are fairly decent singers, though Strange New Worlds is smart enough to understand that large ensemble numbers can cover a multitude of sins. 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody” Soundtrack and Musical Influences

Strange New Worlds Easter Eggs Call Back to a Major Star Trek: Wrath of Khan Character

Celia Rose Gooding gets the biggest and best solo number, a showstopper of a self-actualization anthem that’s a lovely celebration of how far Uhura’s come since the series began. Christina Chong, also a professional singer, gets a nice introspective piece about La’an’s internal struggle with control. And while Jess Bush doesn’t necessarily have the strongest voice among the crew, Chapel gets one of the episode’s best ensemble numbers as she rediscovers her free spirit while celebrating her acceptance into a three month fellowship with archeological medical expert Dr. Korby. (Who I assume she’s also going to get engaged to sometime in the not too distant future.)

Vocal performances aside, the high drama and heightened emotions of musical theater make for a perfect backdrop for a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of several of season 2’s key relationships, including La’an’s lingering feelings for James Kirk to Chapel and Spock’s nascent connection. Even Pike and Batel’s one step forward two steps back long distance courtship comes under the spotlight. Granted, I’m not sure how truly invested any of us are in that particular pairing no matter how fabulous Melanie Scrafano is, and this hour does nothing so much as indicate that Pike isn’t really willing to put in the work their relationship needs, whatever he says to the contrary. But, hey, at least we confirmed Batel’s first name is Marie.

Viewers knew that the Spock/Chapel relationship was doomed long before Boimler told the Enterprise’s chief nurse the truth about the Spock history will remember, but its doubtful that any of us expected a break-up between them to happen so soon. Happily, the end of their romantic relationship isn’t about Spock’s nebulous future but Chapel’s very real present, and it’s a relief not only to see her choose herself in the end, but to do so with such a total lack of guilt or uncertainty about it. We love a woman who knows her worth. Of course, it seems more than likely Strange New Worlds will revisit these two at some (multiple?) point(s) in the future, and her choice—as well as his response to it—will surely complicate things between them even further. 

Speaking of complicated, this is also the episode in which La’an comes clean about her alternate past history with a different version of James Kirk, fearing quite rightly that the odds of her blurting it out in song at some point are not zero. (Since she so clearly also has feelings for his prime timeline counterpart.) Kirk is surprisingly cool about both the revelation that La’an’s into him and that she watched a different version of him die in front of her , and, to his credit doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity. Instead, he confesses that while he’s drawn to her too for reasons he doesn’t entirely understand, he can’t act on any of those feelings because he has a girlfriend at the moment and said girlfriend is pregnant. Whether this is merely meant to serve as a fun Carol Marcus pseudo-cameo for fans, or if it’s a hint that we might actually get to see some version of this character (and her relationship with Kirk) fleshed out more thoroughly in future episodes, is a question for another day. But why not? I’m pretty sure Strange New Worlds has already proved there’s nothing it can’t do.

4.5 out of 5

Lacy Baugher

Lacy Baugher is a digital producer by day, but a television enthusiast pretty much all the time. Her writing has been featured in Paste Magazine, Collider,…

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ' Musical Episode Is a Glorious Triumph

"subspace rhapsody" hits the high notes literally and metaphorically, delivering an episode that's full of great character work and greater earworms..

“Will this work/Who can say?/We’re gonna sing it/anyway!” An interlude in the climactic song of Star Trek ’s first ever musical episode —and an underlying thesis that guides it as it swings for one of the boldest ideas the franchise has ever tried... and by god, does it nail it.

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I’m fully aware not everyone is going to agree with me on this— Star Trek has had a dual reputation of a series capable of great drama and great silliness in equal measure, and when it does the latter, it doesn’t always hit with an audience consensus. How much you enjoy “Subspace Rhapsody,” the penultimate episode of what has been an even more experimental sophomore season for Strange New Worlds than its debut, likely depends on how much you hear the phrase “Backstreet Boy Klingons” and either snort with delighted laughter or recoil in fear. If it’s the latter, well, I certainly question how you got through “Threshold” with your faith in Star Trek in tact long enough that this becomes your breaking point, but you do you.

But that’s not the point, and “Subspace Rhapsody”—which builds on Star Trek ’s history of genre dalliances and in particular its musical dalliances to offer the franchise’s first fully-fledged musical episode—is an episode of television strong enough to warrant much more than “oh it’s just fun ” as a defens e of its quality from curmudgeons. It is fun! But it’s also two things on top of that. It’s a really good musical, filled with an eclectic mix of catchy ditties, all in all eight notable hits that are by and large great, that earworm their way into your head at warp speed. But crucially it’s also a really good episode of Star Trek , one that deftly marries the logical framework it takes on from an angle that is perfectly Trek -y, but also uses it to deliver a vital, character-driven piece that ties into so much of what this season has already had to say about the connections between its characters.

“Subspace Rhapsody” is, undoubtedly, a musical, but it is as much an episode of Star Trek as that—the premise is rooted in the kind of framework the franchise usually deals with, and one that makes sense for Strange New Worlds ’ setting in particular. Examining a subspace fold in the hopes that Starfleet could beam communication data through it—allowing for instantaneous communication across vast distances, a technology that will eventually exist in Trek by TNG —Uhura and Spock, using audio data in the form of the Great American Songbook, inadvertently cause the fold to unleash a quantum uncertainty field. This entangles the Enterprise in a growing pocket reality where heightened emotion causes people to inadvertently break out into song.

With our first song, “Status Report”—a very funny blend of music and Trek in the way it gets so much Starfleet tech and technobabble to rhyme that you immediately start wondering why no one’s used the phrase “inertial dampeners” in verse before—we’re off to the races, and what follows continues to balance that line between Trek character work and musical silliness. While our heroes, spurred on of course by Uhura herself and her interest in music, begin to suss out that this new reality operates on musical logic and experiment with just what causes the songs to break out, the stakes get raised when the reality starts expanding and affecting other ships—Federation and Klingon alike. And while that’s a good enough development outside the Enterprise , “Subspace Rhapsody” prefers to focus internally, right down to the fact that it doesn’t arguably feel as big as an episode an all-singing, all-dancing spectacle could’ve been, outside of a few climactic moments. That’s to our benefit though: Uhura pegs on quickly that musical logic means that where drama goes, song follows. And on the USS Enterprise at this moment in time, there is a lot of drama to go around.

“Subspace” focuses largely on two of the larger emotional throughpoints of this season. The first is La’an, trying to navigate her insecurities in the wake of her potential alt-timeline romance with a young Jim Kirk (returning guest star Paul Wesley), who finds those insecurities compounded when prime-Kirk is brought aboard the Enterprise for command training with Number One when the uncertainty field strikes. We get a barnstorming power ballad/I want song from Christina Chong in the form of “How Would That Feel” that plays with La’an’s inability to let people into her life—something the show has explored thoroughly through the lens of her trauma with the Gorn—and importantly we get to see her begin to open up to Kirk as the duo find the situation aboard the Enterprise getting more dangerous outside of catchy tunes.

The other, is, of course, Nurse Chapel and Spock’s situationship . Getting accepted into a dream research fellowship at the start of a simmering romantic relationship is never the best time, and it’s arguably an even worse time when you’re aboard a ship plagued with emotional outburst-induced song. But we are readily rewarded in perhaps “Subspace Rhapsody”’s best choreographed number in the Enterprise lounge, “I’m Ready,” which sees Christine tell Spock to his face that she’s willing to take this chance and—because the musical reality is compelling her to speak her true heart—more specifically she’s willing to let him go to do so, a brilliant little moment at the climax of the song that Rebecca Bush plays devastatingly well. And we even get a Spock solo out of it too, “I’m the X,” where a spurned Spock laments that perhaps he should never have strayed from the logical emotional control of his Vulcan side, if all he was going to do was get hurt by it.

It’s an incredibly bold move that Strange New Worlds decides to deliver the emotional climaxes of these two relationships we’ve followed throughout the season in a purportedly “silly” episode some might see as throwaway. It’s an altogether bolder move that it equally does not give into the romance of the musical genre and give either of them happy endings . Kirk lets La’an down easy, telling her he’s already in a serious relationship. Since Christine is about to leave the Enterprise for the foreseeable future, her and Spock’s romantic spark is extinguished almost as quickly as it came together, setting the stage for them to become the people they are when they cross paths again by the time of original Trek . “Subspace Rhapsody” matters to these characters as much as any other episode they’ve been the focal point of this season, and it matters to what Strange New Worlds has been saying all season long about finding the value in the time you get to spend with the people you care about, instead of lamenting what could’ve been. In doing that here, in an episode that’s got songs about earning the trust of your subordinates or being a comms officer, and people doing co-ordinated dances through the corridors of the starship Enterprise ? It’s a brilliant statement by the show, not just in the confidence it has its storytelling, but its confidence in just how much Star Trek can stretch itself to when it tries.

In the end, we’re rewarded with those aforementioned Backstreet Boy Klingons—the crew of approaching Imperial battle cruisers also caught up in the reality field that interrupt the final, raucous ensemble number of the episode, “We Are One,” itself a cheesy, heartwarmingly earnest, and yet also thematically crucial sendoff to Strange New Worlds ’ biggest, boldest, and most successful experiment so far. There’s hands waving in the air on the Enterprise bridge, a starship in chorus overwhelms a subspace fold with so much energy it explodes in dazzling light, and the day is saved—but some of our heroes still have hard journeys to navigate with the people they care about.

In a series that has proven that it is often at its strongest when it is most experimental with Trek ’s classical episodic formats, it’s fitting that its biggest leap of faith yet is also a fundamentally vital episode of the entire show— o ne that emphasiz es the importance of the growth of its characters, and their connection to each other, as much as it emphasiz es just how broad a tent Star Trek can be in terms of theme and tone. And that’s well worth having a song and dance over.

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Inside the ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Musical Episode — ‘Picard’ Almost Got There First

Christian blauvelt.

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There have certainly been musical moments in “Star Trek” before: Uhura sang while Spock played his lyre in “The Original Series”; Data and Picard duet to Gilbert and Sullivan in “Insurrection”; James Darren played a holographic nightclub singer on “Deep Space Nine.” But it took “Strange New Worlds,” the critically revered Paramount+ series nearing the end of its second season, to stage an entire musical episode.

The emotional clarity that drives suddenly “breaking into song” was actually an ideal fit for wrapping up most of the characters’ recent storylines, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers said to IndieWire in a new interview. “The thing that made it a comfortable fit is that it’s still essentially a ‘Star Trek’ episode, and not just a ‘Star Trek’ episode but the ‘Star Trek’ episode that needed to be the ‘episode nine’ of our [10 episode] season. We need resolution in order to get us into episode 10, which in this case, Henry was going to write part one of a two-parter.”

The episode, directed by Dermott Downs, also has a very clear in-universe reason for existing: a subspace rift has altered reality so that people can only communicate through singing when they’re feeling intense emotion — the kind of climactic emotions involved in season-long storylines being resolved. “Fundamentally, I’d be game to make every episode nine a musical,” Goldsman said, “because it’s a great way of getting right to the heart of the issues the characters are bringing into the show and to resolve it in a really emotional way.”

The cast encompasses a wide range of singing skill levels from the professional vocalist polish of Chong, Gooding, and Rebecca Romijn (who plays First Officer Una Chin-Riley) to Mount, whose most notable on-screen singing was in a car with Britney Spears in 2002’s “Crossroads” (but who brings an admirable rocker-y growl to some of his musical moments in “Subspace Rhapsody”). Vocal lessons were provided over one to two months to anybody who wanted them, as was the option to re-record once the final mix was in place. Most of the actors had spent so much time in prep, including putting in extra hours on the weekends, that many stayed with their on-set recordings. “The surprising thing was that everyone had worked so hard, they were pretty happy with what they came up with at that point,” Myers said.

Staging a musical episode requires a greatly expanded pre-production timeline and Myers started making calls to prospective songwriters six months in advance of the shoot, landing quickly on Tom Polce and Kay Hanley. The process from there had to be profoundly iterative, with Polce and Hanley sending multiple versions of each song to the episode’s writers, Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, to make sure that they fit with what they wanted for the characters.

The thing that’s especially remarkable about “Subspace Rhapsody” is that it’s the immediate follow-up to the darkest episode in the series to date, “Under the Cloak of War,” in which Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) seeks a fight with a Klingon defector, kills him, then covers it up (with Nurse Chapel helping the cover-up). “There’s a moment in ‘Subspace Rhapsody’ [during the song about people dealing with the things they’re holding onto] where you pass his face and you really see him, he looks at Chapel and they share this look that feels like it comes from that episode,” said Myers. “But we also wanted it to feel like its own thing because this is its own episode with its own tone.”

“We spent a lot of time talking about trying to bring back all the feelings of ‘Star Trek,'” Myers said. “A lot of those [like ‘Take Me Out to the Holosuite’] were ones that really spoke to me. I know that they spoke to Akiva as well, which was just that ‘Star Trek’ changes every week and tries different things. The baseball episode is one of my favorites. It’s shockingly good. It’s like shocking how good it is today. We really wanted to come at it like that. ‘Star Trek’ can be different every week. It’s something that we both missed is what I can say because we’re really delighted to be able to bring that kind of idea back.”

“Subspace Rhapsody” is definitely the culmination of that idea. And though the “Star Trek” of old had 26 episodes to take a chance on a big swing like a musical episode, Goldsman notes that the 10-episode format allows for greater resources to be applied as well as time for production that would never be possible with 26 episodes: “There would certainly not have been time to do it anywhere near as thoroughly.”

The funny thing is that there was one other possible opportunity for a musical episode in the streaming era of “Star Trek.”

“We were like, ‘Yes, call him!'”

“Then two days later we were like, ‘What happened?'”

“Michael went, ‘He didn’t call me back.'”

“Subspace Rhapsody,” the “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” musical episode is now streaming on Paramount+. The Season 2 finale will stream August 10.

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This Is Why 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Musical Episode Works

Like La’an, maybe genre shows need to take chances more often.

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 9. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuted the franchise’s first-ever musical-themed episode with "Subspace Rhapsody," and for those of us filled with trepidation over how the creators would pull it off... well, they did. The episode beats the odds with a rip-roaring, emotional musical journey that will have you tapping your feet in rapturous joy one moment, and bawling your eyes out the next.

Star Trek hasn’t shied away from musical moments in the past—the latter seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine featured frequent appearances and a few duets with holographic Las Vegas crooner Vic Fontaine ( James Darren ), and on Star Trek: Voyager , the Emergency Medical Hologram ( Robert Picardo ) was wont to break into opera and bonded with Seven of Nine ( Jeri Ryan ) over song. An entire hour-long musical episode where the cast is singing about subspace folds and personal tragedies could have gone sideways, and fast — but it didn't.

RELATED: ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 2: Cast and Character Guide

The Musical Episode Isn’t Just a Gimmick on 'Strange New Worlds' Season 2

When the crew of the Enterprise comes across a subspace fold that has the potential to speed up communications in the Alpha Quadrant, they are unaware that their own attempts at communicating through it will lead them—and the whole of Starfleet—to being trapped in an improbability field where they’re living out a musical. They realize, much to their horror, that they now have a propensity to unveil their deepest emotions through song.

“Subspace Rhapsody” writers Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff and director Dermott Downs introduce the musical as a plot device, but they do not treat it like a gimmick. As Nyota Uhura ( Celia Rose Gooding ) explains, the ship is stuck in a musical reality, so they’re playing by those rules. This informs the structure of the episode, which includes songs, dance, and spoken dialogue to develop the characters and tell the story, as well as the ebbs and flows of comedy and tragedy during the three acts. But composers Tom Polce , Kay Hanley , and team also keep things interesting by employing a variety of music genres for the different songs, so there’s something for every musical palate .

What starts off as a light-hearted quirk turns into a security risk, especially once Captain Christopher Pike ( Anson Mount ) , and his partner, USS Cayuga captain Marie Batel ( Melanie Scrofano ), break into a fight in verse on the bridge — and this is what sets “Subspace Rhapsody” up for success. It’s obvious that we can’t have Starfleet officers spilling their guts out in front of their crew. When the Klingons become affected, they pose an additional threat as they want to destroy the fold, which the Enterprise discovers will make matters worse. But the diegetic impact of the musical goes beyond the usual Star Trek threats. Musicals are all about the characters and their connections with one another, and “Subspace Rhapsody” excels at that.

Emotions Are Running High at This Point on 'Strange New Worlds' Season 2

The main reason the musical episode works seamlessly in this science-fiction show is because it’s the penultimate episode of the season. The story builds on almost two whole seasons of plot and character development. This season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been an emotional one for several characters. Unfortunately, Star Trek isn’t known for its broad emotions; the franchise has its moments, but to wrap one’s head around the strength of the feelings the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds crew are feeling, this season can only be conveyed through song.

What the creators of “Subspace Rhapsody” do is take the central conceit of musicals—amusing melodic interludes and sentimental storytelling—to thread the needle of the season’s characterizations. The reason a musical is needed to conclude this particular arc is because, as Number One ( Rebecca Romijn ) says, “When their emotions are so heightened, words won’t suffice.” Speaking of Number One, she’s had quite the journey this season; she almost lost her career after coming clean about her Illyrian origins . But the experience has opened her up to new experiences, as she reveals to James T. Kirk ( Paul Wesley ) in "Connect To Your Truth." Number One wants to connect with her crew and, now that her love for Gilbert and Sullivan musicals is out, she readily embraces this side of herself to advise Kirk on his captaincy journey and support her close friend La'an Noonien-Singh ( Christina Chong ) during a heartbreak.

Uhura has also been staving off connections, but mostly because her work has kept her so busy. It’s meant she’s been on her own on a ship full of people who are, or at least want to be, her friends. Uhura finally acknowledges how isolated she’s been since the death of her entire family, and then her mentor Lt. Hemmer ( Bruce Horak ), in the heart-rending “Keep Us Connected” — and through the song, Uhura discovers a foundational truth about Star Trek: the best way to save the day is by doing it together.

The Musical Format Helps Remove Character Inhibitions on 'Strange New Worlds'

Several characters on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds struggle with sharing their emotions, which is why a musical reality that lifts those inhibitions helps them share their feelings. For a long while, the romantic tension between Spock ( Ethan Peck ) and Nurse Christine Chapel ( Jess Bush ) was building, and then they finally got together . But their romance has already hit a rocky road, with Christine ready to progress in her career while Spock is still getting a handle on his emotions . This plays a huge part in "Subspace Rhapsody." We feel Christine’s absolute delight at winning a fellowship, even at the risk of leaving Spock behind in "I’m Ready," while we couldn’t be more gutted for Spock when he’s plaintively singing about his newly lost love in "I’m the X."

La’an, meanwhile, prides herself on her stoicism, but she’s been secretly dealing with the loss of an alternate version of Kirk which she hasn’t been able to share with anyone since the third episode of the season. La’an’s emotional despair at not being with that Kirk has been devastating to watch, and her coming to terms with the fact that keeping it all to herself just isn’t sustainable in “How Would That Feel” is cathartic at best. She watches Number One embrace her new effervescent self, and takes Number One’s advice in “Keeping Secrets” to share her feelings with the prime version of Kirk. Unfortunately, Kirk is unavailable, but La’an is on a journey to take chances that she didn’t feel she could before.

There are also the quieter moments that develop the characters like the way Erica Ortegas ( Melissa Navia ) and Sam Kirk ( Dan Jeannotte ) sing their support for their crewmates. On a darker note, there’s the knowing look that passes between Dr. Joseph M’Benga ( Babs Olusanmokun ) and Chapel in the sickbay during “Keeping Secrets”—alluding to the toll of the Klingon War they’ve suffered together, as well as the secret they’ve kept about M’Benga being the real Butcher of J'Gal, as revealed in "Under the Cloak of War."

All these musical sequences hit harder because “Subspace Rhapsody” is the penultimate episode of the second season, and we’re witnessing the culmination of these plotlines. We’ve had all these episodes to watch these characters’ stories unfold, and we’ve become invested in what happens to them. Their emotions are heightened, as is our desire to see these characters through these transcendent, and sometimes difficult, moments. The only way to let all those feelings out could only be through song.

The Big Picture

• "Subspace Rhapsody," the musical-themed episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, delivers a rip-roaring, emotional journey.
• The episode successfully integrates music as a plot device, developing characters and telling the story through songs, dance, and spoken dialogue.
• The musical format allows characters to express their deepest emotions, strengthening their connections and resolving plotlines in the penultimate episode of the season.

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 premiere every Thursday on Paramount+.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9 Pulls Out the Stops for Its Musical

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds goes full-blown musical for Season 2's penultimate episode. Here's CBR's review of the ambitious change of pace.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds nears the end of its second season with its biggest and most ambitious creative swing yet by making the season's penultimate episode a full-blown musical. Titled "Subspace Rhapsody," the episode stands as one of the longest in the entire series to date, giving it room to breathe and including eight original songs celebrating a variety of musical styles. While the idea of a Star Trek musical episode may not seem like everyone's cup of tea, "Subspace Rhapsody" fits within the wider story and character arcs, complementing Season 2's noticeably lighter tone .

The Enterprise investigates an anomaly while testing out a new subspace communications system devised by Spock and Nyota Uhura to significantly bolster communication speeds across the armada. When Uhura sings through the subspace system in an effort to change up the harmonics used by the new technology, it triggers the anomaly's probability field, engulfing the Enterprise. As the crew regains their bearings, they spontaneously break out into song and dance to channel even their most latent emotions as they scramble to stop the probability field from spreading and affecting others throughout the galaxy.

RELATED: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Jeff W. Byrd Brings Fiery Intensity to Season 2

With nearly a dozen different Star Trek shows, often filled with ensemble casts from theater backgrounds, it's a wonder that no series has attempted to produce a musical episode before. Given Strange New Worlds ' propensity for experimenting with different genres, a musical isn't too far-fetched as a premise for a standalone episode, and it works within the context of the story. There are still genuine stakes to the story. The fate of Starfleet hangs in the balance by the climax, but the real focus is on the characters.

As for the songs themselves, they are written by Letter to Cleo bandmates Kay Hanley and Tom Polce and cover everything from the traditional stage numbers made famous by Rodgers and Hammerstein in the '50s and '60s to rap musicals like Hamilton . The cast is competent in their singing and dancing abilities, with the episode wisely focusing on its strongest musical performers, namely Celia Rose Gooding and Christina Chong. Everyone gets a chance to shine, and most of the songs are catchy enough, with the best songs bookending the episode.

RELATED: Strange New Worlds - Jordan Canning Delves Into the Hilarity of Star Trek

For all the spontaneous singing and dancing, this episode presents important developments for much of the main cast, from Spock and Christine Chapel's burgeoning romance to La'an Noonien-Singh's complicated feelings for Jim Kirk . It'll be interesting to see how this all, along with Kirk's continued presence on the Enterprise , informs the impending Season 2 finale, but there are major moments for the main ensemble, to be sure. "Subspace Rhapsody" may be an outlier in terms of its presentation and genre but is certainly not a throwaway episode in the larger Strange New Worlds saga.

"Subspace Rhapsody" stands among the most memorable Star Trek episodes from a season full of them. Anyone skeptical about the concept of Star Trek delving into the musical genre is unlikely to be completely won over, but those open to the premise will find lots to enjoy as the season finale looms. At this point in its storied legacy, Star Trek doesn't have a lot of franchise firsts left, but Strange New Worlds has more than delivered and helped redefine what Star Trek can be.

