Inside the ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Musical Episode — ‘Picard’ Almost Got There First
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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.
In “Subspace Rhapsody,” Anson Mount’s Capt. Pike falls to his knees singing an emo song to his girlfriend (somewhat embarrassingly in front of everybody on the bridge of the Enterprise); Paul Wesley’s Kirk strikes a Donny Osmond-esque pose; Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel is hoisted aloft on her back like Satine in “Moulin Rouge!”; Ethan Peck’s Spock croons about his heartbreak; Christina Chong’s La’an gets her own Howard Ashman-style “I want!” song; and actual Grammy-winning singer/Broadway alum Celia Rose Gooding gets a full-on musical heroine arc.
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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.”
“We tried to bring in an attitude about it that the show shouldn’t just be silly,” Myers, who had worked on previous musical episodes on “Ugly Betty” and “The Magicians,” said. “The show should be emotional and the show should reach a place where you feel things. Not just as a left turn for a couple of minutes to show us something, but to actually reveal things. We tried to find moments for everybody based very loosely on what we knew to be people’s abilities and what we wanted to say.”
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.
“It’s one of those things where even when you want to make changes and deal with notes, it ends up everything moves slower because you’re changing the entire song as opposed to just rewriting a scene,” Myers said. “This all had to happen before Tom had also come to Toronto [where “Strange New Worlds” shoots] to sit down with all of our actors and get a sense of their abilities and what they were comfortable with and not comfortable with. Part of that was just literally just designing songs for everyone that would speak to their strengths because we wanted something that everyone could participate in.”
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.”
Tone is key. That question of tone is why fans and critics have loved “Strange New Worlds,” which was recently renewed for two more seasons, so much. Or rather, it’s the capacity of “Strange New Worlds” to encompass many different tones: Season 2 has featured a courtroom drama episode, a deeply romantic time-travel saga, a Vulcan comedy of errors, and an episode bordering on horror in which Uhura has terrifying visions. That recalls the days of ’90s “Trek,” when there were 26 episodes a season to encompass a truly wide range of genres and tones. You could have an incredibly dark episode about the Dominion War on “Deep Space Nine” and follow it up with an episode where they play baseball.
“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.”
“Michael Chabon and I did with ‘Picard’ for a minute,” Goldsman said. “We were sitting around in the Borg Cube [in Season 1] and Michelle Hurd and Michael and I were sort of just waxing rhapsodic about the possibility. Michael went, ‘I know Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m going to call him.