Created by Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds releases new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.

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For the first time in the franchise’s 57-year history, STRANGE NEW WORLDS gives Star Trek a full-on musical episode with “Subspace Rhapsody”

Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9 “Subspace Rhapsody”

So… that happened.

For the first time in its 890-episode history, Star Trek did a musical episode. If you didn’t know what to expect upon first learning Strange New Worlds would tackle this genre, you’re not alone. We were skeptical. Optimistic, but skeptical. But here’s the nice surprise: “Subspace Rhapsody” was generally quite an enjoyable affair, since we were going into it knowing it would be silly. It would have to be, right? What possible reason could there be for a starship crew to break out in song?

Well, there’s a scientific explanation. The episode begins with the Enterprise encountering a quantum fissure in space, and the crew thinks this discovery could be a quantum leap forward in trans-quadrant communications. But, Spock ( Ethan Peck ) and Nyota Uhura ( Celia Rose Gooding ) are having a tough time getting signals through the fissure, so they resort to Lt. Pelia’s ( Carol Kane ) outlandish idea: send music through.

The fissure definitely reacts to a tune from the good old American Song Book, and it distorts the surrounding space, including the Enterprise , so that the crew now exists in a realm where music can break out at any moment. We first see this with a bewildered Spock, who breaks out into tune while discussing the effects of the fissure. Soon enough, the crew from around the ship are rhyming and dancing, culminating in a scene on the bridge where everyone, including Captain Christopher Pike ( Anson Mount ) and visiting officer James T. Kirk ( Paul Wesley ), are musically arriving at the same conclusion: the universe has thrown them a curveball and now they are trapped in a space where singing is the norm.

“Honestly, I assumed it was something you all rehearsed, but… I sang, too.” “So did I. And I do not sing.” – Kirk and M’Benga ( Babs Olusanmokun ) after the episode’s first musical number.

There are 10 songs in “Subspace Rhapsody,” and to our great surprise, Strange New Worlds uses each one to inform our understanding of various crew members and their relationships. Moreover, this is an ensemble episode the likes of which we really haven’t seen yet this season, so everyone in the main cast has a moment to shine, if not have a whole song to themselves.

The driving force behind this music, and a rule of the space the crew learns eventually, is that music breaks out whenever strong emotions are in play. So, we hear musical numbers from Uhura about her loneliness, her ill-fated family, and the importance of connection in her life; Nurse Christine Chapel ( Jess Bush ) about her being accepted into a prestigious fellowship and thus being okay leaving Spock behind (poor Spock!); Spock singing about how hurt he is by Chapel; Captain Pike and his girlfriend, Captain Batel ( Melanie Scrofano ), on the frustrations of their long-distance relationship; the normally stoic La’an Noonien-Singh ( Christina Chong ) about her ill-fated romance with Kirk; and Una Chin-Riley ( Rebecca Romijn ) about keeping secrets, and then another song dueting with Kirk about how to be a good command officer.

One unexpected development from the La’an storyline in this episode is her telling Kirk about her experience with the alternate reality Kirk in “ Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow .” This disclosure breaks rules set by the Department of Temporal Investigations, but the potency of La’an’s music-driven emotions make her decide to express her feelings to Kirk. Kirk takes the revelation good-naturedly and has a surprise of his own for La’an: he is in a “sometimes” relationship with a woman named Carol Marcus, and she is pregnant. This is a neat revelation for Star Trek fans, as those who have seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock know about Kirk’s later-in-life experience with Carol and his ill-fated grown son, David. We’re curious if Strange New Worlds continues filling in Kirk’s backstory.

The Enterprise crew being trapped in a music-filled fissure isn’t enough, as it appears the fissure’s influence is spreading through subspace, infecting many other Federation and non-Federation ships. The crew also realizes their bouts of singing are seemingly following a rule of musicals: when characters have so much pent-up emotion, they resort to song.

“Admiral April’s last message confirmed that the improbability field has now spread to 12 Federation ships. He let me know in surprisingly beautiful baritone that he wants us to stop this now.” – Una

The Klingons, who don’t take kindly to breaking out in song, send battlecruisers to destroy the fissure, and the Enterprise crew knows if the fissure is destroyed, anybody who has suffered its effects will also perish. Uhura and Spock seek to discover a way to break the improbability matrix, and they do so through studying the songs themselves. Uhura, with her careful eyes and ears, finds a connection in the raw data presented by the fissure. It’s a simple solution: the entire crew must sing.

Pike asserts Uhura, who is someone who can bind the Enterprise crew together thanks to her ability to connect people, should lead the ship in song to get the fissure’s “improbability level” high enough to close it. Music hitherto was being used to push people away from each other, but Uhura recognizes music is also great for bringing people together. It’s a clever message couched in dumb science, but again, if you go into this episode knowing it’s silly, things won’t seem so absurd. The episode doesn’t take itself too seriously, and neither should we.

In a grand finale number, with the Klingons just about ready to fire their weapons, the Enterprise crew rallies in song. and even gets the Klingons to join in. We’ll give one critique here: Klingons dancing in a way you might see at, say, a Tayler Swift concert, is really disconcerting and cringy – but at least the uncomfortable moment is acknowledged by the Enterprise bridge crew and played for laughs. Otherwise, the finale number is appropriately explosive, with members of the entire crew singing and dancing together to close the fissure. With the tear in space closed, all is well.

Taken together, the experiment “Subspace Rhapsody” poses to its audience works surprisingly well. Using each song to expand our understanding of our main characters, and in some cases move their respective plotlines forward, is a creatively smart way to balance storytelling and music. While only a few numbers present choreography worth writing home about, the songs themselves are varied and enjoyable to listen to; we have members of the American alternative rock band Letters to Cleo to thank for that. We’ll look forward to the songs from this episode showing up on streaming services, which is as good a compliment as any musical can expect.

On a thematic level, we appreciate how Strange New Worlds asserts a well-known understanding of music and emotions; that is, the two go hand in hand. Such is a fundamental aspect of the human condition that we all can relate to; who doesn’t appreciate it when an artist bears their soul through song?  It’s like what Elton John once said: “Guess there are times when we all need to share a little pain…And it’s times like these when we all need to hear the radio/’Cause from the lips of some old singer/We can share the troubles we already know.” Such is the understanding “Subspace Rhapsody” has of the healing power of music, and this power allowed us to see a more honest side of our characters than we would have otherwise.  For that reason, we consider this Star Trek musical a success, even if some people may scoff at the abnormality of the episode.

Stray Thoughts:

• Chapel is awaiting a message from Dr. Korby, who is likely the same Roger Korby as in TOS ’ “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” M’Benga describes Korby as the “Louis Pasteur of archaeological medicine,” which is the same language Spock used to describe him in the aforementioned episode. We know Chapel eventually becomes Korby’s fiancé, so… will Strange New Worlds show us how that happens?
• The song Uhura sends through the fissure is, appropriately, “Anything Goes,” written by Cole Porter for the 1934 musical of the same name.
• Don’t skip this episode’s intro sequence, as it features a unique rendition of the SNW theme song.
• We confirmed with Paramount+ that these songs were performed by the actors themselves.
• The watch La’an holds while singing about Kirk is the watch the pair used to track down the reactor in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”
• On the map of the area surrounding the fissure, we see the Republic , the ship James Kirk served on as ensign.
• Check out DS9 ’s “Rivals” for another sci-fi story that involves unusual improbability.
• Writers Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff are sure to reference through character dialogue how silly the idea of a Star Trek musical is, and the noticeable reprisal of the TOS theme after the grand finale number helps us recall when TOS could sometimes get off the rails.
• Why do we get the feeling Batel is not long for this world? At the end of the episode, she’s off on a priority one mission, and we know the Gorn must figure into the season finale.

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are made available to stream Thursdays on Paramount+ .

Stay tuned to TrekNews.net for all the latest news on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , Star Trek: Picard , Star Trek: Discovery , Star Trek: Lower Decks , Star Trek: Prodigy , and more.

You can follow us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram and Threads .

Kyle Hadyniak has been a lifelong Star Trek fan, and isn't ashamed to admit that Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Nemesis are his favorite Star Trek movies. You can follow Kyle on Twitter @khady93 .

Martin Jacobs

August 3, 2023 at 10:18 am

especially since in Star Trek II, Kirk was only then learning about his son.

He knew he had a son. He told Carol that he stayed away at her request.

August 3, 2023 at 10:31 am

Echoing what Martin said above; Kirk knew about David. He was told to stay away

Antonio Relyea

August 3, 2023 at 2:48 pm

I came here to make the same comment. David new about Kirk too. “Remember that overgrown boy scout you used to hang around with?” to which Carol replied “Listen kiddo, Jim Kirk was many things but he was never a boy scout.”

August 3, 2023 at 5:53 pm

Ah yes, thank you for that reminder. I must have a leaky memory bank. Will edit. 🙂

Jared McCubbin

August 4, 2023 at 9:27 am

Can any of them sing though?

Christine Granados

August 6, 2023 at 2:16 pm

This episode was just plain stupid… and the end with the Klingons as a weak, sad Boy Band was just pathetic and so off-putting as to be a bit vomit inducing. Really guys, this was possibly one of the stupidest ideas for a show ever….. EVER EVER EVER. Spare me. I had to watch two hours of other mindless TV just to blot the vision of singing Klingons ala a sad little Boy Band. This episode was the thing that nightmares are made of and lurk in your mind waiting to spring up and make you puke.

August 6, 2023 at 4:48 pm

This episode was so hard to watch – I had to fast forward through all the singing. I would say there is some truth in saying that Star Trek fans do not want to sit through a musical. It was very cringeworthy.

August 6, 2023 at 7:59 pm

I loved the musical. The songs were perfect and on point. Star Trek – Strange New Worlds is just what the doctor ordered. I’m loving it!

August 13, 2023 at 7:16 pm

SNW was supposed to appeal to those of us that wanted an episodic sci-fi series again. Its not working and they have already lost their focus. I really want to love it(I suppose because of the nostalgic characters), but they are losing me. Another silly episode !

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‘Subspace Rhapsody’ Is a Fascinating and Flawed Star Trek Musical

This discussion and review contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 9, “Subspace Rhapsody” (a musical), on Paramount+.

It is surprising that it took Star Trek so long to do a musical episode.

After all, John Ford wrote a musical Star Trek tie-in novel in October 1987. William Shatner reportedly considered staging a musical variety show to celebrate the franchise’s 50th anniversary. Fans performed a loving stage musical Boldly Go! , which is available in its entirety on YouTube. Pop songs like The Firm’s “ Star Trekkin’ ” translate the franchise’s iconography to music. The franchise has given musical set pieces to stars like Brent Spiner , Avery Brooks , and Robert Picardo .

More than that, the musical episode was a staple of turn-of-the-millennium television. The most famous example might be “Once More, with Feeling,” the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that aired in November 2001. However, this was the culmination of a larger trend that included episodes like “ The Musical, Almost ” on Ally McBeal , “ Brain Salad Surgery ” on Chicago Hope , “ Old Tree ” on Northern Exposure , “ The Bitter Suite ” on Xena: Warrior Princess , and many more.

As such, “Subspace Rhapsody,” the much anticipated Strange New Worlds musical episode, fits firmly within the show’s nostalgia for the 1990s. As with “ Ad Astra Per Aspera ” earlier in the season, there is a sense that the franchise is finally doing something that would have been cutting-edge 30 years ago. Of course, while “Ad Astra Per Aspera” was confronting one of the franchise’s long-standing blind spots on civil rights, “Subspace Rhapsody” is really just doing something cute and fun.

As with “ Those Old Scientists ” earlier in the season, it is easier to admire “Subspace Rhapsody” on a technical level than it is to enjoy it as a satisfying piece of television. “Subspace Rhapsody” is clearly a labor of love for the cast and crew. It features original songs by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce, members of the band Letters to Cleo . It showcases choreography from stage and screen veteran Robert Campanella , whose past credits include Oscar-winning The Shape of Water .

On a purely technical level, “Subspace Rhapsody” is a showcase for an incredibly talented ensemble cast. It’s obvious that a lot of the series regulars have some experience with the form. Christine Chong has talked about how it “ was always (her) dream to do musical theatre .” Rebecca Romijn starred in The Producers opposite Richard Kind at the Hollywood Bowl . Before joining Strange New Worlds , Celia Rose Gooding broke out performing the Alanis Morissette musical Jagged Little Pill .

More than that, Star Trek should be doing more stuff like this. It is a gigantic multimedia franchise with a built-in fan base and high production values, with Nicole Clemens, president of original scripted series at Paramount+, talking openly about wanting an “ always on slate .” With that level of creative freedom and that volume of content, there is absolutely no reason for Star Trek to be as aesthetically conservative as it has been over the past few years.

Fans and critics have been quick to praise Strange New Worlds as “ a return to an episodic vision ,” but the show has failed to take advantage of that. The beauty of the episodic television model was the freedom that it afforded for experimentation. To pick a random example, The X-Files could do a black-and-white creature feature in “ The Post-Modern Prometheus ,” a found-footage crossover with Cops in “ X-Cops ,” and a series of long-take sequences broken up by commercial breaks in “ Triangle .”

Star Trek should be willing to play with its form. Strange New Worlds should be willing to be both strange and new. With the move to digital cameras and with no commercial breaks on streaming, why not do an episode in a single extended take? What about an episode in the “ screenlife ” style? Strange New Worlds should be taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by the episodic model, where every installment is a chance to do something exciting and interesting.

In that sense, both “Those Old Scientists” and “Subspace Rhapsody” are welcome additions to the Star Trek canon, in that they push the limits of what is possible within the established Star Trek format. “Those Old Scientists” proves that it is possible to blend animation and live action in a single Star Trek episode. “Subspace Rhapsody” proves that the production team can stage what is effectively an hour-long musical. That is commendable.

At the same time, it is frustrating to watch “Subspace Rhapsody” and wish that it was… well, better. As with “Those Old Scientists,” the episode is so thrilled to be playing with a new set of toys that it fails to really build a compelling narrative around them. There is no sense of stakes. There is no sense of momentum. There are some vaguely interesting thematic dynamics at play, but even those end up muddled at the end.

“Subspace Rhapsody” is a relationship episode. The character arcs running through “Subspace Rhapsody” focus on three potential couples: Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano), Lieutenant Spock (Ethan Peck) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), Lieutenant Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and Lieutenant Kirk (Paul Wesley). However, it’s frustrating that the episode ultimately shelves two of these three relationships.

To be fair, this is an issue with both the episodic format and the prequel nature of Strange New Worlds . Without long-form serialization, it’s not really possible to watch relationships grow and develop as they did with characters like Sisko (Avery Brooks) and Yates (Penny Johnson Jerald), Kira (Nana Visitor) and Odo (René Auberjonois), or Worf (Michael Dorn) and Dax (Terry Farrell) on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . If each story has to be self-contained, the characters cannot truly change between installments.

Similarly, most of the key characters in Strange New Worlds already have a predetermined path through the established canon. Based on their knowledge of existing Star Trek media, fans know that Spock and Chapel or Kirk and Noonien-Singh cannot end up together. This has the effect of undermining any attempt to wring drama from their interpersonal relationships. More than that, it makes the choice seem deeply cynical, an attempt to get the audience to invest in an impossibility. It feels like a waste of everybody’s time.

As such, “Subspace Rhapsody” literally makes a song and dance about two relationships that cannot go anywhere. The “will they / won’t they?” dynamic between Noonien-Singh and Kirk that was first teased only a few episodes ago in “ Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ” ends in a simple “they won’t.” The Spock and Chapel romance that only began at the end of “ Charades ,” four episodes ago, is cut short as it would always have to be.

The only real character development that comes from “Subspace Rhapsody” is that Pike and Batel are pretty much in the exact same place that they were at the end of “ Among the Lotus Eaters .” They are in a relationship, but not so committed that it will meaningfully impact the show, as Batel is on another ship. There is nothing wrong with Star Trek asking its audience to embrace interpersonal dynamics, but those dynamics must actually have weight. Otherwise, it feels like watching pieces being shuffled aimlessly around a board.

This is where the themes of “Subspace Rhapsody” get a little muddled. One of the more interesting aspects of Strange New Worlds is its recurring fascination with the idea of gender and performance. This is most obvious with Spock, particularly in episodes like “ Spock Amok ” and “ The Serene Squall .” The show returns time and again to the idea of gendered archetypes and the idea of heterosexuality as a sort of performance. “Ad Astra Per Aspera” and “Charades” are both episodes about “ passing .”

Whether fairly or not, stage musicals and pop music are not seen as stereotypically or conventionally heteronormative masculine spaces. As Kelly Kessler argued , “The performance of song and dance – as well as musical theatre – culturally has been associated with non-hegemonic or queered masculinity.” It is such an accepted cliché that Neil Patrick Harris famously opened the 2011 Tony Awards by jokingly assuring straight audiences that Broadway is “ not just for gays anymore .”

“Subspace Rhapsody” is obviously playing with this. A subspace fold prompts big musical numbers, and those songs find characters expressing their emotional inner lives. The crew find that emotional openness to be an existential threat. “Lieutenant, are you telling us that our emotions constitute a security threat?” Pike asks Noonien-Singh incredulously early in the episode. However, after performing his own musical number to Batel, Pike seems to agree. “The subspace fold, I think we should blow it up,” he states bluntly.

Obviously, it is not only male characters affected – Noonien-Singh is among those most horrified at the thought of being rendered emotionally vulnerable. However, it does tie into longstanding tensions about how men are socialized to repress their emotions . After all, the episode’s stakes only really escalate when the stereotypically macho Klingons are affected. One of the episode’s best gags features a deeply humiliated Klingon boy band, with the Empire vowing to destroy “the abominable source of our dishonor.”

It’s clever and well intentioned, but it is also shallow. As with so much of the show’s interrogation and subversion of gender roles, there’s a lack of diversity of perspective. All three primary couples in the episode are heterosexual, with no queer perspectives represented in what has traditionally been seen — as James Lovelock points out — as “ a safe ‘queer space’. ” More than that, the episode ends with the rift closed. Spock goes back to being his stoic and repressed self, with no sense that he has grown or learned anything.

It’s easier to appreciate “Subspace Rhapsody” as pure spectacle. There is a lot of fun to be had in rhyming technobabble — “inertia dampeners” with “hampered,” “your last breath” with “mek’leth.” The choreography makes impressive use of the show’s sets, with Chapel getting a big crowd number in the crew lounge and Spock using the safety railing in engineering like a balcony. Indeed, there’s something charming in the Enterprise and Klingon ships literally dancing in space like they’re in a Busby Berkeley number.

“Subspace Rhapsody” is an episode that it’s easier to admire than to enjoy. It’s a pleasant enough tune, but it’s not a showstopping success.

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How Strange New Worlds pulled off the first-ever Star Trek musical episode

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Throwing an hour of light comedy into the middle of a 10-episode arc with galactic-level stakes could derail an entire season, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds dances gracefully from week to week between courtroom drama, time-travel romance, and its latest wild swing: a musical episode.

In “Subspace Rhapsody,” the crew of the USS Enterprise encounters a strange cosmic phenomenon that induces them to break into song and reveal their innermost feelings. The episode features 10 original songs by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce (of Letters to Cleo fame) and highlights the vocal talents of the cast, including Tony nominee and Grammy winner Celia Rose Gooding and singer-songwriter Christina Chong.

Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman, who heads up the franchise at Paramount, has been teasing the possibility of a Star Trek musical since 2020. But at the time, his only venue for bizarre genre experiments was Star Trek: Short Treks , a short subject anthology series that filled the gaps between Discovery and Picard . Short Treks eventually became the launchpad for Strange New Worlds , whose tone has proven equally elastic. After the warm reception to its first season, which contained everything from a screwball body-swap comedy to a grim political drama involving child sacrifice, it was time to set phasers to “sing.”

According to the episode’s director, Dermott Downs, Chong was the cast member who pushed the hardest for a musical episode. Chong, whose debut EP Twin Flames is also out this week, confesses in her Spotify bio that her screen acting career began as a way to raise her profile as a singer and stage actor. “Subspace Rhapsody” would seem to be an important landmark in her career, as she features heavily on the soundtrack, including the solo ballad “How Would That Feel?”

(Chong is unavailable for comment due to the conditions of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, as is the rest of the cast and the episode’s writers, Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff. Songwriters Kay Hanley and Tom Polce also could not be reached via Paramount publicity.)

Indeed, one of the interesting challenges of producing a musical episode of an established television show is tailoring the music to suit the talents of the existing cast. Who’s a belter? Who’s a crooner? Who’s funny? Who might not be comfortable singing at all? The tools at hand impact not only the distribution of the songs, but the shape of the story. The narrative and emotional weight of a musical has to fall on the shoulders of the cast members most prepared to carry it.

So, it’s no surprise that, while “Subspace Rhapsody” gives nearly every regular cast member an opportunity to show off, the heart of the story is Ensign Nyota Uhura, portrayed by Celia Rose Gooding. Gooding’s performance as Frankie in Jagged Little Pill , a Broadway jukebox musical featuring the songs of Alanis Morissette, garnered them a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, as well as a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album (shared with the rest of the cast). Gooding sings the episode’s 11 o’clock number, “Keep Us Connected,” an undeniable earworm that showcases their impressive vocal range and power. Gooding’s Broadway bona fides bring a level of legitimacy to “Subspace Rhapsody” that’s lacking even in top-tier TV musical episodes like Buffy ’s “Once More, With Feeling” and Community ’s “Regional Holiday Music.”

This also isn’t Downs’ first crack at a musical episode, as he also helmed “Duet,” a crossover between The Flash and Supergirl that reunited former Glee castmates Grant Gustin, Melissa Benoist, and Darren Criss. Downs used this experience, as well as his long resume as a music video cinematographer, to secure the “Subspace Rhapsody” gig from the list of episodes in development for Strange New Worlds ’ second season. Combined with his fondness for the original Star Trek , the possibility of working on Trek’s first musical episode was too exciting to pass up, despite the obvious risks.

“There was a great potential to jump the shark,” says Downs, “because if you’re this grounded show, how are you going to do a musical in outer space? And to their credit, they crafted a great story. Once you understand the anomaly and how music pushes forward all of these interior feelings through song, then you have the potential for so many different kinds of songs.”

However, the prospect of singing for the viewing audience was not immediately appealing to every cast member, a fact that is lampshaded within the framework of the episode. Much of the Enterprise crew fears the subspace anomaly’s ability to make them spill their guts through song. Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) is afraid of getting into an argument with his girlfriend, Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano), and the pair ends up airing out their relationship issues on the bridge. (This song is, appropriately, entitled “A Private Conversation.”) Mount’s singing role is simpler than his castmates’ on a technical level, but leverages his comedic talents and awkward, boy-next-door charm.

“He crushed it,” says Downs. “It was like a country ballad gone wrong.”

Babs Olusanmokun, who portrays the multifaceted Dr. Joseph M’Benga, sings the bare minimum in the episode, and his character makes a point to tell his shipmates (and the viewer) that he does not sing . For his part, Downs cannot comment on any studio magic that may or may not have been employed to make the less seasoned vocalists in the cast more tuneful, but a listener with an ear for autotune will definitely detect some pitch correction.

Downs says that Ethan Peck, who portrays the young Lieutenant Spock , was among the more apprehensive cast members, but if anything, this becomes an asset to his performance in the episode. Spock has spent this season actively exploring his human feelings, even entering into a romantic relationship with Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush). Spock’s solo “I’m the X” sees Spock retreating into his shell, and the actor’s shyness feeds into the character’s conflict. Peck’s performance of the song, which was written for his smooth baritone, was the production’s most pleasant surprise. The temp track of the song that the crew worked with (until Peck recorded his version over a weekend, like the rest of the cast) featured a bigger, more conventionally Broadway vocal, but Peck performs it in character — superficially steady, but with strong emotional undercurrents just below the surface.

On a character level, however, the musical format might be most revelatory for Rebecca Romijn’s Commander Una Chin-Riley, aka Number One. Una began the series as a very guarded person harboring a secret that could end her career. Even as far back as her appearance in the 2019 Short Treks episode “Q&A,” her advice to new arrival Spock was to “keep your ‘freaky’ to yourself,” in this case referring to her love for Gilbert and Sullivan ( inherited from Romijn herself ). Since then, her much more consequential secrets have been revealed, and she finds herself unburdened, and uses the opportunity presented by the musical anomaly to encourage her mentees to do the same. Una’s songs, “Connect to Your Truth”’ and “Keeping Secrets,” see her offering advice to rising first officer James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) and her protege La’an (Chong), respectively, about the futility of withholding your full self from others.

“Subspace Rhapsody” concludes with an ensemble number about the crew’s common purpose and fellowship — an appropriate sentiment not only for a musical episode but for Strange New Worlds . Star Trek has always been about friendship and cooperation, but no previous incarnation (save, perhaps, for Deep Space Nine ) has granted each member of the cast such even amounts of attention and importance, from Captain Pike to Ensign Uhura. Previous Trek series could perhaps have sustained a musical episode (Ronald D. Moore even pitched one for DS9 back in the ’90s). For a series sold to fans as a return to “old-school Star Trek,” Strange New Worlds has taken some wild creative risks. While the show has resumed its time-tested episodic “problem of the week” format, its writers and producers have used this structure to experiment in ways that its sister shows, Discovery and Picard , could never have gotten away with. As corny as it might be, on Strange New Worlds it feels particularly appropriate to close a story with the entire crew singing about their trust in each other, in perfect harmony.

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How ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Brought Its Delightful Musical Episode to Life: ‘You’re Like, Wait, Spock Is Singing Now?!’

By Adam B. Vary

Adam B. Vary

Senior Entertainment Writer

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SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot — and musical! — developments in Season 2, Episode 9 of “ Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ,” currently streaming on Paramount+.

Since premiering in 2022, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” has already embraced body-swapping comedy, storybook fantasy and a crossover episode with the animated series “Star Trek: Lower Decks.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that for the penultimate episode for Season 2 of “Strange New Worlds,” executive producers Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman would mount the first-ever full-on musical episode in “Trek” history.

Popular on Variety

As Myers and Goldsman explain to Variety , “Subspace Rhapsody” was the result of more than six months of intense work by the cast and crew, as the songs were built around the actors’ respective vocal abilities by composers Kay Hanley (Letters to Cleo) and Tom Polce (Letters to Cleo, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”), in partnership with writers Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff. 

The showrunners also revealed which performance ultimately did not make the episode, and what to make of Kirk’s allusion to an it’s-complicated relationship with a woman named Carol.

How did the idea for this episode first arise?

Akiva Goldsman: The truth is it goes all the way back to Season 1 of “Star Trek: Picard.” We were sitting on set and [co-showrunner Michael] Chabon and I were talking about a musical [episode], and Chabon goes, “I know Lin-Manuel Miranda.” [Actor] Michelle Hurd was there and she was like, “Oh my God, call him!” And so then, like, three days later, Michael came in. And we said, “Did you call him?” And he goes, “Yeah, he didn’t call me back.” And so died the musical idea for that series. 

I love musicals, but know nothing about them. And then it turns out my partner Henry has done this before, and well. And so what a fucking delight! I mean, I had no idea what we were biting off. Henry clearly did.

So how did it finally happen for “Strange New Worlds”?

Myers: The idea for it came when were pitching what Season 2 should be. I remember, Bill [Wolkoff], one of our writers had a crazy idea, and we were like, ‘Well, that’s interesting, let’s try that!’ I did a bunch of musicals on “The Magicians,” and I did one on “Ugly Betty.” And so I just knew what a giant pain it would be — I mean, how difficult it was. I started making calls probably about six months before production.

Goldsman: We were lucky enough to suddenly have a cohort that knew how to do all these things, and they were collaborative. It was built around story and theme, and it was tailored to the vocal ranges of the particular actors. We ended up with an absurdly good cast on “Strange New Worlds.” Like, it makes no sense whatsoever. Usually, there’s a dud in the bunch. It was as if they all secretly had been coveting the idea of a musical their entire lives. So it was really good fortune how much everybody liked doing it.

There are so many threads in this episode that originated much earlier in the season: Spock and Chapel’s break-up, La’an’s feelings for Kirk, Uhura’s feelings of isolation. How did you build this episode’s the story around them?

Goldsman: We don’t break them episodically. We break the season first, so we know what our 10 episodes are — in terms of character development, really. We’re a hybridized object. We are episodic, fundamentally, in terms of plot, but serialized in terms of character arc. So we knew what the characters had to go through in the episode and that was connected to where they had come from and where they were going.

What was the most important thing for you to get right?

That was all that I came in pushing. And then everyone else jumped in and actually did it. We had someone to teach the people to sing. We had someone to teach them how to dance. The actual shooting of it, weirdly, was not as hard as you’d think, but only because it has months and months of work to lead up to it.

How much of that was happening in parallel with production and all the other episodes?

Myers: All of it! A lot of our cast were walking around set, shooting previous episodes, looking at what they were going to be singing, playing with each other. They would come in on the weekend and work on the dancing. 

How did you bridge the songs and the story?

Myers: We had broken an early concept of what the story would be, which we then shared with our composer and lyricist, and they would send it back to us and then we would give them thoughts. The two writers who wrote the episode were deeply involved in that. We were trying to make sure that all of the stuff that they were coming up with linked with what we were coming up with. They wanted the show to feel like the show, and we wanted the show to feel like a musical. So we kind of found this great place in the middle.

So, for example, who was the person who realized Spock could sing about being both Chapel’s ex and the x variable in an emotional equation?

Myers: I think that came from our composer and our lyricist. Usually, we’d say, “Here’s the emotional thing that’s supposed to happen. We know the beginning. And we know the end.” Because these are story scenes. It can’t be just a song that describes everything you know. This has to be a scene that reveals something. So we knew what was generally supposed to happen. And then we were like, “Now that you have that, go have fun. Come back to us when you have something.”

Celia Rose Gooding, Rebecca Romijn and Christina Chong are all singers, but did you know that the rest of the cast could sing as well?

Goldsman: No! Our composer played with all of them to see what their range was, and we wrote for them. I mean, I didn’t know Ethan could sing until I went, “Holy fuck, Ethan can sing!” Which is, by the way, kind of what happens when you watch the episode. You’re like, “Wait, Spock is singing now?”

Are there any musical areas that you explored that ultimately didn’t make it into the episode?

Goldsman: Well, we had one fantastic moment of contention, which we won. There’s two versions of the Klingons at the end.

Myers: And we did them both because we were like, we’ll try out everything. The other version is great, too. But this was the one that really kind of, you know, knocked us out. That’s why we wanted it.

What we see are the Klingons performing like they’re in a pop boy band, but you shot another genre with them as well?

Myers: We did an operatic one which was also great because the Klingons have a history with that. And it was also good. 

Myers: The boy band took you by surprise. It was not what you thought was going to happen. I’m delighted by it.

At one point, Kirk tells La’an that he’s in a complicated relationship with a woman named Carol, who is pregnant with his son — which “Trek” fans know is Dr. Carol Marcus, who first appears with Kirk’s grown son David in 1982’s “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Would that suggest we’ll meet Carol in Season 3 of “Strange New Worlds”?

Goldsman: I think what we can say is the conversation about James T. Kirk’s love life is not over.

Myers: There’s a lot of known history about his love life, and this part had never really been explored. So we thought, what an opportunity. That’s really what we try to do on the show: None of these things that we know about happening later are known to the people in it.

I will ask the very nerdy question: Did you do the math as far as when Kirk’s son is supposed to have been born vis-a-vis the timeline of the show?

Goldsman: Oh, we always do the math. Anytime we can make canon work, we do. I mean, we’ll body English around it now and then for the sake of a story. But fundamentally, we really try to adhere.

So would you do another musical episode? 

Goldsman: In a heartbeat. 

Myers: Absolutely. But now that’s a high bar. It has to earn itself and be purposeful and feel like a great thing to do. But we loved it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Recap/Review: Anything Goes In ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Musical “Subspace Rhapsody”

| August 3, 2023 | By: Anthony Pascale 325 comments so far

“Subspace Rhapsody”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 9 – Debuted Thursday, August 3, 2023 Written by Dana Horgan & Bill Wolkoff; with original songs by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce Directed by Dermott Downs

Strange New Worlds makes Star Trek history with an engaging episode that turns out to be more than just a musical.

I may be an ensign, but none of this works without me.

WARNING: Spoilers below!

 “We appear to be singing.”

The Enterprise is at the edge of the Alpha Quadrant studying a subspace fold Spock thinks can triple communication speed. His experiment is tying up the computer, so Uhura has to go old school, channeling her inner Ernestine to keep the ship connected. Elsewhere, we see Pike and Captain Batel arguing over their upcoming vacation and La’an struggling to keep her cool as she welcomes James T. Kirk, who’s beaming on board for some first officer training with Una. In sickbay, Chapel finally gets some good news with an acceptance letter to a prestigious fellowship with Dr. Roger Korby that is going to take her off the ship for a while… and away from Spock. Oblivious to this impending separation, the Vulcan is having trouble figuring out how to tap into the hypothesized super-communication capability of this subspace fold. He sees merit in a suggestion from Pelia to try using music, since the fundamental harmonics might work within the fold’s different laws of physics. Uhura is inspired by the idea and chooses a classic Cole Porter song for the experiment. The musical signal sent into the fold results in a pulse of energy that ripples through the ship, so Pike demands a status report. Spock complies, reporting that all systems are stable… except he is singing, and soon enough, others across the ship are doing the same: Pike gets updates from everyone on how “all is okay” – but in song, along with some nice harmonies. Even the captain joins in asking the question on all of our minds… “But why are we singing?” Cue the new choral opening credits, we are in for a musical journey.

So that happened, and Captain Pike wants answers about why there are musical outbreaks across his ship. Spock explains that sending the song into the fold has created a “quantum improbability field” and they are now tethered to the fold and a new “musical reality.” Got that? The analogy of the week is this reality has torn open like a zipper and the plan is to zip it back up by teching a lot of tech. While Spock and Uhura are tasked for finding the right frequency, Una and Kirk start connecting the shields and Heisenberg compensators to the deflector dish, as if this was just another Star Trek episode. But soon enough they start talking about command styles, and here comes the music again as Una has some advice for young Kirk in a jaunty tune about connecting to his truth and to his crew, as she has decided to move away from her more distant style. Others watch bemused as Kirk and Una ballroom dance down a corridor, but La’an is concerned and goes off to her quarters to launch into her own little torch song over her James T. Kirk, dead in another timeline, and how maybe it’s time (or is it?) for her to let go of her strict control and find some of her own happiness and freedom. Once her impressive solo is done, the security officer makes a beeline to the captain to reveal that the songs people sing are disclosing highly personal emotional information. This isn’t just an amusing musical interlude, it’s a security threat.

When I’m captain, I’m going to have the chief engineer do this dirty work.

 “This musical reality wants us to sing.”

Worried by La’an’s information, Pike is happy to find the various teams are ready to unzip this reality, and Una fires the rejiggered deflector beam at the fold to “collapse the musical reality back into our quantum state.” Sounds good, but the fold has other ideas, responding with a new, bigger energy surge. Things get even worse when the USS Cayuga hails and Captain Batel wants to “have a private conversation in a more discreet location about our canceled vacation.” Uh oh, now she’s singing too, and Pike joins her in a very awkward viewscreen duet that thankfully gets shut down when La’an closes the link. Now the improbability field has spread throughout Federation space; singing has infected 12 ships so far and Admiral April (a beautiful baritone, BTW) is pissed. Uhura posits that things are actually following the rules of musicals, so songs are being triggered by emotion and what’s most pressing on people’s minds. An exasperated Pike has a simple solution, which he can’t believe Spock agrees is worth considering: Shoot photon torpedoes at the fold. Just to be sure, La’an and Kirk are tasked to capture some particles to test. The security officer confides in Una that it isn’t a good idea for her to be around Kirk inside this musical reality… for “temporal” reasons. Number One gets the hint, but the first officer has some advice for her old friend… and here we go again. Una goes downtempo to sing-share how she spent her life keeping secrets, imploring her friend to not do the same. She also turns off the gravity for some inexplicable musical reason.

La’an and Kirk get to work transporting particles and she tries to open up to this Jim, but they are interrupted by an explosion. Spock’s experiment revealed the photon torpedo plan would only make things worse—a lot worse. Speaking of bad news, an incoming message from Klingon General Garkog makes it clear they have been hit by the improbability field too and it has caused “dishonor,” so stay out of their way. They are coming to blow up the fold, which will end up destroying the Federation and half the Empire, but just trying telling that to the Klingons. Pike needs a Plan C fast. Uhura wants to capture data from the moment a song begins so she takes Spock to the port galley, where he sees Christine celebrating landing that fellowship. So yeah, this should do it. He awkwardly asks why she didn’t tell him the good news and Nyota is ready with the tricorder as it’s time for Nurse Chapel’s big number. Christine joyously sings how she is “ready” to see her dreams come true, the whole bar lifts her up (literally) as she shares how for her the sky is the limit and if that means she has to leave a certain Vulcan behind, so be it. Ouch, dumped by dance number.

My girlfriend finally has a first name!

“We’re connected as a crew…”

Back to La’an: As she and Kirk analyze K’Tinga battle tactics, she gets the jump on the musical reality, spilling the time travel beans about falling in love with a Jim from another reality. That Kirk could see the version of her she wishes she could be, but he’s gone. Lt. Kirk isn’t the same, but she kind of likes the way he looks at her too—but before things progress, he drops the bomb that canon dictates for him to have a pregnant girlfriend around this time. So much for this pair, but she did avoid breaking into song. In engineering, Spock is analyzing musical data and scrutinizing Christine’s in particular, triggering his own sad song. The Vulcan has done the calculus and sees he is the variable, deciding he will no longer be solving for human emotions. Singing ceased, a disheartened Spock exits engineering and leaves Uhura alone to find the pattern that will get them out of this mess. This is the musical number we have been waiting for as she goes full Grammy-winning Broadway star, belting out her journey from the pain of loss to her loneliness to working her way through to her new path. She may have started alone but now she is the communications officer, she keeps everyone connected… and on the Enterprise, she is never alone. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Uhura has figured it out and briefs the captain on how each musical moment caused spikes in the field, with a boost for moments with multiple singers. To shatter the field, it’s going to take a lot more singers. Pike tells her she is the one who can motivate everyone to share an emotion together. No pressure! The coms officer opens hailing frequencies to talk to the crew, breaking through the chaos and refocusing them to come together to fight for their lives. Soon enough, one by one, others begin to sing and dance their way through the ship… yes, it’s the big finale number. Together this crew sees their purpose as they function better all together, and it’s working. Uhura’s field boosting meter climbs, but it’s still not enough voices so Pike opens a channel to General Garkog as his bridge boy band to drop some K-Pop beats (that’s K for Klingon, get it?). The Klingons plus one last push on the Enterprise bridge does it; the fold bursts and the musical reality returns to the songbooks. La’an and Una take a moment over drinks to think about what they just learned. Pike and Batel come to a romantic dinner accord, but their vacation will have to wait as she has a new priority one assignment. Uhura takes us out with a final log, reporting things are back to normal across all affected ships, Klingons included. But she leaves us humming an earworm, and a nice end credits medley as this one-of-a-kind musical journey comes to a close.

Young man there’s a place you can go…

More than an anomaly

Well this is it, the swingiest of the “big swings” of season 2. Singing is nothing new in Star Trek, starting with Uhura’s song and DS9 even had a resident crooner , but a full-on musical episode with 10 original songs is on a whole new level. “Subspace Rhapsody” will surely be a matter of taste, with fans of musicals mostly likely to relish it. But even those (like this reviewer) who are not necessarily fans of the genre can be impressed by the enormous effort that went into this episode with superb levels of coordination between script and songs, choreography, and performance, especially from the professional singers in the cast like Celia Rose Gooding and Christina Chong. Analyzing “Subpace Rhapsody” as a musical will be left to TrekMovie’s musical-loving Laurie Ulster below, but behind the music, this was still a strong Star Trek episode that brought fascinating twists to familiar beats but also tied into the emotional throughlines of the second season.

Creating a musical episode has been a stated goal of executive producer Alex Kurtzman for years, yet there was still a welcome level of logic to keep the story within the rules of the Star Trek universe. From eddies to tears to ruptures, subspace anomalies have been the gift that keeps on giving to the franchise, so it makes sense to build this episode around a “subspace fold” which created the “musical reality.” And for a show that usually likes to avoid engineering solutions, Uhura’s Giga Electronvolt scale and “We need melodies and harmonies with tone ratios that achieve both algorithmic and logarithmic balance on a mass scale” fits right in with some of the franchise’s best technobabble, however, the logic only holds together at a surface level. While the explanation of the musical reality was better than a handwave, the logic falls apart upon scrutiny, but this isn’t the kind of episode where that really matters.

When I meet Khan, he isn’t going to believe this.

Even with the unique musical execution, this episode still had a nice affinity with the broader sub-genre of episodes featuring crews acting out of character, like TNG’s “The Naked Now” to DS9’s “Fascination.” The internal logic of where the music, lyrics, harmonies, and choreography were coming from might have worked better if there was some identified entity manipulating things, like the way the Hirogen transformed the Voyager crew into characters from a World War II movie in “The Killing Game.” However, that would actually give up the key that makes this episode hold together. Each of these songs was deeply rooted in long-developed character arcs, and even acted as a bit of a season resolution with some emotional breakthroughs, from Una and La’an learning to let go of their secrets and control to Christine embracing her ambition and agency, and especially Uhura finding her true calling on the Enterprise. That being said the impact of the various songs was still mixed and perhaps the most emotional scene of the episode (with La’an opening up to Kirk) had no singing at all.

The singing and the dancing certainly kept this bottle episode on the lighter side, and this was buoyed by some welcome humor, with Anson Mount’s Pike again delivering the best subtle comic beats. But there were still some clear stakes set up with a ticking clock and the threat posed by the Klingons. It was a delight to see Hemmer actor Bruce Horak return again in season 2, this time as Klingon General Garkog where he and his boy band bridge crew resolved their arc with humor as they danced their way into the finale number, outrageous gold uniforms and all. Looking closely at what actually happened during some of these songs shows how this episode was a big pivot point for many of the characters, like putting Spock back on a path to logic. Pike and Batel’s romance resolution coming right before her priority one assignment almost certainly sets up the stakes for the finale, possibly even setting up something tragic. The episode even found time to tie into some key bits of canon for some characters, including Kirk mentioning Carol Marcus and her pregnancy (with his son David) and Christine’s coming fellowship with (future fiancé) Roger Korby. Musicals may not be my cup of tea, but there was still enough humor, plot, and character going on to maintain interest. And even someone who has never seen an episode of Glee can be moved by some of the performances here, especially Uhura’s “Keep Us Connected” and the grand “We Are One” finale, both of which beautifully embody the themes of Star Trek.

Remember when you thought forced roleplaying Lord of the Rings was weird?

A most confounding thing, I appear to be singing…

Analysis by Laurie Ulster

I’m not an expert on musicals, but I am definitely a fan of good ones and this fits the bill. The songs come in a variety of styles and tempos, evoking memories of big moments in familiar musicals but with their own unique twists, and the theme of the episode—difficulty communicating—is echoed for La’an, Una, Spock, Uhura, Pike, and Chapel as they reveal their innermost thoughts in song.

Things start off with humor and confusion when Spock starts singing his status report and when the rest of the crew joins in with musical updates on phaser banks and inertial dampers, it’s fun to imagine the Strange New Worlds fan who doesn’t keep up on industry news and had no idea what was coming. But as we move forward into the episode, the humor remains but songs get personal and revealing, taking each character on a journey they may not have been aware of until the tunes came pouring out. Every song moves each character forward in ways spoken dialogue never could, making this work as a perfect penultimate episode as the season: They will take their revelations forward into whatever comes next.

Being red shirts, none of these officers will be seen again

Whether you want to sing along about deflector shields or deepest emotional truths, you’ll find yourself hearing these tunes in your head and wanting to snap up the soundtrack. The songs are beautifully written, with engaging, clever, lyrics woven into musical highs and lows that feel both familiar unpredictable at the same time—no easy task. When Celia Rose Gooding belts out the solo we’ve been waiting for, one can’t help but think about how Nichelle Nichols would’ve felt had she been able to see it. I believe she would have wept for joy seeing how her legacy as both a talented singer and an expert communications officer has come to take its place in the much-deserved spotlight; I teared up thinking about it on my first viewing and felt the exultation in my soul as the song reached its height.

As a musical, it succeeds on every level. The “science” of the story never quite makes sense, but the consequences of each character’s journey are as real as it gets. With its clever and often ebullient choreography (both in dance numbers and camera moves) and catchy tunes, this episode has quickly become one of my most rewatchable favorites.

Will you do the Enterprise Fandango!

Final thoughts

“Subspace Rhapsody” will surely go down as one of the most talked about episodes in the franchise. Musical lovers will rejoice while others will file it away as silly or even corny. Yet the sheer artistry and audaciousness make it worth watching, at least once. While it is a jarring tonal shift from last week’s dark episode, it still fits well within the season, providing a key pivot point heading into next week’s season finale. And maybe this is one of those episodes that benefits from avoiding overthinking analysis, so this time, just sit back and enjoy the show… and sing along if you are so inclined.

Gold is the new black

• Begins with communications officers log, Stardate 2398.3.
• This is director Dermott Downs’ first time with Star Trek, bringing his experience of directing a musical crossover of The Flash and Supergirl, “ Duet .”
• The comment about people becoming bunnies is a reference to one of the songs in the   Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode.
• With a runtime of 62:34, this is the second-longest episode of the series, just 12 seconds shorter than the season 1 finale
• After appearing multiple times through both seasons, Captain Batel finally gets a first name: Marie.
• Number One’s love of Gilbert and Sullivan was first revealed in the Short Treks episode “Q&A.”
• Starfleet ships affected by the musical reality include Lexington, Republic, Potemkin, Cayuga, Hood, and Kongo. Klingon ships include Forcas and Harlak.
• Spock was dispatched to handle bloodwine diplomacy with the Klingons, something he learned in the season premiere.
• The soundtrack for this episode is already available online .

I’m never going to tell Bones this happened.

More to come

Every Friday, the TrekMovie.com All Access Star Trek podcast covers the latest news in the Star Trek Universe and discusses the latest episode. The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify ,  Pocket Casts ,  Stitcher and is part of the TrekMovie Podcast Network.

Season 2 episodes drop weekly on Thursdays on  Paramount+ in the U.S, the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Season 2 is also available on SkyShowtime elsewhere in Europe. The second season will also be available to stream on Paramount+ in South Korea, with premiere dates to be announced.

Keep up with news about the  Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com .

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Strange New Worlds

Prep Begins For ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 3 Finale; Cast And Directors Share BTS Images

I think this episode is SNW’s “Naked Time”…. a sci-fi plot to reveal who these people are to us and to each other.

I’m not a musical fan, but I think they did it in a Star Trek-y way. Bravo!

Great observation re: The Naked Time. I think that aspect worked as well.

I didn’t get to see this episode until today, because of being out of town visiting an ill parent.

I mostly adored the episode, but I hated, hated, HATED the idea that TOS Spock restrains his emotions because Chapel broke his heart. I really, REALLY want Spock to follow Vulcan custom in restraining his emotions because he believes in the philosophy or because he believes that those ultra-strong Vulcan emotions can be dangerous to others. Having him be Chapel’s bitter and self-protective ex is just such a terrible thing to do to a character who’s always been a huge role model for ethical behavior.

I also thought that the finale should have been inspired by the CAPTAIN of the ship and not by the communications officer. It’s true that Gooding is a much better singer than Mount, but they could have had Mount give an inspiring speech — we know Mount excels at that — and have the crew break into song in response.

Aside from those two things — one major and one minor — I was hugely impressed by how much creativity, talent, and work went into this episode. Aside from the Spock problem, I was delighted during the whole thing.

Am I the only one picking up a vibe that Captain Batel may not survive the season finale?

That’s definitely the vibe I get, as well. I think, as with Spock/Chapel/T’Pring, this show is rearranging the deck chairs to get Pike to fall back in love with Vina as the love of his life.

I’m getting a vibe that many of the characters are in for a tragic end:

– Pike, for obvious reasons – Batel, as stated above – Chapel; it may not be tragic, but she’s going to leave the ship for Korby, and her relationship with Spock lasted all of three weeks – M’Benga, for reasons set out last week – La’an, whose romance with Kirk is clearly doomed to fail – Una, who never appeared elsewhere in the franchise

M’Benga served under Kirk in TOS didn’t he? When Bones was CMO.

Well, perhaps I was speaking too metaphorically. In M’Benga’s case I meant that he gets demoted, if not temporarily drummed out of Starfleet.

Aaaaah ok, I see what you mean!

But there still is Dr. Piper before McCoy.

Doesn’t mean Number one wasn’t around…. She just wanted mention in the TOS: the fact she was famous in the 24th Century, gives facts to reason she went on after the Enterprise

If there’s one criticism I think we should collectively drop, it’s “this person or that situation” wasn’t mentioned. It’s just the way these things go.

Una not appearing anywhere else doesn’t necessarily mean that she is in for a tragic end. She might go on to have a distinguished career we just haven’t heard of. She’s clearly notable since Boimler idolises her!

I picked that up in the trailers when they showed the shot of her on the planet with the huge Gorn ship in the sky.

Ok.. this worked and worked well. It is a lot of fun. I’m a little shocked at that. Kudos to whoever they brought in to write and compose the music, they did a great job, as did the cast. I thought they were trying to hard to bring in the scientific explanation part to all this. In my opinion, they should’ve dialed that back and just gone with it. The Klingon performance was easily my favorite part.

I particularly agree to the Klingon performance part. It would have been better (and perhaps even more funnier) to break some more of their stoic interior to show more of the K(lingon)-fun side.

The music and songs were 👌👌

So, my approach to this episode was to view it as a stand-alone, out-of-canon, alternative take on Star Trek — not unlike the BACK TO THE FUTURE musical on Broadway and the West End. In-universe, the premise is patently absurd, up there with transforming people into salamanders (“Threshold”) or amphibians (“Genesis”); I tend to excise those gems from the Trek historical record, too, and that’s what I’m doing here.

I admit I’m getting tired of having to do this twice in one season, and the prevalence of lighthearted comedy more broadly is absolutely souring me on the whole series, which is becoming Roger Moore’s Trek.

But within that context, “Subspace Rhapsody” was mostly enjoyable fun, if not a runaway hit. None of the numbers struck me as the next “Memory” from CATS or “Last Night of the World” from MISS SAIGON. But they were more earwormy than the aforementioned BACK TO THE FUTURE, which — with the exception of “This One’s for the Dreamers” was starkly devoid of earworms. I need to listen to the soundtrack to firm up my opinion, but the numbers with La’an and Kirk, Uhura’s solo, and Chapel in the bar were memorable. Celia Rose-Gooding and Jess Bush were the best singers; Ethan Peck was far and away the worst. (Listening to him was grating.)

One disappointment was that all the numbers were too peppy, the lyrics somewhat banal. The writers lately seem intent on lecturing us about how noble Starfleet is; they need to be *showing* us, not telling us. None of the musical numbers were in a minor key.

In particular, I was hoping they would adapt La’an’s theme, which we heard in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” and again in “Lost in Translation” into a one of the musical numbers; they kept tantalizing us with the prospect, but never followed through. The theme is beautiful, right up there with Ilia’s theme from TMP, and putting lyrics to it might have had “Frozen” written all over it. That was a real missed opportunity.

I was also hoping we might finally hear the TOS theme put to Rodddenberry’s infamous lyrics, or even “A Star Beyond Time” (the lyrical version of Ilia’s theme) in the opening credits. No such luck. Similarly, the teaser gave me some hope we might get a creative new rendition of “Anything Goes”; as things stood, Spielberg has nothing to worry about.

Part of the problem is that — at the risk of channeling Tom Cruise’s exhortations to lure us back to cinemas — musicals are best enjoyed onstage, in a theater, with an audience. The communal experience is part of the attraction. I tried unsuccessfully to score tickets to HAMILTON in New York in 2019, and I ended up watching it on Disney+ during the pandemic. It’s just not the same watching a musical on television, or for that matter on celluloid. I think this is part of the reason CATS (the movie) was so widely reviled; you just don’t capture the same magic that you do seeing it in the West End, with all the posters advertising it on the Tube on the way to the theater (and I’ll freely admit this is why I like the West End more than Broadway!).

I’ll see how it fares on a rewatch — the plot itself was dull — but the real legacy will be whether the soundtrack is worth adding to one’s iTunes playlist.

Contrary to what some are saying, Ethan Peck’s singing voice is more than acceptable. In fact, he carries a tune rather well. I was especially touched by his voice and the lyrics on the song he sang about losing Christine (“… the Ex”). He sang the song with just the right amount of disappointment and pathos.

Just listened to Ethan Peck singing: I totally understand that someone can personally find a voice grating (don’t play me a Phil Collins ballad…), but I liked it and objectively he had great vocal control jumping between higher and lower registers and knowing where to employ vibrato or not. I would just kinda hope that Spock choses to abandon exploring emotions after an intense and nuanced exploration of the topic in-series, not just because he got dumped :D. I’d just think Spock being the thinker he is might not reduce such a decision to only one factor. Feels a bit simplistic. But well, maybe sometimes things are simple like that.

Klingon boy band for the win.

Perhaps VOY (or was it ENT?) had it right all along: all Star Trek needs was more boy bands. :)

Yes! I was not denied Bruce Horak after all! I love this.

Where was he? A Klingon perhaps?

Yes he was a Klingon

I like Horak and did NOT recognize him as the Klingon captain. I like how they’re using him as their version of Vaughn Armstrong or Jeffrey Combs or Kenneth Mitchell, casting him over and over in new and various roles.

I hope they keep using him over and over like those three. I’d really like that.

100% want Horak to be the new Combs

I do too for gay reasons

those are perfectly good reasons

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Yes! If I can’t have him as my favourite Aenar engineer, I will absolutely take him as an R&B singing Klingon

Right. We couldn’t have him as engineer. Elderly actresses need work, too!

Easily the best episode of the season.

In pure of raw entertainment? I think you’re right. If I’m honest, as much as I despise the canonical problems of Season 2 Episode 3, I think it’s my favorite episode of this entire series, let alone this season.

I thought Subspace Rhapsody was great, but Ad Astra Per Aspera was pure Trek and the best of the season, perhaps best SNW episode to date. I loved Those Old Scientists , too.

No, M’Benga ep and lower desk crossover were the best this season

This was such a beautiful episode!

“Ok, now that Pike is gone, who should we make captain of the Enterprise?” “How about James Kirk? He practically lives there already.”

When Kirk was saying to La’an about how he never stays in one place, I couldn’t help but think that.

Yeah. He’s showing up WAY too much. And it’s really feeling forced.

I just wish they would make Sam Kirk a main character so that is the Kirk connection.

Prime Kirk has shown up twice. That’s not that much.

I haven’t seen Prime Kirk once. But three Kirk appearances is too much. It still feels forced.

Don’t poke the ML31 Prime Universe bear!

He’s shown up twice in this reality. Lost In Translation and Subspace Rhapsody.

Both times it was this SNW timeline Kirk. Not prime Kirk.

Remember… Episode 2.3 said this is all an alternate timeline.

I don’t remember. Certainly that episode occurred in a different timeline with Kirk from yet a third timeline. Could you please indicate who said what as I’d like to go back and see it. Thanks.

Thorny is correct. ML31 is trolling you. He insists that everyone follow his head canon about SNW’s timeline.

If you are going to speak on my behalf I would appreciate it if you would be accurate.

This is not “head canon”. I never was one of those who considered the show an alternate time line from the start. Many here did as it was the only way they could reconcile the obvious inconsistencies. I only started going along with the alternate thing once the show itself admitted it was.

Please cease misrepresenting me.

That episode was in a different timeline because it was a part of this show and the entire show is occurring in a different timeline. The episode confirmed it in very rock solid fashion. Not only were there so very many inconsistencies already but the episode showed more. No Eugenics wars? Khan a child in the 2020’s? And for those who still didn’t believe their eyes they had the Romulan character actually spell everything out of those who still weren’t picking up on it. She said the Eugenics wars were supposed to happen in 1992. But in that timeline they didn’t. It’s towards the end. Very hard to miss.

All that was confirmed is that the Eugenics War is supposed to have happened later now. It also isn’t clear “when” this change took place. Enterprise discussed the Eugenics War being in the 1990s a few episodes after the temporal war ended, but Voyager showed a war-free 90s before we even heard of the temporal war.

It doesn’t matter “when” a change took place. The fact is it did. Which places SNW squarely in an alternative timeline at the very least. An outright reboot at most. It’s confirmed to be an alternate.

The Voyager episode was in LA. How many bombings of LA took place in WWI or II? It’s very likely, like the other WW’s, there were no battles in N America. Life went on there very likely as usual.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. We’ve seen multiple time travel episodes that have changed things in the past, perhaps subtly, but changes nonetheless. If every change results in an alternate timeline, we haven’t been in the “prime timeline” for decades.

I know I brought up Sisko becoming Gabrielle Bell, and you dismissed at such a minor change that the timeline “fixed” itself… how could the timeline, a nebulous construct that has no agency, somehow fix itself That wasn’t even the biggest change DS9 made. Trials and Tribbleations straight up changes events that we saw in TOS – with DS9 characters taking the place of random extras seen in the Trouble with Tribbles.

VOY is probably the biggest culprit when it comes to time travel shenanigans. Voyager went back to 1996, and there was very much not a Eugenics war going on. In Timeless, Chakotay and Kim drastically change the timeline by saving Voyager from crashing on a planet and killing everyone. Using your logic, the prime timeline is actually the timeline in which Voyager was destroyed. Then you can move on to End Game, in which the timeline is again drastically changed, this time by Janeway going back in time and not only getting Voyager home decades earlier, but being instrumental in the near destruction of the Borg. The crazy thing, the previous timeline where Voyager eventually makes it home decades later isn’t even apart of the prime timeline, as it’s a part of the timeline created by the events from Timeless.

Alternatively, you could look at it as such: as long as certain events happen, the timeline will stay intact. And, in the case of SNW, it may not necessarily matter when the Eugenics war took place, as long as it takes place prior to (or even concurrently with) WWIII, and before first contact with the Vulcans, the Trek timeline will stay intact. Basically, WWIII was the catalyst for humanity to change and reach out to the stars. The rough dates for the war are from 2026 to 2053, first contact with Vulcans occurred in 2063. So there’s a massive period of time for events to happen in such a way to lead up Zephram Cochrane’s warp test happening on April 5, 2063.

Tine changes that do not radically affect things, like Christopher knowing his kid would go to Saturn, don’t make major changes as far as Trek lore is concerned. But if you want to get technical then yes, all those tiny changes that affect next to nothing can indeed be considered alternate timelines. However Trek has never considered them as such. They have been “fixed”. The Voyager example is poor. There is nothing to suggest there were no Eugenics Wars going on in some far off place on the other side of the planet.

And yes, one can argue that Endgame was indeed an alternate as well. That one does have merit. The difference is nearly nothing about what happened in that original timeline was shown on any Trek show anywhere. As far as Trek is concerned the one we followed is the Prime. But I give you that situation is not as straight forward so good call on that one.

The difference here is that Kahn & the Eugenics Wars have been firmly established in Trek lore. In both a show and a feature film. That date is prime. Moving something so established only to cover mistakes made in your own show I just can’t count as “preserving the time line”. Something that huge in history just can’t be blown off and still think everything works out with minimal changes.

I don’t know where you got the idea that WWIII was the catalyst that changed humanity. Honestly everything regarding that is a bit murky and not all that clear as it was never really addressed in any show or movie. In fact, while not outright said it was implied on TOS that the Eugenics Wars & WWIII were possibly one in the same. Until TNG’s pilot episode.

Let me ask you this… Since the First Contact date seems so important to you suppose the Romulan went back to 2063 to screw with that and there was no First Contact until say 2083. Would you still think everything on SNW was prime?

“The difference is nearly nothing about what happened in that original timeline was shown on any Trek show anywhere.”

This is a great point actually and again a big problem with prequels versus sequels. It’s true Voyager altered the timeline multiple times and you can very much argue they are living in an altered timeline. The big difference is though Voyager was changing events we haven’t seen yet . We have no idea what the future was suppose to look like until they showed us in an episode. But it didn’t matter regardless because we knew it was there to be changed. That was the story, ie, how will they change it to keep the timeline we care about in tact. Those events had no bearing on the overall story because it’s stuff we didn’t know about until literally when it was presented in the episode. That’s not the same thing.

In his case, A. the Eugenics war happened well in the past and B. It’s an event that has been pounded into us for over 50 years now. It’s the core of both canon history but the show’s history as well. So when you alter that, it’s a big deal . And then when you alter it literally centuries in the past as well, of course it’s going to create other issues because it’s altering a story line that takes place before the other shows even existed. In Voyager’s case, being a sequel show and the last sequel show for nearly 2 decades it didn’t cause any issues to other shows because there was nothing else ahead of it at the time. They could’ve kept all that alternate history if they wanted and no one would’ve blinked because from our POV the future is still being written just the same.

But this also shows why there were so many reset buttons in Star Trek. I know people got sick of them, me included but it was done so people wouldn’t look at every time travel story as being part of an alternate timeline. It would’ve been confusing. And back then Star Trek was more episodic so they wanted people to feel whatever was changed it didn’t effect anything you saw last week or will in the next season.

But when you change something soooo far in the past and you make it clear time DIDN’T reset itself in this case, then you are creating bigger problems down the line. People can certainly argue SNW isn’t in a altered timeline, but guys it’s very simple, is Space Seed and TWOK still considered canon or not? Because if it is and Kirk and Spock still encountered Khan and thinks he still came from Earth in 1996 when just a few years prior we were told he came much later, then one of these is obviously not the case anymore. So either ONE of them is now operating in an altered tilmeline, but they both can’t be true.

And I’m going to assume for most fans it would be considered blasphemy to consider SS and TWOK as the ‘alternate’ history now.

That was pretty much what I was getting at with the ENDGAME scenario. At least one person got it. :)

I know this is why you don’t want prequels. But I still say while more difficult to navigate prequels can still be done and done well. You just need people who not only can write compelling stories but also are familiar with the source material to keep things in line.

That’s certainly part of it, but the main issue is I just generally prefer to go forward in a story, not backwards, especially in something like Star Trek. But of course I agree when they are done right, then I can easily be persuaded to like them. I loved Better Call Saul for example and love it as much as Breaking Bad.

As for Star Trek we have three prequels leading into TOS and I don’t think any of them did a great job leading into it although ironically Enterprise seem to been the best, but it was a century away from that show and not a few years like DIS and SNW was so it had more leeway.

I mean, ML31, I get what you’re saying. Khan in Space Seed citing 1992 seems incompatible with Khan child in 2022. But come on… this is shadowy temporal war time travel voodoo. What did that very same Romulan say? Time is like a “black box”? “So many people have tried to influence these events, you know, to delay them or stop them… And it’s almost as if time itself is pushing back, and events reinsert themselves…”?

But a more basic issue is La’an herself (when does she think her ancestor Khan lived?), or even Starfleet and Federation, if you prefer. If Khan/Eugenics Wars are a part of history, how is it that Prime and SNW-alternate timelines align at all? Why are we checking on exact dates for Pike’s command, and Enterprise voyages, and Talosians… ? Pike is going to have a similar career on a similar starship in a similar political setting and then die in an identical way at the same time in Prime and SNW-alternate, even though World War-level history was irrevocably changed 250 years prior?!

All I am saying is that while on the surface it seems like history changed, there can be many explanations. Time travel is … well… fiction. For example, consider this: the events of Tom/Tom/Tom episode THEMSELVES occur in an alternate timeline. La’an from Prime and Kirk from Alternate together jump to Another Alternate past. Events there are not Prime, once La’an’s mission succeeds, she is returned to Prime. Or of course, consider the agent at the end of the episode, who’s entire job is to repair the timeline–like Terminator 2 or that cool Seven of Nine chronoton frequency time travel episode, the nature of (fictional) time travel is such that they can keep going back in time until they get it right. (And the agent even says “Those events were never supposed to happen”!).

Your interpretation is valid. But, it’s not “Spock is Vulcan” level of establishment. We can quite easily still be in Prime. That’s a very valid view also.

Stop gatekeeping.

So to you “gatekeeping” is accepting what is actually being shown in the episodes?

Sorry. it’s not.

Gatekeeping is when you insist everyone must believe what you believe. What happened on screen DOES NOT indicate an alternative timeline. That is something you have chosen to take from it, and that’s fine, but stop pushing that belief on everyone else.

So if I believe that Spock is a Vulcan but someone else says he’s Andorian it is out of line to say he is actually Vulcan?

🙄. That’s really they only response I can give you inane comparison/question.

So with that response I can only take that to mean that it is NOT gatekeeping to say to someone who believes that Spock is an Andorian that he is really a Vulcan. Therefore, no. I am not gatekeeping at all and you just opted to not admit it.

*sigh* I’ve learned at my age that certain arguments are simply not worth my time and energy, and this is one of them.

I was fully expecting to really dislike this episode and it completely proved me wrong. It was a great character exploration and really revealed a lot about the motivation of the crew. I loved the end hearing the classis TOS ending theme.

Well done to the cast and crew! LLAP🖖👏👏👍

In my humble opinion, Ethan Peck’s singing was just as good as several of the others; his song of rejection by Christine was most touching, and worth repeat listening several times over!

Peck was decent, but I do think there was a little more Autotune applied for him than for, say Bush or Romijn.

Agreed! A smart, touching, enjoyable romp on the ol’ gal, Enterprise.

Loving this season and the series, *thank you* cast & crew 👍

This episode was one of the most silliest/corniest/bizarre episodes of Trek i have ever watched.

To me it’s right up there with DS9’s Move Along Home in terms of corny lol and viewing this episode as a full on comedy makes it much better imo.

Personally i was laughing through the episode with just how silly i thought it was.

I’m fine with musical episodes (A TV show called Sanctuary had a musical episode named Fugue that was good and Buffy’s Once More With Feeling was great) and if it was just the characters singing it would’ve been better.

But with all the dancing i felt like i was watching a dancing competition show like Strictly Come Dancing but more corny lol.

Criticisms aside it was way better then i thought going in and it was clear the actors enjoyed themselves.

Don’t get me wrong i appreciate SNW doing something new in Live Action Trek but sadly this episode just isn’t for me. I’m sure others will enjoy it and more power to them.

Strange that you liked BtVS’s Once More With Feeling but not this, since they are very similar. And that had quite a bit of dancing, too, including the Xander and Anya number.

Big “Once More With Feeling” fan here. My perspective on why I felt this was well done but, for me, isn’t on the same level: each song in OMWF was a stand-alone hit. And they all had different vibes and styles, yet held an interconnected theme between them — even literally, towards the end, as the elements from the different songs blended together towards the climax with Sweet. (I love that Buffy and friends actually lost against him. Their unearthed misery his reward.)

I felt none of that depth and weight with this episode.

Yes, each SNW cast member belted their numbers out well, and they worked in the current story themes well enough, but it all just felt fairly… generic? Chapel’s brutal, throaty kick to Spock’s naive heart and the angry Klingon crew’s brief, but hilarious number being the only real stand-outs for me.

The rest just felt kind of by-the-numbers. Competent, well performed, but generally uninspiring.

Of course, I may discover a fondness for it on rewatches. I’m open to that. And, of course, the impact of this on each viewer will vary, and that’s absolutely fair.

OMWF is an extremely high bar. That this even approaches that bar is something I’ll happily give it credit for.

I’m chasing ST:SNW, eager to hold it in a warm embrace and let it’s science fiction narrative wash over me, to add subsidy to my intellect and embellishment to my sense of wonder. But SNW runs from me, always remaining just out of reach. Just when I feel I am catching up, getting close, then……it surges away from me again, darting to the left and to the right and to this way and to that. Like an over-possessive spurned lover I cry out “come back to me, be what I want you to be, love me like I have loved you….”, and in response it titters flippantly, mockingly, and then performs an impossible loop, now behind me to kick my posterior and to send me sprawling face-first into the indignity of the parched and dusty earth. And there, lying in a pool of sticky mud formed by my own tears, weeping, mewling, I understand finally, that when you truly have loved something, you need to let it go……..

Yep. To me, this was the nail in the coffin to all Trek pre-Secret Hideout. It’s over. This is “Star Trek” now, even if it’s nothing close to what I think should be allowed to use that name. I really had high hopes with SNW season 1. I was willing to maintain some level of hope with season 2, but now that’s gone. Picard season 3 will probably be the last thing that ever feels like the Trek I knew and loved. I’m willing to accep that SNW, Discovery, and whatever comes next is for a new generation. But I honestly just don’t think the jump between TOS and TNG was anywhere close to as jarring as this.

For all those who gave up after TNG premiered, who were dyed-in-the-wool TOS fans who just couldn’t accept the change, I think I finally understand their pain.

The difference is when TNG came along it wasn’t a change. It was further down the line. It didn’t undo anything TOS did. Some may not have liked the time shift… I was one of them. I wanted to go forward from the feature film time. But this feels like they are just making their own version of Trek. I give them credit… I thought they wanted to “overwrite” older Trek but they have since made it clear it isn’t. That it’s a brand new KU like timeline. So at least there’s that.

TNG season 1 is a huge tonal change from TOS, with unlikable characters and Roddenberry’s absurd rules like “no conflicted characters” that didn’t exist in the 60s. This was gradually corrected in seasons 2 and 3.

If you mean different in that the characters are acting different with a slightly different set of behavioral rules, then sure. But I would argue that while this was Roddenberry throwing more of his personal view into the show it was still reasonable in that humanity would have certainly had some perspectives change over 80 years. But it still didn’t undo anything established from TOS. It really built on that.

I’m just curious, but have you liked any episodes in season 1 or 2?

Yes, I actually liked most of season 1. Season 2 had a few that I’ve enjoyed, but have to take them as not part of canon (and even on some levels just plain not “Star Trek”) to enjoy them. Ad Astra per Aspera, Lost in Translation, and Under the Cloak of War had some good elements. I even liked Charades, but I had to suspend my disbelief when it came to how I really believe Spock would handle being fully human. But I can’t say I really just loved any of these in season 2, and there’s certainly more I don’t have to watch ever again. It just doesn’t feel like Star Trek to me anymore. I’ll watch the final episode and see where that leaves things. But if this season is any indication as to the approach to the potential season 3, I know I won’t be looking forward to it.

Ok fair enough! And I actually don’t disagree much with your assessment. Yeah I too thought season 1 was a lot stronger overall. For me that was the strongest first season of any Trek show since Voyager’s first season. I loved 8 out of the 10 episodes and that’s even including the canon issues I had with them. But I don’t include canon when I rate the episodes, just the quality of the stories themselves.

With season 2, I think I like it more than you do, but even for me, I really only loved 3 of the episodes so far. I don’t hate the others, just not as impressed with them (but episode 4 is my lowest rated easily). I still think season 2 is good overall but a big step down from season 1.

I guess the honeymoon is over. ;)

There are about 6 good episodes in each season. there are some episodes, like this one, that are clearly filler episodes in a 20-episode season arc, but not in 10. This was as disappointing as the episode in season 1 with the sets decorated as a castle…I can’t remember the name. No, strike that, this was annoying.

Yes, I like Season 1 just fine. The writing was perhaps a little blasé, but the sets are gorgeous and I really do like every one of the actors and the parts they play. Season two though, not so flash for me, the only two episodes I thought were fairly good were the one’s where Spock was humanised and the one about Uhura communicating with the Nebula lifeforms. Also kind of liked the planet episode where everyone forgets. The rest of the episodes though have disappointed me somewhat, I think it is because the writing has in my opinion been too simplistic, all gravy but little meat. I see a lot of people gushing over every episode of SNW though, so I can be thankful that SNG is mainly hitting it’s target audience. Unfortunately the idiosyncrasies of my receptiveness now lay on the periphery of the target rather than in the centre.

“ all gravy but little meat” yes, from the little I’ve seen, like broad strokes of drama, maybe a bit generic (unrequited love, superfighter during war background etc.), not too complicated or nuanced. That what you mean?

Yes, I think that is it, the actors in the show are all fantastic, but it is like they are being served comic book dialog by the writers. Or like a stone that spends all the time skipping over the water while suffering none of the drama of being submerged for a time. Or like cotton candy, put it in your mouth and marvel at the taste, but it melts away before reaching the stomach and leaves you still hungry. This show has a great cast, the background musical arrangements are quite good, the design of the ship is simply stunning in my opinion, and the show is bright and colourful. I just don’t think some of the writers are up to task, it’s like they are naive and barely know the bare basics of the human condition, and little about continuity and science fiction in general, and so write accordingly. I do think a part of the problem is the short yearly episode run – it may encourage “hit and run” types of writing, whereas a 26 episode season like in days of old would perhaps force the showrunner to implement a deeper narrative for each of the characters.

There are a lot of interesting comments there and I can concur with much of that assessment. Thumbs up.

Wow interesting points. For the record, I like the show more than you but I do 100% agree about the dialogue writing though. They do come off as a lot less professional and too contemporary at times. I have made the same complaints about LDS as well which is way way way worse, but I guess others excuse it more for being a comedy.

And yes having just 10 episodes the bad or ‘filler’ episodes stands out way more. But that said I still think SNW has much less of a problem with this than shows like DIS and PIC does IMO. And I think the episodic nature of the show really helps that too and probably a big reason why the classic shows have aged so well because you have so many episodes and can just easily skip the bad ones.

Funnily enough, I don’t agree about LDS :-) The dialogue may be informal, but behind the outwardly loud and colourful surface, in my opinion the writing on LDS is often more subtle or interesting than on SNW (though I recommend watching at 90% speed ;). I think Lower Decks had some quite intelligent stuff, some of it in the interpersonal field: Like when Mariner learned that sometimes true freedom is to do a thing you realise is right for yourself IN SPITE of your adversaries telling you to do exactly this, when your instinct would be to act contrary to them (in the episode where she fights herself on the holodeck). Sometimes there’s also a joke behind a joke to discover in LDS. And to this day, I think that LDS transports the vibe of the fantasy trek space-ship my cousins and I had as kids, bigheaded captain included :-). I still have my cousin’s drawing of a fantasy space ship labeled “Edge Of The Known Space Map”. Guess what the new LDS trailer started with: “At The Edge Of The Universe…” Hehe.

Not only the dialogue, but the plotting: Maybe SNW is the popcorn/blockbuster version of a Trek series, with some daily soap (love triangles etc.) and a healthy dose of teenage romantic fanfiction thrown in? Well I don’t mind so much that SNW does not succeed in catching my interest, because I enjoy Lower Decks a lot, so maybe to each their own in the new Trek universe.

Ok, thanks for the response! :)

We don’t really disagree that much. As I said in the other post, I agree season one was much stronger overall but still like season two. But I only love three episodes at this point which was the trial episode, Charades and TOS. The others were mostly fine, including this episode but not amazing either. And I agree the writing is definitely the culprit per usual.

But it does seem like the majority of fans like season 2 as much as season 1 or at least close to it. Looking at the IMDB ratings at least, the episodes in season 1 is a little stronger than season 2 but not much. And every episode in season 2 averages over 7 at least minus this episode so far. In other words there is no big gap in the ratings between both seasons even if season one is rated a little higher.

But that has zero to do with personal taste of course and this board seems to have bigger problems with season two when you look at the nearly high praise most of season one got here.

Make personal note — mushrooms combined with Vodka not a great mix.

Someone should set your deeply poetic comment to music. Kunstlied or opera perhaps.

Ha, and the music video could be of someone caught within a fever-dream inside of a coma!

I did not mind the singing as much as I minded the mention of K’tinga class battlecruiser which is WAY too early for cannon. 2270 or 2265 at earliest. Not 2257!

Yes nitpick but at this time the K’tinga was still the D7.

It’s the same design, but with more details added anyway.

Maybe “K’Tinga” is the Klingon name, and “D7” was just Starfleet’s designation for it. The Enterprise and her sister ships were still called Constitution-class even after the TMP refit. The K’Tinga is basically just the TMP-refit version of the D7 from the Original Series. Maybe it was called “K’Tinga” all along.

K’tingas were brand new in TMP according to the GR novel.

Given the novels aren’t canon though, they have some latitude. I mean it’s pretty obvious that TMP Klingon ship was the same one from TOS, but done with the level of detail they could now afford for the model.

These writers don’t care. They just do what they want. Their knowledge of Star Trek is what they look up on memory alpha or Google search.

I noticed the name thing but since this is an alternate reality/reboot none of that matters. They can, and have, change anything they wish to.

Agreed! I also view this show in an alternate timeline.

It’s not just a personal view. I’d prefer it to be Prime and to obey all the rules. But they themselves showed us it absolutely isn’t in Ep 2.3.

That’s nuts criticizing Memory Alpha like this? Dude, that site, which I have written with many other Trek volunteer fans over the years, is the best single resource for this type of information.

You are way off base and you are throwing hundreds of volunteer fans over years who created this outstanding encyclopedia under the bus. In fact, the collaborators of that site intend that current and future creators of Star Trek will use the database actually like your are criticizing them for?

WTF? This is just way out of line! Of course we would hope the current producers and writers, who are very busy, would take the time to use this outstanding online resource Your comment is just freaking nuts to make fun of Memory Alpha — insulting many who have worked on that for decades.

Ah, internet. What would we do without you?

According to Memory Alpha website the K’tinga entered service in 2259.

And where did THEY get that info from?

They removed this episode, which is obviously canon.

I would love to know what William Shatner, Nick Meyer and Rick Berman think of this episode.

Nicholas Meyer loves it, William Shatner doesn’t give a damn, and Rick Berman thinks it’s gay.

I’ll add I thought it was great :)

Doubt any of them are watching….

Hopefully they all enjoyed it if they watch it.

A reference to turning into bunnies and uhura saying ”I’ve got a theory” have to be Buffy homages, right? 😁

Absolutely :)

I was skeptical but cautiously optimistic. Didn’t expect to like a a musical episode, but assumed I’d end up at least think it was cute or something by the end. But . . . I really just cringed my way through this.

It wasn’t particularly funny, I thought. Except maybe the Klingon bit. The songs weren’t especially good or even catchy . . . Watching La’an just more it less stand in her quarters and sing on repeat felt like an eternity.

I’m glad there seems to be a good number of people who enjoyed this. I want the show to succeed and do well . . . But . . . It’s just not one that’s going to have the rewatch value I’ve come to expect from other Treks.

This season has tried way too hard to be cute and not hard enough to seek out strange new worlds. Loved the Lower Decks episode, but . . . Yeah.

And not to beat the canon dead-horse, but k’t’inga class cruisers pre-TOS??

Yes to all of what you said and then some. I was not engaged at all for yet another hour of Trek. And that makes me sad because I LOVED this show in its first season.I’m all for Trek taking chances and doing lighter episodes, but with few exceptions (making M’benga a murderer, for instance), this has been a rather comedic season.

But that just one grump’s opinion. This episode is clearly some folks’ cup of Earl Grey and I’m glad for that. I’m one of the rare souls who LIKED “Spock’s Brain”, after all.

And not to beat the canon dead-horse, but k’t’inga class cruisers pre-TOS??

Remember the events in Episode 2.3. Falling in line with the prime TOS universe is no longer a thing. In fact it turns out it never has been.

Yep, just another confirmation – if having a musical episode wasn’t enough of a confirmation in the first place.

Why did you expect it to be funny? Most musicals aren’t. Sure, sometimes they have an amusing number like How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria but usually, no.

I didn’t expect it to per se, but I hope for it to be. For me, *my* tastes, comedy has been the saving grace of a number of musicals.

I actually come at this from the opposite standpoint: a lot of musicals have a number that’s morose, or at least a kind of soulful ballad — think “Tonight” in WEST SIDE STORY, or THE NIGHT OF THE DRAGON in “Miss Saigon” (literally about a Viet Cong commissar forcing Jonathan Price to pick rice in the fields), or “Memory” or “Old Deuteronomy” from CATS, or the main number from FROZEN.

That’s what “Subspace Rhapsody” was missing, I think, and La’an’s orchestral theme was the obvious place to put it.

I come at this from the perspective of liking musicals, but by that I mostly mean on-stage, in-person musicals, where you’re part of a communal, almost transcendent experience. CHICAGO and most Bollywood productions do nothing for me; I’ve only seen Hamilton on screen, and I failed to see what the hype was about. I bet I would have a different reaction in a theater. PHANTOM on the West End was a magical experience; on Disney+ during the pandemic, it was kind of “meh,” although anything during the pandemic kind of fits that bill. (To contradict myself a bit, I’ve enjoyed the two screen adaptations of WEST SIDE STORY.

I don’t know how well science fiction and musicals mash up together. I’m going to re-watch this and decide; my first impression was “good, but not great” — it was just a bit too peppy. I had a similar reaction to the Back to the Future musical adaptation. I never saw the Spider-Man musical.

The song that Uhura first played into the subspace fold seemed to be Nichelle Nichols singing if I am not mistaken

Awful. Just awful.

Nichelle Nichols is awful?

If it was Nichelle, at least that’s one better way to look at the choice of song. But to me, the way I look at the use of “Anything Goes” is that, why on earth would someone that far in the future even KNOW that song? That would be like someone today pulling out a Bach concerto and jamming out to it and expecting everyone else to hum along. Sure, there are still plenty of people who appreciate classical, but I highly doubt “The Great American Songbook” would be the first thing thought about on a starship in the 23rd century…. In fact, the first question might be, “What do you mean by American?”

Well, Anything Goes is 89 years old and is still well-known, so there’s that. Plus, there was a revival of the musical (from which the song originates) last year on the London stage.

And why wouldn’t the Great American Songbook still be known to music lovers? Art lovers are still well acquainted with the Dutch Masters who painted their works in the 1500s and 1600s.

I don’t think works of art (such as paintings) equates with music – even though it is an art. There are plenty of art lovers in the world, but the average person doesn’t grab their phone and start browsing through paintings everyday. But popular music is everywhere, and I would say 1 out of every 4 people in most public places have on headphones or are somehow enjoying music. The vast majority of music listeners don’t spend their time listening to creations more than 50 or 60 years old. And even if people do listen to classical on occasion, other than classical musical lovers, I don’t think most people could identify much more than Beethoven’s 5th Symphony or maybe Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

Simply put, the average person is going to identify with music from their generation. They may enjoy some “oldies” but, from my interactions with people of many ages, I think “oldies” fall within the last 30 to 50 years for most people. I work with college students everyday, and I can guarantee you that they aren’t very familiar with songs recorded in the 1950’s, much less the 1750’s!

So to assume that a person on a starship in the 23rd century is very familiar with 20th century music, so much so that it’s the first thing that pops in their head when told to come up with a tune, seems absurd. This problem isn’t limited to SNW. Most Star Trek’s have this problem.

As for knowing the “Great American Songbook”, I would ask a different question – what would you pick from the “Great Native American Songbook”? Native American’s were the dominant population throughout most of North America less than 300 years ago. Can you sing one of their songs? You probably live in an area close to where a tribe called home in the 1700’s. Shouldn’t you be able to recite a song from that time if Uhura was aware of “Anything Goes” being part of the “Great American Songbook”?

what would you pick from the “Great Native American Songbook”?

False equivalency. Native American music has only rarely been recorded for widespread distribution. Sure, you can find some modern day performances, but the vast majority of Native American culture (including music) has been lost to time since the arrival of Europeans and therefore was never widely known. That isn’t the case with Anything Goes and others of the Great American Songbook, which have been recorded too many times to count in dozens of languages and is very easily available. At least two versions of the Broadway score (1987 and 2011) are readily available on iTunes. Not bad for an almost 90 year old musical.

summt augenblicklich “ein feste burg ist unser gott, ein gute wehr und waffen….”

That would be pretty cool. I can’t be entirely sure, but I don’t think it’s Nichols: https://music.apple.com/mu/album/anything-goes-broadway-version-single/438424778

I think it was Patty Lupone from the 1987 revival of Anything Goes.

Loved it. Can’t wait to watch again.

It was a harmless episode that I didn’t personally love. I don’t mind the concept at all, I just wanted more out of the story, beyond the character stuff coming to a head. Or maybe the personal stuff should have been framed in a more urgent way, I don’t know.

That said, I hope Spock’s eventual path towards logic isn’t based on his brief romance with Chapel ending. Spock believes in logic, he doesn’t just use it as a shield against feelings.

That was something that was cringe too. I find it a bad creative thing to do even with alternative timeline Spock. But whatever.

Honestly this episode wasn’t nearly as bad as most episodes but still… This show doesn’t seem know what it wants to do. It’s not going with different genres. Trek always did some of that. It’s not knowing how it even wants to treat itself.

At this point it’s pretty obvious any episode that ends up being decent is likely a mistake by the producers.

Yep on Spock’s turn toward logic. I had hoped he would have been inspired by a mentorship. Instead they went for heartbreak and that’s also a poor decision for Chapel too. Here’s hoping with her going away for the internship the characters get a chance to grow in better ways. I did at least appreciate the closure of some storylines like La’An and Kirk’s. Number One also got the opportunity to show not just tell what kind of leader and support system she could be to the crew. Like how all the characters got some scenes once again. This is something new in the back half of season 2 and I am liking it. I would also like to see some background characters, like Mitchell and Sam Kirk, get some more screen time. Admiral April would also be deserving of a bigger role. Special mention to Bruce Horak he does a great Klingon.

As for the delivery through songs….they did the best they could with it. It will never be a favorite and that’s ok. I hope they continue to take risks going forward into season 3. By focusing on strange new worlds and including more legacy characters or even original characters to enhance the show. Oh and an Ortegas episode. She deserves more serious content.

I absolutely loved this episode. I can’t belive there is only one episode left of the season.

Yes and probably no more after that for at LEAST 18 months!

Easily that where SNW is concerned. And generally in terms of live action, after episode 10, that will be it until Disco S5 starts.

I don’t actually mind the concept of a musical Trek episode. I can easily imagine DS9 doing one. And they did find a technobabble explanation that works for what it needs to do.

But why were the songs so boooooring? It’s all generic pop stuff that an AI could have written. And the music sounds like those loops that come free with a keyboard. It’s so aggressively mediocre.

I still have the music from the Buffy episode in my head. Or the songs from Todd and the Book of pure evil. Or Picard and Worf singing Gilbert and Sullivan for a Trek example. I can’t remember any of the songs from this episode and I JUST finished watching it.

With the album being released on digital platforms today, I was hoping to add at least a few of the songs to a playlist, but nothing really grabbed me enough to go seeking any of them.

I wasn’t wowed by the music itself, but was surprised they took the time to write stuff that integrated into the story of the episode and the overall arcs. I think for me, it was just easy to not take this episode very seriously, so I could just sit back and take it in for what it is. And I thought it was fun. Applying my general criteria as it relates to canonical Star Trek, and it’s an unmitigated disaster. As funny as the Klingon stuff is, why would they act like just because they were singing? Would they not sing in their native tongue? Why would they immediately know to sing in another culture’s musical genre? Where did the music come from and why do they know how to sing original songs in unison? Again… think too much, and your brain will boil.

That was another complaint. I enjoyed that opening number. But then the rest of the songs were all so similar! After the opening I was hopeful. I shouldn’t have been. This is still Secret hideout after all.

Really? I thought La’an’s number was musically very different from Chapel’s.

They changed tempo but that doesn’t really differentiate them that much. It’s almost like rearranging a cue for a different feel.

No, they are completely different, stylistically. Now, I do think Chapel’s song “ I’m Ready ” and Spock’s song “ I’m The X ” have some elements in common, but I’m fairly sure that was deliberate, servings as two sides of the Chapel/Spock relationship coin.

This is a spot on review of the music. I won’t touch the episode as a whole or the fact that it happened as “Star Trek”, but as a musical, there wasn’t anything interesting or really any of the songs that will last in my memory past a few weeks.

I have kids, I’m exposed to a lot of kids music and movies, but some of them aren’t that bad. When Encanto came out, I didn’t really think it would be as big as it was, but I had to admit that several of the songs were catchy, and a few even stuck in my head beyond the first viewing. Since then, most of them have been nailed into memory, but there’s a couple I still like.

If you’re going to do this sort of thing, DO IT RIGHT! I felt like this was a mediocre attempt at music composition. And several of the performances were just static and empty. La’an’s solo soliloquy just about put me to sleep, as an example.

When I initially heard about the episode, the first thing that popped into my memory was “Star Trekkin across the universe…”. If you know what I’m talking about, then you know that a comedic parody song was more catchy than what was done here.

Crap! I haven’t had that in my head for a very very long time. Now you mentioned it and there it is again and I have no idea how long it will live there!!

Did Kirk know in TWOK that he was a father? I thought it was a surprise to him. I’ll have to watch that again, I just find it interesting that Kirk would have gone though all of TOS without mentioning David then

My thoughts exactly! Perhaps someone who has seen TWOK recently can confirm?

From: Trek BBS

TWOK is the first time that viewers became aware that James T. Kirk had a son, David Marcus, with his old flame Carol Marcus. But it’s a little unclear exactly  when  Kirk found out about David. He knows that Carol has a son by that name, but Kirk obviously doesn’t know David well enough to recognize him in the Genesis Cave ( “Is that David?” ). Kirk and Carol’s private conversation afterwards (added during reshoots to clarify things) is still ambiguous at best:

KIRK: I did what you wanted. …I stayed away. …Why didn’t you tell me? CAROL: How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be? You had your world and I had mine. And I wanted him in mine, not chasing through the universe with his father. … Actually, he’s a lot like you. In many ways. Please tell me what you’re feeling. KIRK: There’s a man out there I haven’t seen in fifteen years who’s trying to kill me. You show me a son that’d be happy to help him. My son. …My life that could have been, …and wasn’t. And what am I feeling? …Old. …Worn out.

No, he knew. In the film he said to Carol, “I did what you wanted… I stayed away”

Okay, I remember that now, so all of TOS he never once mentioned David and Carol Marcus, but he blurts this out to La’an now. Hmm.

I do think Paul Wesley is starting to grow on me as Kirk but best to leave him alone for a few seasons I think. He’s already overshadowing Pike.

Well, not mentioning it in TOS is what it is. Has been ever since TWOK came out.

Was he ever in a situation in TOS where someone was suggesting a serious relationship like La’an was though?

And we should have a pool for what Trek elements they are going to stick to and which they are going to completely obliterate in this new rebooted version of Trek. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for any of it.

Writer’s room: “Hey, wasn’t there some guy named Korby who Christine hooked up with? Let’s throw his name in there this episode. Oh, and what was the type of the Klingon cruiser in TOS? K’Tinga class, right?? And I think Kirk needs another pointless reason to return. It makes sense that he wouldn’t spend any time at his post with a family member on another ship. He’s just learning to be a first officer from someone he met ONE TIME…”

They mentioned Korby in Charades (and at the time, someone said he’d been mentioned before, but I don’t recall which episode.) so this seems to have been their end-game to get Spock and Chapel back to their TOS status quo.

But they didn’t need to. They set up a situation where they could have played with the relationship a lot more than they did. They aren’t beholden to what happens on TOS.

On TOS, where Chapel asks Spock, ‘have you ever been engaged?’ Clearly not beholden. More like, making it up as we go, but then when somebody says ‘tribble,’ instead of drinking, they put in a worthless nod to continuity, as if that offsets all the damage.

Exactly. It’s such a weird way how they are handling canon. One hand they acknowledge Korby, but they literally changed the entire back story o of how they originally got together.

I guess I just don’t really understand it? It’s not acting like a ‘true’ prequel but more like the Kelvin movies did and just added whatever canon they wanted but changed a lot of it around, but unlike SNW the Kelvin movies made clear it wasn’t trying to fit TOS canon and do its own thing.

But then they went and made an episode that says “Yes, this is why everything is so very different. This is a different timeline/reality.” Just like the KU movies did.

Yeah I agree with you, I just mean the way the producers discuss the show. They still talk about it as if they are trying to line it up with TOS and anyone with eyes clearly see that’s not the case.

But as you said they gave themselves an out where they can change whatever they want in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow but then in the OTHER time travel episode, TOS, they still treat it like the show MUST line up with every event in TOS (the show) and how strict Boimler and the crew treated his and Mariner’s presence. Now of course Boimler and Mariner don’t know about the changes in the timeline or obviously they are affected by the changes as well but I’m going on the notion in LDS everything from their POV is exactly what leads up to TOS and the canon we know.

So it’s a bit confusing but welcome to temporal mechanics lol.

The producers don’t really have a clue what the prime timeline really is. The difference between the Kelvinverse and this, is that the writers for the Bad Robot movies decided to create a new timeline / canon.. which is the smartest thing they did. This braintrust has decided that this is an altered prime universe, so basically TOS as we knew it is wiped out. That’s a problem for a lot of fans.

I’ve heard it said that they actually WANT to wipe out TOS and do what they think is the superior version of it. I still have a tough time with that as that sounds too conspiratorial for me. But there are times when I cave and think that theory might have merit.

But yes. Say what you will about the KU features they had the balls to tell us all it was an alternate/reboot.

This very well could be an example of having their cake and eating it too.

Honestly I just don’t know what the producers are thinking. They said it was in prime but then they just blow apart some rather huge parts of the lore. Then they make an episode that clearly says, “this is an alternate reality” yet haven’t publicly confirmed that is what they did. Did they intend for some fans to follow what they said last year and other to follow what they showed in the episode? What’s the point of THAT? This is why I say this show is very schizophrenic. I don’t think they really know what they want to be. Or they know they want to be everything. They want to be both prime and be free to do what they want. Those two things would seem to be at odds with each other.

True that. If the show really was prime then using a version of the little rectangle things or throwing in Dr Korby call outs doesn’t make up for the HUGE mistakes already made. It’s like smashing out a car windshield and replacing the radiator with one for a different make and model but saying “Look! We added a USB port! It’s fine!”

K’Tinga actually only appeared starting with TMP, so this K’Tinga is over a decade early.

He also asked Carol “Is that David?” when he first saw him. So he already knew about David.

I think heyberto is correct. I think Kirk’s surprise in TWOK was based on David being fully grown/a man and not recognizing his own son…that many years had passed since he stayed away and he obviously didn’t get birthday pictures along the way, so he had no idea what his son looked like after a couple of decades.

Nice tie-out to canon.

He was surprised to run into David, and I think it was a little ambiguous whether or not David knew that Kirk was his dad, but Kirk definitely knew that David was his son.

I’m calling it now, Kirk and La’an hook up before she leaves the enterprise. We find out she is pregnant with a child Kirk will never be aware of. The great revelation that Kirk’s greatest nemesis is actually an ancestor of his own child.

It had a few good moments but ultimately the A plot was not strong and the dual B-plots were stretched to carry the rest of the episode through all the singing and dancing. Those songs were not particularly inspired or catchy.

“Creating a musical episode has been a stated goal of executive producer Alex Kurtzman”. I think this is biggest the problem I have with this episode. It felt like it was really stretching hard — an undeniable trait of Kurtzman to shoehorn personal goals into trek. In fact, it might be my least favorite episode.

I was curious what other people thought of it and I guess they liked it, so whatever — to each their own.

See, I was hoping they’d just leave plot out of it completely, and just make this a crazy, non-canonical romp. So making the plot elements weak is a feature, not a bug, IMO. And I agree wholeheartedly that the idea of a musical episode is not something that makes any sense, conceptually. Perfect for Lower Decks. However.. I do think the creatives have conditioned us for something so ridiculous with their low bar for storytelling in this series so far.

Yeah, actually. If they had a Trek comedy series a musical episode with no explanations would slip into that genre more easily. There is a reason comedy/musical are often mixed together.

Lower Decks was best left out of this, and outside of canon. It’s the perfect place to do ridiculous things. This series, is not.

See, I was hoping they’d just leave plot out of it completely, and just make this a crazy, non-canonical romp. So making the plot elements weak is a feature, not a bug, IMO.

It seems like Spock and Chapel had this crazy relationship for all of one week before it began falling apart.

Yeah. They are free to do what they want. So if they are going for a Spock-Chapel thing then they should really go for it. Just like Spock-Uhura in the KU. To be as brief as they were doesn’t feel fair to anyone.

I’m ok with it. The break up was the best part of the episode.

A more serious episode where the characters lose the ability to mask their feelings but this just comes out in normal verbal interaction might have been better.

The songs were kinda meh, but t It was a fun episode. But when the original Star Trek theme played after the rift blew up and the bridge crew cheered, i got choked up. They got me with that one.

I really thought they should have been singing the actual GR lyrics to the TOS theme at some point, maybe the climax. Instead of singing about the ‘mission.’

I thought about that, too. But I thought it might have cost them too much money to do it. Funny when one considers why GR wrote the lyrics to begin with.

Well I got it COMPLETELY wrong! Thought this was going to be a horror show but my god this was good.

Some of the singing was excellent, especially from Celia Rose Gooding but also great stuff from Christina Chong, Jess Bush and even Ethan Peck!

Choreography was excellent, especially with Jess Bush in the bar and that finale….WOW!

I gotta say hats off to the actors, composers and arrangers for this episode. I expected this episode to be over the top and at times corny, which it was, but hey, this is fiction and fantasy, so I was ready for the “take me there” moment. I have been a Treker since the 60s, and have seen every second of Trek that has been released, but by profession, I am a recording engineer, producer, arranger and composer, working on projects that range from contemporary, to classical, to world, to traditional musics for commercial, theatrical and large scale event releases, so, with professional curiosity, I was looking forward to hear what musical adventures Toronto/Hollywood had come up with for this episode.

I have always admired Treks high production values, not only visually, but also audio wise. When these episodes drop, I usually watch them in my studio, through my studio monitors, to get the full, juicy sonic experience. When our characters are speaking to each other in engineering for example, you will hear the “ambience” of the large space they are working in (engineering), but when they kick into song, the voices all of a sudden become very dry and up close, very processed, with varying degrees of pitch correction software (from 3 to 11:). That alone took me out of the fantasy. I suppose the solo actors were recorded in a proper isolation booth in a studio. which sound very, very dry, with no acoustics at all. Again, high praise to the creative staff and the actors who sang, BUT there are people on the production staff responsible for continuity, both visual and auditory, and the differences in the way the voices sound in and out of song is very noticable, more so to professional ears, but also to your average Joe (or Josephine). There are ways to minimize these sonic differences, but it looks like nobody paid attention to this or they just did not care (maybe short on time?). Heck, even the musical movies of the 60s did a better job of this.

The song styles were also all over the place, but that may have kept the episode more dynamic. One thing tho, had it not been a musical, these character confessions would have been much shorter.

I know a lot of my production colleagues are also Trekers, and we do look up to the show for its production values, and sorry to say, this one lowered the bar. The episode sort of looked like a lip synced karaoke show.

Well, I hope SNW returns to the science part of science fiction soon. Pike, Spock and Una were much more focused on Discovery than they are on their own ship. Even Prodigy is more of a science fiction than SNW.

The lip syncing took me out of it early on. I realize they have to do that, but it was pretty blatant.

I appreciate your analysis as an expert. I helps me know that i’m not crazy. I do video production but not full on audio engineering. But even to me, I felt there was a lot lacking on the production side – both visually and in terms of audio.

Actually watched it again, this time knowing about those audio bumps on the road, I had an even greater appreciation for the work that the actors put into their performances. My faves, “I’m ready” and “I’m the Ex”.

It was… terrible. Far too indulgent of the cast and producers. I wish somebody had just said No.

That assessment is harsh. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it showed the real range and talent of so many of these writers and actors. I found it to be silly, as most musicals are, but I also am impressed with the quality of the original songs and was pleasantly surprised at how good a singer Ethan Peck actually is.

Well, as I’ve said above, I was able to enjoy the episode, but it isn’t very good Star Trek, and I do wish they’d quit trying to make Trek into something it’s not. I don’t need to see the cast sing and dance to know they’re talented. If this had been a singular one-off, and they quit trying to tie everything in to a larger storyline, I think it would have been better. Combine this with the Lower Decks crossover and get the ridiculousness of both out of the way in one shot.

This is not a harsh assessment by any stretch – if you remember that this is STAR TREK. It should have been a hard “no”, and this isn’t even the only instance this season.

I’ve said it multiple times before, but I feel like the inmates are running the asylum – as in the actors have more say than they should. I read and listened to comments talking about SNW the production of season 2 last year where they were talking about how the direction was going to take more “big swings” similar to The Elysian Kingdom (one of my least favorite episodes of season 1), and I knew things were getting out of control. The cast talked about how much “fun” it was to do that episode. Yes, work should not be painful, but there’s a fine line between having fun and remembering the source material.

Despite the fact that I found this fun (unlike the Spock Comedy episode), I agree with everything you said. I would say it’s not terrible at what it’s trying to be, but it certainly is terrible Star Trek.

Indulgent is definitely the right word for it lol. I was certainly prepared to hate it like you, but actually liked it in the end. But no, I don’t see myself rewatching it a lot either. But it seems to be a hit overall with people based on reading the other boards, especially on Reddit. I can’t wait to see what the IMDB score will look like for this.

It was a very entertaining episode. Christina Chong is a wonderful singer.

I also liked the nod to canon with the mention of a pregnant Carol Marcus. Poor La’an.

The Spock and Chapel relationship seems to be ending now since she will be away falling in love with Roger Korby. That was a very brief off-screen romance. Poor Spock. I guess now we know why he threw the Plomeek soup at her in Amok Time. LOL

Not the best episode out of the season in my opinion, but entertaining.

Cringy Girl glee trek…..

Just skip and delete episode for me. Not that the songs were bad, mind you, but I still hate musical, especially when they are 2 and more singing. This didn’t do anything for me, other then being a cringe illogical episode. The cross over with Lowers decks was much more logical and done with care then this. If they would have done the Klingon’s opera or side of things, it might have been fun.

I’m actually surprised people like this episode. Well, different strokes for different folks, I guess I’m in the minority here. I was expecting silly great songs like in the classic Buffy episode ‘Once more with feeling’ but got a bunch of lame, boring songs that all sound the same. Horrible episode. The only reason I’d rate it 2/10 instead of 1/10 is that absolutely hilarious Klingon scene. With a better songwriter this could have been a legendary episode. Too bad.

I think that some people jumped on early today to make sure and skew it more positively. I’m sure some other social mediums are full of positive publicity. But taking this as JUST a musical and discounting that it’s Star Trek, I thought it was mediocre at best.

Peck could have sung a cover version of Nimoys “Bitter dregs” after Chapel dumped him.

I won’t be surprised if Christine Chapel leaves after this season. I also don’t see Kirk being used again until a series finale when he takes over the Enterprise.

If canon still mattered, then one could only hope that Kirk doesn’t show up. Since canon is out the window, Kirk will be back in season 3 – if and when that ever happens.

I have to say this episode was fantastic. I wasn’t expecting to to be…The writing, the songs that were actually good songs and the lyrics that fitted so well into the story and plot. The production, the choreography… “those negative Nancy self proclaimed did hard fans” will state… Star Trek doesn’t do musicals… yet song played a big part of the last season of DS9 with Vic. And yes Star Trek does to silly comedy… little green men and trials and tribulations!!

When it started I was thinking, “Holy crap! This looks to be very enjoyable and fun for a change!” And it was. Unfortunately the songs ended up all being too similar. Since the new characters are being overshadowed by the classic ones I still don’t really care much about them so the emotional side of the episode ended up falling flat. And that finale was super uninspiring. Once again, the writers need to learn nuance. Subtlety.

All that being said it’s still the 2nd best episode of the series. After 1.10.

I can’t agree with you today. We’re often on the same page, but this one ranks near the bottom for me. Star Trek has done fun before without throwing the baby out with the bath water. The premise alone was enough for me to even think of skipping it. I’m not that kind of person, but I kinda wish I had. But it’s also par for the course for an underwhelming season. 10 episodes, and I think maybe 2 are worth ever going back and watching.

Fair enough. And I can certainly understand where you are coming from. This figured to be an extremely divisive episode to begin with. Even still I expected the people who have been liking the season overall would still like the episode and those who have not been liking it would not find this one any different. I was obviously OK with it. I wish the numbers were better and it didn’t try to get all emotional. The only thing I really enjoyed was the opening number. Beyond that it was repetitive and tiresome. But I do want to give them credit for trying something different. But again, if they did more episodes in a season I think doing something like this would be a safer bet. But with only 10 and they have started so very many storylines already… This didn’t seem like the best choice. Maybe if the show was better….

I expected to hate it.. and I really didn’t. It’s not a great musical or anything, but it is a fun romp. Like I said above, break the 4th wall, Take it out of canon, and this would work a LOT better.

I would probably say there has only been one great episode and one pretty good and the rest of the season has been so average. I actually really enjoyed last season’s final episode and was really looking forward to season 2. Spock has gone from one of my favourite characters to in this series the most annoying characters. Not really the actor himself who is pretty good but the writing for the character is very poor. I bought the first season on UHD blu ray, think I’ll be giving this one a miss.

This definitely deserves some kind of award

LOL, nope! Perhaps I watch too much TV and movies, but this doesn’t rank that high on the level of quality that you get from SO MANY OTHER productions that have either included musical numbers or even done a full on musical. Maybe it had potential, but I don’t think the final product is anything more than a ratings stunt.

Okay, cards on the table: I’m a theatre person, and I have sympathy with the “theatrical” elements of it

That was the most fun I’ve had with an episode of Star Trek in a long time. The songs weren’t all to my taste, though the opener was technically really solid. It has some really nice rhythmic and melodic subtleties.

I appreciated that it gave (almost) everyone something to do, and we got to see them working. Sad that we didn’t get enough Ortegas, but I’m glad they actually did something with Number One.

At first I hated the Klingons. I wanted a blast of Opera in the middle of the finale. But the flip into hip-hop with the backup dancers was so over the top that it came back around. Brilliant.

On a technical side, one thing I think they missed the mark on a little was the lip syncing. I know they’re working on a time crunch, and tastes vary, but, to me it seemed that a lot of the folks were very obviously lip syncing. The more seasoned singers sold it (Celia Rose Gooding continues to crush it), but others, not so much (looking at Anson Mount).

Still, I’m really happy this exists. It was fun. If someone doesn’t like Star Trek but has a soft spot for campy musicals, this is a good gateway episode.

I think it was a fail not having the Klingons sing in Klingon. If not an opera then perhaps something for contemporary Klingon. But yeah… These writers just don’t have it in them for something as detailed as that.

I wouldn’t call it a fail myself, but perhaps a missed opportunity. It’s tough enough to learn music as is, and then add in a fictional language and its own musical foibles it might not be worth it. They’d have to really knock that portion out of the park, and I just don’t see any Trek writer pulling that off

Star Trek is usually pretty Shakesperian. Traditionally the actors have had some of that background. Wrapping their mouths around a made up language shouldn’t be too hard for people who can perform that olde English stuff. They had to have hired songwriters for the numbers, right? Put the effort in. Make it work. What we ended up seeing just came across as lazy.

I’m gonna strong disagree on the comparison between Shakespearean English and Klingonese.

Background: I have two linguistics degrees. I specialized in the history and development of English before doing ma MA in Norse. I’m a theatre practitioner, and studied music for 10 years.

Shakespearean English is basically identical to modern English. Words have come and gone from usage, and we’ve changed the value of some vowels, but the gist of it is identical. The phonetic inventory has been stable for a few hundred years.

Klingon was *specifically* designed around being as utterly alien as possible. Weirdest syntax you can imagine. Consonant clusters that just don’t happen normally.

Add in the harmonies and rhythms that don’t follow regular conventions. It’s gonna be damn near impossible to get that into a 20 second bit.

Like, listen to ‘u’ — it’s something else. If it’s not that, it ain’t Klingon opera.

They could make some knockoff Bizet, but that would be so boring. That’d be the lazy way out, imo.

OK. You seem to have the credentials and far be it from me to question your experience.

That said uttering Shakespearian lines, while still english words, is weird and unnatural for today’s language. In that respect memorizing random sounds ought not be that difficult for competent actors. Perhaps making up an authentically alien sounding Klingon song is a tall task. And perhaps would turn a lot of viewers off. But it sure would have helped with creating depth in their universe. And it wasn’t like it had to be 4 minutes long. Just 10-20 seconds of it would have done the job.

I went into this episode with a lot of trepidation but the episode actually was excellent. They embraced the campiness of it all. It had all the vibes of Buffy the Vampire Slayers musical episode.

This is the most original, creative and beautifully realized episode of any Star Trek iteration, ever. Period. They keep hitting it out of the park on SNW!

Settle down.

It’s interesting that when someone responds to overly harsh negativity (which seems to permeate here) they are clapped back with “I’m allowed to have an opinion too!”

But when someone is overly positive your response is “settle down.”

Very very interesting.

I’d much rather celebrate people’s love and positivity than encourage hate and negativity and force everyone to be as miserable as ML31.

Overall I liked it, but far from love it!

I think like many, I wasn’t sure what to even think of the idea when most assumed it would be a musical. On one hand, yeah, interesting and unique for Star Trek that’s for sure lol. On another level, this could be a total disaster that’s just beyond cringe and an embarrassment for Trek as a whole that would sit in its rightful place with other noteworthy disasters from Spock’s Brain to These Are The Voyages. But this one done in spectacular fashion. It was a gamble for sure, but thankfully I think it was mostly successful and will be considered one of the whackier but memorable episodes that many will truly love and embrace. Others…not so much.

For me, not being a musical person at all, but certainly liked many growing up, this was definitely a fun episode. I thought the songs were very fun and enjoyable, more than I thought they would be, but it was still a bit too many for me. But the story itself and how it supposedly happened was confusing. I gave up trying to understand Spock’s very deep technobabble of the event and its ‘musical reality’. I actually just wish they went super silly with it and met a large pink alien unicorn in space who sprouted out some bizarre space glitter from its horns onto the Enterprise that made the crew sing and dance in order to save the multiverse or help conceive a unicorn baby or something.

But I did like it, especially the Klingon boy band lol. Easily the best part for me. I laughed so hard. But everyone put a lot of effort into their roles and were mostly good, but La’An and Uhura were definitely the stand outs IMO. I did like how we got some actual story in there with Kirk and Carol Marcus or Chapel breaking up with Spock (thanks Boimler ;)).

Overall, I thought it was good, but still not amazing. I’m always happy to see Trek try to shake it up a bit, especially with 800+ stories and counting, but I highly doubt this will be much of a rewatch for me in the future. But I’m happy for the people who truly loved it.

Yeah, definitely Celia Rose Gooding and Christina Chong were the stellar voices, but I was also impressed with Rebecca Romijn’s vocal stylings. The guys, not so much haha but they did not embarrass themselves. Also liked how they progressed the stories of Kirk and La’an as well as Chapel and Spock. Yeah Boimler did play a big role in making sure Spock stayed on course haha.

Absolutely loved it.

I’m pretty sure Nichelle Nichols would have broken down and wept over Celia Rose Gooding’s performance. Fantastic.

She’s the vocal standout of the whole thing, and it’s not close.

I thought it was fantastic! Really enjoyed this musical episode 😃

It’s over.

I’ve already felt this multiple times this season, but this one took the cake. Star Trek as I knew it and loved it pre-Secret Hideout is officially gone. Picard season 3 was the last thing even closely resembling Star Trek, and even it had its issues. But what SNW has proven is that what I call Star Trek and what the powers-that-be in the Kurtzman world call “Star Trek” are not the same thing.

The worst part is, this isn’t even the best version of a terrible concept. They could have at least made something that would be memorable enough to sing the songs over and over (whether you want to or not), but that’s not even the case. Looking at it as solely a musical, it’s still mediocre at best .

SNW season 2 was already ranking a lot lower than season 1 to me, but now I don’t think I can even compare them anymore. And once again, the premise of the episode excluded a “Strange New World”. I mean there was a spacial anomaly, and for past Trek’s, that would have sufficed because there may have been more to discover about the anomaly and that could have worked as a “new world”. Instead, we once again explore the feelings, relationships, and dynamics of the crew – just this time in song. The universe be damned! At least we had a chance to see them dance!

Someone in an early post on this article compared this to TOS’s The Naked Time, but I don’t think that’s fair to TOS. The Naked Time was FAR SUPERIOR to this episode in that it gave a plausible reason for the crew to lose their inhibitions, and the interactions were MUCH MORE interesting. The fact that Subspace Rhapsody decided to use the “multiple universes” excuse to somehow explain the idea that a “musical universe” exists and there’s even rules that it follows that were apparently created by Broadway just sits poorly with me. Maybe this can somehow be put into a “out of universe” category and ignored, but SNW season 2 has already had enough other fails that it’s just par for the course.

Star Trek as I knew it and loved it pre-Secret Hideout is officially gone.

Oh, I’ve given up on Secret Hideout Trek over a year ago. For reasons that have been stated here ad nauseum. My only hope is after a lengthy writers & actors strike the Secret Hideout deal is somehow ended. Trek goes away for a bit but resurfaces later with better people involved. Maybe we don’t need self proclaimed Trek fans running things. Just new people who will respect the source material.

This site needs a block button ASAP

I’ve been a proponent of that for quite some time. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. My personal block “button” has been to see a name of someone I no longer wish to engage and just move past the post without reading a word. It does work pretty good.

…. because people having a different opinion should be blocked?…..I’m assuming IDIC is not your thing.

To be fair, for me it’s not about different opinions/takes. I’ve only done that to people who were insulting, stalkers or troublemakers. And of the few I’ve done it to all but one has been banned. And the last one I just don’t see around all that much anymore.

Dude… we know. We ALL know. I’m all for everyone sharing their perspectives but you just spam the same ones over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. We know what you think. We get it.

Who’s “we”? You don’t get to speak every everyone. You don’t like what I say then either ignore it or engage me and talk about it. No need to react in such a way. It’s not a good look.

Cut the music from it and it is watchable. I hate musicals and this did not sway me!

In space, everyone can hear you sing!

Well I just checked IMDB and yeah this is not going to be the runaway hit I thought it might be just reading some of the first reactions. At the moment, the episode sits at 6.6. Thats very low for this show. Not Discovery ratings low, but low for SNW. It’s the second lowest ranked episode of the show overall with Elysian Kingdom being the lowest with 6.1. And it’s the only other episode that has fallen in the 6 category out of 19 episodes.

Of course it’s early it can still move up (or move down) but starting that low from the start tells me this episode is a divisive one and probably will stay between 6.5-7. It’s not going to be a fan favorite, put it that way.

Now compare that to Those Old Scientists that started with a 9.4 rating immediately after it aired and currently sits at 9.2. And that is still the top rated rated episode of the show overall.

“Elysian Kingdom” has a 6.1…? That’s preposterous.

LOL, sad but true!

But I will admit, on a rewatch of it, it’s not as strong as I originally felt and it’s the second worst episode of season 1 for me. The pacing felt super slow as well. I wouldn’t rate it that low personally but probably in the low 7’s.

As far as Subspace Rhapsody, yeah a 6.5 is about where I would rate that one so it’s right on target for me.

I’d be interested in seeing the distribution of when the scores were submitted. If there were a slew of low scores within moments of it being possible to watch the episode, that would maybe be indicative of some reactionary brigading.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s happened here – people are 100% allowed to like/dislike what they want – but it is curious.

Reading more of the reviews, it reflects the score because it doesn’t seem to be a lot of people in the middle. The people who like it seems to REALLY like it and the people who hate it REALLY hates it. But sure I would be curious too.

But no one should be surprised lol. Most people thought it was a weird idea from the start and many were apprehensive about it. Very few people thought this was an amazing idea. But I think a lot more people liked it than they thought they would and that includes myself.

But making a Star Trek ‘musical’ a home run for a lot of hardcore sci fi geeks was always going to be an uphill battle.

lol, yeah, I’m not surprised in the least bit surprised at the reviews given the what these pages have been like over the last few weeks. I don’t have any problem with people disliking the episode, but I know some folks heralded the mere concept as the Death of Star Trek, which just seemed silly to me.

Definitely an uphill battle. It was successful for me, and that’s the vote I care most about. :)

That’s not a horrible rating either. The reality is MOST Trek episodes there usually fall between 6 and 7 which is about average. Anything 5 and below is considered bad. So people definitely didn’t like it, but it’s not a trash rating or anything.

And I liked the episode as well, but that’s about the rating I would give it personally as well.

yeah, I think I’d likely give it ~7/10

I tend to rate things on a 1-5 scale, without decimal options, with 3 being the typical about which I have no disqualifying complaints. I’d probably put this at 4 overall on that rubric

Btw Tiger2, I think you said this a few weeks ago, that a musical episode would draw attention from the mainstream entertainment media and not just the science fiction pundits. Well after looking at this morning’s coverage, it looks like you were right. From the LA Times to the EW, Variety (which has picked up many SNW stories), Vuture and The Guardian just to name a few. No, not as much as the Picard finale, but no bad. We shall see if it translates to the Nielson ratings.

Wow that is great to hear! :)

Not surprising this episode would bring some non-Trek media buzz for a change. It’s a big first for what they did and its great people are paying attention.

I’m pretty sure the ratings will be huge. I don’t know as big as TOS because people genuinely seem very excited about the crossover. This is more out of curiosity but I think every Trek fan who has P+ probably watched it, at least a little.

Haha TOS now has a new meaning!! Very appropriate!

No it doesn’t.

Well it has another meaning now which I think DeanH means.

Every time I see it I think one thing.

Sorry. It’s engrained.

I think pretty much everyone here does as well.

As you have said, the posts for E9 really seem to demonstate people either really liked it or hated it. As a kid, I grew up loving Star Trek and science fiction, but my parents also loved musicals, music and singing (along with sports and good food) so I really liked last night’s episode. That said, I totally understand why some are appalled of the thought of a musical episode and why the concept was polarizing. An “uphill battle” indeed, but one I personally am happy they took on.

Yeah it’s actually funny reading the reviews here. One post says ‘this was absolutely fantastic and a stunning achievement that is now the best episode to date’ but then the next one after that is ‘I am appalled this thing even exists and someone should be fired for making this embarrassment’. Yeah VERY divided man. ;)

But I actually went back to see what the review rating is on IMDB now and it actually went up . It’s currently at 6.9 now which is pretty impressive that it jumped this high in a day. It will fluctuate for weeks obviously but I might have to take back my original assessment and this ends up being a bit more popular than what I thought. The episode may ultimately land in the 7s somewhere. Still not amazing, but certainly an improvement if it happens.

I don’t follow into either of those. I didn’t hate it, like usual. Nor was it great. It started out promising but ended up, meh. Which is pretty good for SNW.

Same, I’m mostly in the middle like you are. I didn’t cry with joy watching it but I didn’t feel like I was being tortured by watching it either. ;)

IMDb users have some biases. Rom-coms and pure romances don’t tend to do all that well. Musicals are a little hit or miss there but they usually have a rabid fan base to combat the naysayers (I can’t really explain The Greatest Showman outranking Chicago otherwise).

I’m guessing a lot Trek fans in general are not big musical fans either. Again you can’t be surprised because for two months now on this board people were complaining about it being a musical. It was always going to be a hard sell. But I did think maybe after it ran and seeing how much others loved it, it would be a bigger hit kind of the Lower Decks crossover turned out. But as this board is proving, it’s a pretty divided view.

You remember how divisive Vic Fontaine was at the time. Still is, probably.

LOL oh yeah! ;)

horrible turned it off

What the f was that

I’m not a fan of musicals, but had to sit through the whole thing anyway in case there was some plot progression elsewhere. It was torture. Thankfully I don’t ever have to watch it again if I ever return to rewatch SNW.

I’m happy to see the mostly positive reaction to this episode. It works because the writers have taken the time to give over two seasons and just 19 episodes (more for Pike thanks to Discovery) to let us get to know these characters. I have a better understanding of this crew than I ever did for VOY, ENT and especially Discovery. SNW, like TOS, TNG and DS9 is a true ensemble cast. Will this be an episode I rewatch often? Probably not. It was a heck of a showcase though for the talent of the writers, crew and especially the cast. Hate that the season is almost over and season 3 feels a long, long way away thanks to the current strikes.

Finale looks like a doozy with Pike likely to encounter more heartache and misery.

Shout out to Wil Wheaton on The Ready Room too. He does a nice job hosting and I enjoyed his interview with the very lovely and talented Christina Chong.

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Of course Star Trek looked to Buffy for its big musical: 'That was our bar'

Co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers tell EW how they pulled off "Subspace Rhapsody" on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 9, "Subspace Rhapsody."

When it comes to musical episodes of television, few have done it better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer . The producers behind Star Trek had that pop culture event on the brain when they set out to make the sci-fi franchise's first-ever music-fueled extravaganza on Strange New Worlds season 2.

"That's one of the best made ones," series co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers tells EW of 2001's "Once More, With Feeling," in which Sarah Michelle Gellar 's supernatural warrior faces a demon of song and dance. "It was done very well. It's really smart and thoughtful. It has big heart. The only thing I will say that I distinctly thought differently was that they wrote their own music, and I knew that that was a little more than we could handle. But that was kind of like, let's challenge ourselves to be as good as the best of this [genre]. That was our bar."

As time went on, Myers realized they actually could write their own music, with help from Letters to Cleo rockers Kay Hanley and Tom Polce, who crafted the songs. "Subspace Rhapsody," the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 (now streaming on Paramount+), sees the likes of Captain Pike ( Anson Mount ), Number One ( Rebecca Romijn ), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Spock (Ethan Peck), and the rest of the U.S.S. Enterprise breaking out into musical numbers after an encounter with a quantum probability field. They all find themselves operating by the rules of a parallel reality in which everyone sings all the time, which causes problems for anyone trying to hide their emotions, including La'an (Christina Chong) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush). The problem gets bigger when it starts spreading to other spaceships.

"I'm a huge fan of musicals, but had no idea what it took to actually make one," says Akiva Goldsman, the other co-showrunner on Strange New Worlds . Myers had worked on musical episodes of Ugly Betty and The Magicians , but Goldsman was coming in fresh. "When we started on season 2, a small voice, like a gremlin kept going, 'Music. Musical. Musical.' And Henry kept going, 'Not yet. Not yet. Not yet,'" he continues. "We were going back and forth on the story, and we sort of knew where the character arcs were. Then, to our delight and terror, the idea of what we needed to do emotionally in episode 9 and the idea of a musical went hand in hand."

With a script written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, the producers got to work on "Subspace Rhapsody" about six months ahead of filming, Myers estimates. Goldsman likes to say, "This episode happened in large part before it happened," meaning most of the execution went into prep, including dance rehearsals and singing lessons. Director Dermott Downs also wanted to shoot the episode like a musical, which means the shots are "a little more wide and you really see people doing things, you're not in their faces all the time," Myers explains. "It was a lot of work from a lot of people, but the one thing I remember waking up and thinking was that everyone will expect this to be silly. We should surprise them and have it be gut-wrenching and emotional."

Some of that can be credited to Gooding. It was clear to everyone from the start of the show that their Uhura actress had some pipes. An early episode of Strange New Worlds season 1 saw her singing out tones to activate a piece of alien tech. So, it's no surprise that the actress is the one to get the musical's big power ballad, "Keep Us Connected." "What we do like to do is write to our cast," Goldsman remarks. "It suddenly became clear that a lot of the folks who we work with had musical theater in their backgrounds or real musical training. The universe was conspiring to get us to throw down in that way."

Peck was less confident about pulling this off, Myers notes: "I don't think Ethan thought that he could do it, and he surprised everyone by having this crazy deep voice, the baritone, that was kind of beautiful."

Now that it's all come together, it almost feels like a miracle that it even happened. Goldsman looks back to when the news of what would become "Subspace Rhapsody" came up during the closed-door meetings with the other showrunners from across the active Star Trek series. "All I remember was people being like, 'Okay, sure,'" he recalls. "This is basically the tenor of all the [meetings], which is somebody will say a bunch of stuff and then somebody else will go, 'Wow, that sounds cool.' Subtext: 'Please don't f--- it up.'"

Goldman adds, "We were like, 'If we're gonna do this, we gotta do this.'" And so they did.

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Related content:

• Star Trek is getting its first-ever musical episode
• How Star Trek brought the 'chaos bomb' of Lower Decks to Strange New Worlds
• Star Trek: Lower Decks stars enter the world of live action in first look at Strange New Worlds crossover

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“In a weird way, that made it better.”

Behind-The-Scenes On The Star Trek Musical

From the director to the choreographer, to showrunners, writers, and actors — it was all hands on deck for “Subspace Rhapsody.”

Strange New Worlds’ showrunners always knew Season 2 Episode 9 was going to be big. They just didn’t know it was going to be this big.

“It was planned that all the arcs would come to a head in Episode 9,” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman tells Inverse . “Then we decided it would also be a musical and, in a weird way, that made it better. We had obligations to these character stories. And they were gonna sing it!”

Perhaps the biggest surprise of “Subspace Rhapsody,” is just how crucial the episode is not just for the overall story of Strange New Worlds Season 2, but for Trek canon more broadly. This fun episode full of singing and dancing isn’t just a one-off, it’s an essential piece in the Strange New Worlds journey. This is still a prequel series, technically, but, when it comes to addressing the rest of Trek canon, co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers tells Inverse the show is never “trying to jump into the thing that’s it’s gonna be,” which was especially true of the musical.

“We try to imagine the person who is still living through the moment,” Myers adds.

But how did Strange New Worlds pull that off? Inverse spoke to both showrunners, director Dermott Downs, and choreographer Roberto Campanella to find out. Spoilers ahead.

Choreographer Roberto Campanella with the cast of Strange New Worlds .

Defying Anti-Gravity

“For me, I wanted to know what Episode 8 was,” Roberto Campanella says. “I wanted to know the cast more than anything. I wanted to know their characters.”

Campanella is an Oscar-winning choreographer perhaps best known for his work on What We Do In The Shadows and The Shape of Water . But despite his deep knowledge of dance, he maintains that everything about “Subspace Rhapsody” was designed to make sense within the Trek world and not to be constantly winking to other musicals.

“I guess there’s one moment, a tribute to West Side Story when the dancers run toward the camera in the finale,” Campanella admits. “But other than that, I wasn’t trying to reference anything. I let my experience dictate where we were going, physically.”

Campanella also largely credits the cast of Strange New Worlds with making sure the story was told through the music. “They know who they are better than anybody else. They were always open to collaborate. Always. I love this cast.”

Don’t jump the space shark

“They’re running a great ship over there.”

The director of the episode, Dermott Downs — who previously directed The Flash musical episode “Duet” in 2017 — points out the SNW cast kept the episode “grounded,” and although it was the next-to-last episode filmed in Season 2, that the cast “worked weekends,” and put in extra rehearsals to get everything just right. Downs credits some of this energy boost to timing.

“You would think they'd be pretty exhausted,” Downs says, “but Season 1 just started airing when I was at the end of my prep [in 2022]. So they were very fueled by the positive response of Season 1 when we started filming.” Downs makes it clear that everybody sang their hearts out, both on set and in laying down the tracks. “Yes, they all sang,” Downs confirms. “When I came on, there were pre-recorded temp tracks, but I was excited to hear their versions because I knew the cast was gonna bring their own nuance and emotions to the songs.”

Downs also stresses he didn’t want the episode to “jump the shark,” and that keeping everything grounded in the reality and canon of Star Trek itself was very important. “The anomaly hits the ship and the music becomes a kind of virus. It’s a great plot device. They express what they can’t normally say.”

Although The Original Series never did a musical episode, the idea of a weird space virus causing people to express their innermost feelings is very reminiscent of the 1966 episode “The Naked Time,” perhaps better known as “The One Where Sulu Is Shirtless With a Sword and Spock Cries A Lot.” Star Trek canon clearly allows for this kind of thing. But, we now know that a “musical reality” is a part of the Star Trek multiverse.

George Takei as Sulu, swinging a sword in “The Naked Time.”

Downs also points out that almost nothing was cut from the final version of the episode, which runs at 62 minutes. If you count the brief Klingon dance number — featuring the promised return of Bruce Horak as the Klingon captain — there are technically 10 unique songs in “Subspace Rhapsody.” In other words, it’s a supersized episode for good reason. (Note: speaking to Variety , the showrunners mentioned another version of the Klingon song that was “operatic.” It’s unclear if that alternate version was ever filmed or recorded.)

“I’ve done so much episodic TV and that hour becomes really like 42 minutes,” Downs says. “This wasn’t like that. There’s very little that changed. And that starts with the writers’ room. They’re running a great ship over there.”

Star Trek canon shockwaves

Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Kirk (Paul Wesley) in "Subspace Rhapsody."

While “Subspace Rhapsody,” brought Season 2 SNW plot arcs to a crossroads — most notably Spock and Chapel’s relationship, Uhura’s emerging independence, and Pike and Batel’s feelings for each other — it also dove deep into some Captain Kirk canon . While La’an had a relationship with a Kirk from an alternate dimension in Episode 3, she learns she can’t have a relationship with Prime Kirk, because he’s currently in a relationship with someone named “Carol,” and this person is pregnant!

Longtime fans know this is Carol Marcus, Kirk’s ex from The Wrath of Khan and mother of David Marcus, their son. The Wrath of Khan takes place in 2285, and Strange New Worlds is happening in 2260 at this point. So, if David is born in 2260 or 2261, that makes him either 24 or 25 in The Wrath , which is just about right. Chronologically, this all matches up with the existing canon, but it probably does change our perception of canon a bit, at least in terms of our feelings about present-tense Kirk.

“Everyone knows this happened,” Myers says. “The opportunity that we thought we had was, this is a part of Kirk that you've never seen and it happened, and we have a chance to explore it.”

Neither Goldsman nor Myers can reveal if we’ll actually see Carol Marcus or baby David in Season 3, but they do stress that Strange New Worlds is always trying to make characters like Kirk seem real to today’s audience.

“This is how people live,” Myers says.

That said, both showrunners are always open to fan theories, specifically the canon-changing implications of the way the episode ends...

Does the ending of “Subspace Rhapsody” create the TOS theme music?

Jess Bush as Nurse Chapel in "Subspace Rhapsody."

In the end, the Enterprise crew has to break the “improbability field” of the musical reality, by putting on a show-stopping number, encouraged by the one and only Uhura. But, after this song concludes, the outro music we hear is very clearly the 1960s Alexander Courage theme song of the classic show. All the other songs in “Subspace Rhapsody” were written by Tom Polce and Kay Hanley, but that outro music is 100 percent retro. So if the Polce-Hanley songs clearly exist in-universe, does that mean the theme to Star Trek: The Orignal Series just became in-universe canon because of this episode?

“That hurts my brain too much!” Akiva Goldsman says, laughing. “Pain precludes me from answering that. Maybe?”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 9, “Subspace Rhapsody” streams on Paramount+. The album itself is now on Apple and Spotify.

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An all-musical episode of Star Trek? Something that’s never before been done in almost 60 years of television and cinematic history? Folks might say the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds may have jumped the shark. I would say they have, at worst, tossed a tribble. Let’s do a quick dive into last week’s highly anticipated (and romance-heavy) episode, “Subspace Rhapsody”.

Please note: spoilers ahead for the episode .

We open on the Enterprise’s latest discovery: a naturally occurring subspace fold that could be used to triple the speed of communications. Spock absolutely must dive head-first into its analysis. (Could he possibly be overworking to avoid those pesky emotions around Nurse Chapel? Eyebrows point to yes.) Which naturally takes up so much juice, Uhura has to do communications “the old-fashioned way” and has become the ship’s de facto switchboard operator. As we watch, she routes calls to the crew with a degree of romantic foreboding. 

Just like any other musical worth its salt, the bulk of this episode was all about the romance, focusing on the current big three couples: Captain Pike & Captain Batel, La’an & James Kirk, and Nurse Chapel & Spock. One of these three escapes this episode unscathed, and spoiler alert, it’s not the one you’re rooting for.

(Chris and Marie’s relationship has gotten a fair amount of mileage this season and while I could watch Melanie Scrofano in anything forever and always, it mostly feels like a series of contrived issues to give something for Pike to do outside of the business of Captaining. This episode is no exception, with them quibbling over taking a vacation on a planet called Crivo, something she loves but Pike feels is too touristy.)

In the process of trying to see if this subspace fold will actually accelerate the communications, they make a last-ditch effort to subvert the physics of the fold (just hang with the space talk, we will get there) by sending the “Great American Songbook” as a message, hoping it will reach someone. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. As a mysterious wave hits the ship, everyone’s eyebrows (and Pike’s hair) raise a little higher. 

And then, Spock starts singing.

Listen, I’m going to level with you here on two things. First, as Beckett Mariner pointed out a few episodes back, “I’m going to keep this like 100% profesh but I was thoroughly unprepared for how hot young Spock was going to be.” We, as an audience, didn’t need another reminder of how wonderfully talented Ethan Peck is, it’s just overkill at this point. But secondly and more importantly, it sort of works? They sing about how terribly strange this phenomenon is and well, it is. But the entire cast jumps in head first with the camp and the cheese and we just believe it. We’re along for this absurd ride.

So, why are they singing? By sending the songbook into the fold, they’ve created a quantum uncertainty field which creates a musical reality. Does that make total sense? Not really. But it’s said with a lot of Trek language, so we (and the crew) go along with it.

Television is no stranger to mid-season musical episodes, and while Star Trek hasn’t gone there in its nearly 60 years, they hit many of the same beats which is to say, accelerated character growth. It’s as if someone hit warp speed on some of the character beats we’d been expecting for a while now. La’an has a lovely Fantine-style song where she decides to finally confess to Kirk the whole business of sort of being in love with another time version of him. (Breaking a rather serious time law, which will absolutely come back to haunt her, and yet, we love a reckless romantic moment.) And we learn that while Kirk felt something akin to a connection to her, he’s sort of in a relationship with this woman named Carol who may or may not be pregnant. Whoopsy-daisy.

(Oh, that’s right, we suddenly remember Kirk is a player.)

Our other heartbreaking romance is that of Nurse Chapel and Spock. At the top of the episode we see Christine get accepted to a fellowship, (she’s been trying for several over the last few episodes, ending one a few weeks ago with a rejection from the Vulcans) and she’s over the moon about it, but cold as ice to Spock. They’d been on the outs since the crossover episode where Boimler disclosed to her that Spock will go on to do many incredible, important things; but none of them where he’s happily in love. Depressingly, she continues to push him away, and Spock, with all his big Vulcan feelings, sings a very sad love song about math.

(I didn’t say this episode was completely void of cringe moments, mind you. Just that it was worth the ride.)

There were two great standouts I have to mention. The first being Rebecca Romijn, who spends most of the episode expressing Commander Una’s joy in finally getting to live her truth and singing to La’an and Kirk to inspire them. Romijn commits to the bit, and I love to watch her get a little goofy in this role, dancing through the halls of the Enterprise. She’s a delight to watch.

But the gold star goes to Celia Rose Gooding, who has been absolutely killing it this season with Uhura’s story arc and this episode is no exception. And boy, does she have some pipes! Ultimately it is she, as the ship’s Communication Officer, that bands the 200+ crew together (plus a ship of rapping Klingons, I swear to Q) for one show-stopper finale that hits the right frequency to zip the fold right back up. 

I love camp in Star Trek , and this episode rode the line pretty hard between that and cringe. Was it the single best musical episode of television I’ve ever seen? No. For all my marbles, that award likely goes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer ’s “Once More With Feeling” and let me tell you, the way my spouse and I flew off the couch hearing someone mention “bunnies” during this episode, I think that one was on the writer’s minds as well. 

I’m not sure that we’ll see another musical in Star Trek ever again, but we appreciate this cast for boldly going where no Trek cast has gone before. 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs Thursdays on Paramount+

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Musical Episode Director On Staging Songs In The Key Of Enterprise [Exclusive Interview]

The funny thing about "Subspace Rhapsody," the musical episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," is that it's still ... well, it's still a "Star Trek" episode. Yes, everyone is bursting into song and dancing through the corridors of the starship Enterprise, but it's because the crew accidentally triggers a subspace anomaly that causes a dimensional rift with unexpected consequences. In this case, it causes everyone to express themselves through song. Whoops. And naturally, it's up to Captain Pike and his crew to fix the space problem they caused before it can transform their entire universe. 

Director Dermott Downs proves himself to be the perfect fit for the material. With credits that include "Arrow," "Supergirl," "Doom Patrol," and "Chucky," Downs is no stranger to geek-flavored television. But it's his work on the acclaimed "The Flash" episode "Duet," in which the title character finds himself trapped in a musical dimension, that surely landed him the "Strange New Worlds" gig. The episode walks a fine line (it's ridiculous, but it's still checking every box you'd want from a "Star Trek" adventure), and it's one that Downs manages to pull off. 

I recently spoke with Downs over Zoom about his work on the episode, the actor who seemed the most nervous to sing, directing Spock in a musical number, and staging that big final number. 

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

'What's amazing with Strange New Worlds is how grounded ... that show is'

Let's start with the basics. Why you? Why were you picked for the "Star Trek" musical episode?

I had a meeting with [Alex Kurtzman's production company] Secret Hideout, and first of all, the first season of "Strange New Worlds" hadn't even aired yet, and I was like, "Look, I mean, ["Star Trek" shows are] all good, but why another one?" I said, "What was so fascinating about the original was every week you'd just sort of be something completely different. You could be the tribble comedy, you could be in an interracial romance, you could be a courtroom drama." And they were like, "That's exactly what we're doing with this." They said, "And we have two episodes open. We have a sitcom and we have a musical." They don't hire directors to do blocks because every episode is so uniquely different. They really want to find the right person. And I had done a musical "Flash" and "Supergirl" episode called "Duets," in which the alternate Earth was kind of a weird Bugsy Malone '50s gangster world.

Not to blow my own horn, but Vanity Fair did a really flattering review and called it quite possibly the best hour of musical television ever produced. I had done some other music-influenced episodes of "Prodigal Son" and I had come of age as a cinematographer when MTV was really making music videos. So I was making three to four minute movies set to music almost once a week for quite a few years. We met, we talked about it. Obviously Bill [Wolkoff] and Dana [Horgan] wrote a great script and they took a swing with me and I'm so happy. It's a career highlight.

What was the big thing you learned from your "Flash" episode? The thing that made you say, "Yeah, we've got to make sure we do this in 'Star Trek,'" or "We've got to make sure we don't do this"?

"Flash" wasn't ... I mean, it was grounded and they were trying to get out of this world they're stuck in, but everything's sort of a little heightened in the DC world. What's amazing with "Strange New Worlds" is how grounded — even though you're in outer space and going to strange new worlds every week — is how grounded that show is. I think it's paramount to what Akiva [Goldsman] and Henry [Alonso Myers] were setting out to do. I guess the biggest takeaway I had learned was just how prepared you need to be. I mean, ["Flash"] was an eight-day episode with probably half the money, so every minute counts — not that it didn't on twice the budget and almost twice the days, but really getting the actors familiar with their songs. Because when I came on board, music was temp recorded with the other singers.

As I was imagining choreography for the two weeks I was on before my regular prep started, I was with the choreographer walking the stages, just trying to get a ... really wanting to differentiate each song from the next in how the characters moved and how we were going to have the camera visualize it differently. I had certainly learned the stakes in one hour TV with "Flash," but this was its own animal and I was looking to sort of make it its own, so I wasn't looking to really repeat "Flash." But coming from music videos, I had worked with actors that were appearing in music videos. We were working with non-actors because the singers wanted to play the parts in their videos and go in and out of narrative to song, so I had quite a bit of experience doing that, good or bad. I hope good, in everybody's eyes that sees it.

'The music was exposition, but it wasn't just sort of blatant exposition, it was kind of character exposition'

This episode reminded me a lot of the rightfully famous musical episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," because what the episode did right was that it didn't just lean on the music as a gimmick. It uses music as a way to propel every storyline, to let the characters say things that could not be said previously.

In a way, the music was exposition, but it wasn't just sort of blatant exposition, it was kind of character exposition. Because as you noted, yes, music becomes a way of saying things that they can't say. And in exposing your deeper vulnerabilities through song that you're compelled to, that you have no choice but to embrace because it's an infection that's taken over the ship, once you go with that conceit, everybody, I believe, was just game to embrace it. Because none of it was like, yeah, jazz hands, and I mean, it climaxes is in a big chorus line, but we're coming together as one because this is the only way we're going to beat this.

But there's private moments where La'an, in her quarters, it's a solo to herself, and the heartbreak of not being able to express love. Captain Pike, [Anson Mount's] kind of country duet gone off the wires. It's humiliating to be saying these things in front of everybody, but yet he's forced to, and he even gets down on his knees to profess his love. The whimsy of Rebecca [Romijn] and Paul [Wesley] in the hallway first kind of feeling, "Oh, wow, what is this? We're not fighting it." It was so nuanced in the way it begins and how it builds through the ship to the finale where you've got them and the Klingons in a battle of the bands, which was, yeah, a pinnacle.

I'm kind of obsessed with how Ethan Peck performs Spock singing, because clearly he's not Ethan Peck singing. It is Spock singing. It's a very specific choice. Can you talk about directing how Spock would sing?

I think the whole show has done an amazing job in seeing these familiar characters, but in a modern template, and he's just great. But he had been playing with that in the show because of his affection for Nurse Chapel, even though as a Vulcan, that's kind of taboo or it's just not what happens. So we wanted that to resonate on a level that — and because he's really alone, but yet he's very controlled, too. But I felt, in the midst of trying to be controlled and talk about these things he really shouldn't in any other world, he infused it with emotion. I mean, there's so many favorites in that. But that probably from reading the script was one I was going, "Oh, this is going to be ... I'm going to love this one, right from the beginning."

'We had so many different songs going on, but that was the power ballad, man.'

Was there an actor who was especially nervous about singing, and you had to coax it out of them?

Well, I mean, I think Anson was like, "Yeah, look, I'm not a singer. Maybe I did a musical once in college or something." But I was like, "Yeah, but the great thing about you is Pike is, one, the expression of the song. This is more spoken word to music." So you think of, I mean, crazy comparison, but when [William Shatner] does "Rocket Man," it's like he's not really singing it. He's compelled to have this conversation. So I said, "Just don't let the music get in the way of that." And even when we recorded his version that he would sing the playback, I just was like, "Just focus on performance." He's such a great actor that unless the performance was coming out as the primary intent, then we were not going to honor the sort of grounded template of what the show is, so that was always foremost.

I wanted to talk about the final song and Celia Rose Gooding's performance, because clearly she's the showstopper. You bring her in to blow the roof off the Enterprise. Can you talk about directing that final scene and her final song?

We had so many different songs going on, but that was the power ballad, man. She comes with a great musical background. As I was prepping with her, she's talking about her experience on Broadway at the same time her mom was doing "The Color Purple." "Oh yeah, we're doing two Broadway musicals at the same time and meeting for a coffee or dinner after." She came in with certainly the confidence of being a singer, but there was a whole space to fill, and there was no doubt that she was going to fill the void with all these feelings about her past and about the tragedies in her life. It was very easy once the song was clear in her head. I had some grounded places I wanted to bring her, as she is sorting all this out in her head. That was huge and it kind of came together the simplest, even though it's super, super visual, but they were all challenges. [Jess Bush's] was a blast. That was like out of "Grease," too, Nurse Chapel.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is now streaming on Paramount+.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds : How Lin-Manuel Miranda Ghosting a Picard EP Led to That Memorable Musical Episode

Keisha hatchett, staff editor.

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Nobody is having more fun making television than the creatives behind Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . That was evident in this week’s episode, “Subspace Rhapsody,” a musical installment which found the Enterprise crew involuntarily sharing their true feelings through song.

Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers confirms that Thursday’s Strange New Worlds was, in fact, influenced by the Buffy musical.

“That was definitely an inspiration,” he tells TVLine. “We held that up as like, ‘OK, well, we have to live up to that because if we do this badly, it will not go well, and we would be upset by it. And none of us wanted to do it badly.”

The idea for a Star Trek musical came up while Picard executive producers Michael Chabon and Akiva Goldsman were enthusiastically chatting with star Michelle Hurd about the prospect of one on the Picard set.

Goldsman, who also serves as EP and co-showrunner on Strange New Worlds , recalled how Chabon told them he knew Lin-Manuel Miranda. “We were like, ‘Call him! call him!”” the EP shared. Two days later, when they followed up with Chabon, he told them, “[Lin-Manuel] didn’t call me back.”

“And that was the end of that musical,” Goldsman noted. “But it did seem like such a good idea. As soon as Henry and I got together to make [ Strange New Worlds ], I kept peppering him with, ‘We should do a musical,’ and Henry, of course, had done musicals before.”

Myers, who oversaw musical episodes as showrunner on Syfy’s The Magicians , “was like, ‘You know they’re really hard,’ and I was like, ‘Well, they can’t really be hard, can they?’ knowing nothing about how hard they could be. But my blind optimism, I think, finally persuaded Henry’s pragmatic, actual practical understanding of the heavy lifting required, and off we went.”

“It has to come late in the season because there’s a lot of work that is required. I remember I started making calls about six months out because we needed to find a composer, we needed to find a lyricist, we needed to start designing what we would do for the sets,” he continues. “Once they’re finally ready, they shoot more quickly than you think. But it’s the months and months and months before that, while you’re making a TV show and doing lots of other things, that make it extremely hard.”

TVLine has reached out to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reps for comment.

What did you think of Star Trek’s first musical episode? Grade “ Subspace Rhapsody” below, and then share your thoughts in the comments!

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I’m relieved that they didn’t end up trying it with Picard. A musical is a much better fit for the lighter, wackier tone of SNW. – I had totally missed the Magicians connection – I always loved their musical moments, which were often hilarious but actually delivered real emotional impact.

I am still missing “The Magicians” and I won’t ever forget the cast perform “Take on me”.

I absolutely loved the arrangement of Take On Me performed after Quinn’s death.

i can’t recommend the books enough. There are a few differences, some major, but theres more story and a much more satisfying conclusion.

That was an experience!!! The talented cast pulled it off… The other thing is as well as the musical numbers, it revealed a lot… Didn’t just sing for singing purposes… The songs revealed stuff the the audience and it actually pushed the stories of this season forward and answered some fan questions like for instance about Spock and Chapel.. As a one of event, it was fun.. And it looked like the cast all had fun doing it as well which is a great thing.. Hope they all can get back to work soon…

Did anyone else notice the main Klingon was played by same actor who portrayed Hemmer?

Really? I didn’t know that. Makes it even more fun.

I love any and everything Lin Manuel touches. Feels strange to me that any Star Trek is related to that, but ok.

Except this happened specifically because he *didn’t* touch it…

I’m not a big fan of random musical episodes (I’m that person who hates the Buffy musical episode), but this was better than I thought it would be. More interested in the “Dr. Korby” easter egg and trying to remember if Kirk ever mentioned a “Carol” on the OG series – definitely no mention of Jim Kirk having a child, but his brother Sam did. At least the show can say they did it and never have to do it again.

Never mind about the Carol Marcus bit; I looked it up and it’s from the Wrath of Khan movie, including the reference to Kirk having a child that I had completely forgotten about (I know, everybody loves that movie but it’s not one of my personal favorites so I don’t remember all the details from it)

And to add to this, in the second TOS pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, Gary Mitchell mentions having set Kirk up with a “little blonde technician” whom many people assume was Carol Marcus, or at least that the Wrath of Khan writers kept this line in mind when creating the character.

Kirk being an absent parent wouldn’t have been accepted as a lead on a 1960’s show, but it was obvious from how old David was in 1982 that he was conceived before TOS ever began.

Well, even Kirk didn’t know he was a father. I love that the are playing with the cannon. I hoping for more surprises!

No, Kirk knew he had a son. Carol asked him to stay away.

It seems almost every show now does has a musical episode, it it’s a sci-fi or fantasy show. Going all the way back to shows like Xena, Buffy to more resent shows such as The Flash, even Gray’s Anatomy did one. The only one that was any good IMO was the Buffy the vampire one. I really just hate them with a passion. as such this is the one episode I’m just going to watch something else, and return for the week after.

It was horrible and a rip off of Lin’s music in Hamilton

I felt no connection to Hamilton at all in it.

There really wasn’t, but most of the music was obviously derivative of other musicals (one song obviously had most of its parts derived from Let It Go). I rationalized it as the wave was using the ‘great american songbook’ so obviously all the song swould have been derivative of clssics.

Uhura won hands down – she got some pipes

No. I’ve watched Hamilton many times. This had no Hamilton vibes whatsoever.

Wow. A Star Trek the musical… the other OG Trekkers will probably go cranky over this episode but I loved it! And that cast has some pipes! The only negative was that the Klingons had better choreo. Krunking Klingons. Oh my…..

I AM an OG Trekker and I absolutely loved this episode! I hate musicals where the story is stopped for a musical number. Here, the songs propelled the story. It was well done and the cast looked like there were having a blast!

Very good singers. And K-Pop Klingons — I have no words. But, overall, not that good. BTVS is still about the only non-musical show that has pulled off a musical episode.

Xena would like to have a word with you about that comment.

I really liked it and tjhe nod to Buffy’s Once More With Feeling by bringing up bunnies.

And Uhura said, “I have a theory…” I replied, “…that it’s a demon.”

I thoroughly enjoyed the episode. This season has been top-notch and the episodes keep getting better.

As a die hard ST fan this show showed promise last season but has clearly “jumped the shark”

You mean last season when Spock and his fiancee swapped bodies and an omnipotent child transformed everyone into storybook characters? If you haven’t figured out what this show is by now, you aren’t paying attention.

LOVED the episode!! Thank you cast and writers.

Going in, I felt the same way I did before the Buffy musical came on — I hoped it wouldn’t embarrass a show I liked. Nothing to worry about in either case. I’ve watched this a couple of times, and liked it the first time, but loved it the second. . Celia Rose Gooding is a powerhouse, but it was Christina Chong and Jess Bush that really did it for me. Chong in an excellent singer and dancer, and she has that way of going straight to your heart, as she did in Doctor Who. The Bush number was interesting, for example in the way Chapel flirts with a man and a couple of women in celebrating the freedom the fellowship will give her. Ethan Peck was also very good, and you wanted to take poor Spock aside and tell him that it’s a three month break and he should at least talk things over with Christine before withdrawing from emotional involvement forever. This Nurse Chapel is a surprisingly complex character, and Jess Bush has been giving a strong performance, particularly in the episode before this. . It was fun to see Anson Mount and Melanie Scrofano singing, among others. Rebecca Romijn isn’t as strong a singer as Celia Rose Gooding or Christina Chong, which is hardly a criticism, but she is very good, and she’s a pleasure to listen to. . I’m incredibly slow on the uptake, but until now I hadn’t clicked with the fact that Number One’s first name is Una, which means one in Spanish or Italian.. .

worst episode ever in the history of all trek series combined

This is just factually inaccurate Star Trek TNG had so many brick episodes, the worst of which is the one with david ogden stiers Any episode that reolved around westly crusher, objectively worse, especially if it involve ashley judd and an addictive space checkers game

Let’s not forget the Voyager clunker where Tom Paris turns into a lizard and mates with Janeway. Can not watch.

They were salamanders, not lizards! They were salamanders!

LOL!! I don’t want to remember LOL!!

The best was Chapel’s “musical” number in the lounge. I have to admit that I thought that this episode was going to be SNW “jump the shark” moment but it wasn’t. The story as to why everyone would break out in song was well thought out. The next best “musical” number were the singing and dancing Klingons! I had thought that a ST musical would be better as a Lower Decks episode, but everything considered it was better than I expected it to be.

The first season was sharp, suspenseful with good character development and storylines. This season is not. It is bordering on stupid. This episode and the one combined with lower decks, for me were unwatchable.

Dear Star Trek, If you’re resorting to Musical Episodes to remain relevant and trying to do something “unique” with your Franchise then it’s probably time to give it a rest. You’ve had a good run but come on… You’re done. You belong in a museum now. Sincerely, -Me.

I have retired in 2005. The person you are adressing is just an impostor that uses my name.

Regards, (The actual) Star Trek

While I thought they did an excellent job, I would have preferred it on a stage in a theatre. I’ve been a Trek fan since Day 1 and did not like the episode.

Pure cringe

It was a fun episode and I enjoyed it. I didn’t care for some of the songs and no song really stuck with me, but that Klingon scene was absolutely hilarious.

Surprisingly excellent in its execution both in demonstrating Cast & supporting Writers/Producers’ talent & most importantly sticking well within the series story line. Well done!

I don’t normally mind (or especially like) musical episodes, but I feel like they packed way too many numbers into this episode. Seemed like they’d start the next song 30 seconds after the last one ended. And the songs were mostly “meh”.

I loved every minute of it. Funny because I felt it had a “Lin-Manuel” flow, but to find out he actually had nothing to do with it is interesting. Well done!!

This headline had me scared that this was going to be another stop-start Lin-Manuel musical – was pleasantly surprised when I watched the episode that the songs were SONGS!

This was a really fun episode, goofy in a good way, and it was very nice to see the whole cast getting a lot to do – something this season has not been great about juggling. The Klingons’ shame was hilarious.

There were some very fun numbers in there and they tried hard to make everything relevant and pushing the characters forward. Not every song was a winner, most were too long, some of the lyrics got awkward and some character work still felt trite, but this was a stellar effort all the same. Great acting, fantastic production team, and a fun bold concept. The idea of an improbability field is straight out of Douglas Adams.

The Infinite Improbability Drive! . Actually, I took it as a sort of self-parody. They’re always pulling rabbits out of hats — nebulas as magical places, particularly when they contain Boltzmann brains, people hallucinating because their spaceship passed through deuterium, deuterium somehow hosting extradimensional beings, whatever that means, and so on. They do it so blithely and their “science” is such word salad that I wonder sometimes if they’re winking at you, as well as getting their plots from A to B, keep moving, nothing to see here. . This time they obviously were joking. You had “subspaces” with “quantum improbability fields” like zippers that someone thinks might have gotten stuck in a musical theater mode and which are somehow shut off if everybody sings at once and exceeds a specific threshold measured in GeV that somebody just knows. I found that very funny. . In more serious contexts, I kind of hate it when a show waves its hands that way. It’s like assuming your audience is so ignorant that you can double talk them and they’ll believe it. SNW does some of that, sometimes in ways that drive you nuts, but on the whole it’s pretty good at not putting you in that position.

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'Strange New Worlds' trailer offers sneak peek at 1st musical episode of 'Star Trek' ever (video)

Let's hope the Klingon High Command never catches wind of this bold silliness.

In space no one can hear you … sing?

Well, that might be technically true for warbling in the cold vacuum of outer space but inside the comfortable confines of a Constitution Class Federation starship like the U.S.S. Enterprise , the acoustics might be akin to any world-class concert hall.

This past weekend during San Diego Comic-Con at the official Paramount+ "Star Trek Universe" panel in Hall H, the powers that be not only announced an early Saturday, July 22 release for " Star Trek: Strange New Worlds " anxiously awaited live-action crossover episode with "Star Trek: Lower Decks" titled "Those Old Scientists," but also a surprise peek at the singing and dancing plot of the upcoming episode nine.

As seen in this ear-pleasing preview trailer above, it appears that the Enterprise is struck by some sort of interstellar interference that has a peculiar effect on Captain Pike and his intrepid crew, causing them to belt out a medley of catchy numbers.

Related: Star Trek streaming guide: Where to watch the Star Trek movies and TV shows online

Watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount Plus: Get a one month free trial  

Get all the Star Trek content you can possibly handle with this free trial of Paramount Plus. Watch new shows like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and all the classic Trek movies and TV shows too. Plans start from $4.99/month after the trial ends.

"Star Trek" and musicals go together like … well, never! "Subspace Rhapsody" is a joyous salute to Hollywood musicals of the 1950s and is deemed the first-ever, complete musical-themed episode in the "Star Trek" franchise's long 57-year history. There's even a cool retro-style movie poster designed just for this special occasion!

"Subspace Rhapsody" will break into song as the ninth and penultimate episode of Season 2 and it's due to air on August 3, 2023. This toe-tapping chapter is an ode to Technicolor spectacles Tinseltown churned out during the Golden Age of Cinema. 

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It features ten original songs in addition to a whole new musical version of "Strange New Worlds'" main title theme, with music and lyrics provided by Kay Hanley ("Letters to Cleo") and Tom Polce ("Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"). 

Fans might recall previous "Star Trek" scenes where a certain character might spontaneously break out into song as in "Picard" Season 2, but never a full-blown musical episode filled hull-to-hull with upbeat lyrics-enhanced dance sequences.  

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" streams exclusively on Paramount+.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Jeff Spry is an award-winning screenwriter and veteran freelance journalist covering TV, movies, video games, books, and comics. His work has appeared at SYFY Wire, Inverse, Collider, Bleeding Cool and elsewhere. Jeff lives in beautiful Bend, Oregon amid the ponderosa pines, classic muscle cars, a crypt of collector horror comics, and two loyal English Setters.

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• CraigNB What a JOKE they are making of the Star Trek Universe these days!!! If combining the "CHILDRENS" animated characters with live action in episode 7 and now a "MUSICAL" Star Trek. I thought and was hoping that ST SNW was going to be the return of Star Trek but it looks like I was wrong. Seems that there is NO great writing anymore just lame excuses to fill in the episode numbers. What has happened to the Roddenberry legacy? Its been going downhill for decades now and each time a new series comes out they start out OK for a few episodes then the decline starts and gets very rapid once that happens. At this rate I can predict the end of STSNW by the end of season 3, they always produce 3 seasons of new ST to see how it is going. STSNW had such a promising future with the idea of the initial space exploration in the Enterprise but it has turned out to be a vary lame series now and is going downhill rapidly. Such a waste of some actors also. Might just have to stay with Star Wars instead as those series are GREAT Television viewing with little lameness in them. Maybe ST needs to take note of what they are doing. Good story lines and very good acting plus really great special effects plus a bonus of them being in Dolby Atmos to boot. WAKE UP ST!!! Reply
• ReuvenF There was an episode on TOS where the "hippies" wanted to go to the Planet Eden that was CERTAINLY a musical. So... Reply

ReuvenF said: There was an episode on TOS where the "hippies" wanted to go to the Planet Eden that was CERTAINLY a musical. So...

• View All 3 Comments

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‘star trek: strange new worlds’ musical episode announced, trailer revealed.

Paramount+ revealed a surprise first look at a 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' musical episode and announced the 'Strange New Worlds' and 'Lower Decks' season four live-action crossover is getting released today.

By James Hibberd

James Hibberd

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Are you ready for singing and dancing Captain Christopher Pike?

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The announcement was made at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, where Paramount+ had a Star Trek franchise session in Hall H.

Based on what’s shown in the trailer, the U.S.S. Enterprise gets zapped by a space anomaly, which makes the crew break into song.

In addition, Paramount+ is releasing the Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks live-action vs. animation crossover episode early. The episode will be available on the streaming service starting at 4 p.m. today. The rest of the season will premiere Sept. 7.

The company also released some first-look art of the episode and the trailer for Lower Decks season four.

Here is a look at the crossover episode, which brings Lower Decks voice actors Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid into live action:

The panel showed the first five minutes of episode one of season five of Star Trek Discovery , which featured Sonequa Martin-Green as Captain Michael Burnham on top of a ship in the middle of a warp jump while two Federation starships are in pursuit. The scene can be seen here . The fifth and final season will premiere in early 2024.

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Review: michael jackson fandom, rejoice – 'mj' musical at the orpheum thrills.

Michael Jackson keeps flashing back.

In the middle of crises, he hears the voices of his domineering father, who is harsh with him because he wants to inoculate his son against a tough world. Jackson also hears the words of record label founder Berry Gordy, producer Quincy Jones and others in his orbit. But the voices, and the problems they anticipate or address, cannot drown out his music and the movement.

For Michael is a virtuoso showman. He assesses and solves problems through music and dance, finding his ultimate joy in perfecting his art. He also tends to equate applause with love.

"MJ the Musical," which runs through May 26, had its press opening Wednesday at Minneapolis' Orpheum Theatre. The production, choreographed and directed by Christopher Wheeldon, is a smashing triumph.

True, Jamaal Fields-Green (who alternates the title role with Roman Banks) is much more muscular than the icon but he evokes Michael's aura in his vocal modulations, speaking delicately but belting powerfully. He also summons Jackson with his virtuosic dance moves, including his moonwalk. All of that serves Lynn Nottage's narrative as well, because the real Michael may have been wiry with a gentle falsetto. But he also was exacting and tough-as-nails.

Nottage set the show in a rehearsal room in 1992 as Jackson is preparing to hop four continents with his Dangerous Tour. He wants his outing to be the grandest one by any artist in history and he keeps making demands of his dancers and supporting crew, even as both costs and negative press reports mount.

On top of that, an MTV documentary crew that's shooting in the room has captured talk of pills that Jackson takes to help him maintain his stamina and relentless drive. (The show has a reference to his contemporary rival: "If we don't do it, God's gonna give the idea to Prince.")

The critical reception to "MJ" on Broadway was mostly from the same page, with many noting that the show failed to address the messy questions in Jackson's life.

But the musical is all about fandom. It's a celebration of Jackson's music from "Beat It" and "Thriller" to "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and "Human Nature." In fact, in the show, the narrative makes fans of the hostile press as, after some tough questions, the reporters start dancing in sync with Jackson. Similarly, the MTV reporter Rachel (Mary Kate Moore) duets with Jackson.

Wheeldon's production, backed by Victor Simonson's tight orchestra, is extravagant and flawless. It boasts seamless transitions and whiz-bang technical wizardry.

The performances are similarly impressive. Fields-Green has the star qualities in voice, moves and charisma, not to mention that winning smile, to make believers of us. And he works so hard in the role, I got fitter and lost weight just watching him.

He's just one of a trinity of actors in the title role. Brandon Lee Harris inhabits the teenage Michael beautifully, imbuing him with innocence, hunger and warmth. And there's an overload of talent and cuteness with Josiah Benson, who alternates the role of Little Michael with Bane Griffith.

Kudos also to Devin Bowles, a lyrical actor who switches effortlessly and delivers brilliantly between the roles of Joe Jackson and tour director Rob as Michael's memories flit from scene to scene.

It's a credit to this musical that we get a glimpse of Jackson's journey and all the frailties that make him human, even as, at the end, he flies like a latter day Peter Pan into remote and drowning lights.

'MJ the Musical'

Where : Orpheum Theatre, 910 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.

When : 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 6:30 p.m. Sun. Ends May 26.

Tickets : $50-$199. Hennepintheatretrust.org .

Rohan Preston covers theater for the Star Tribune.

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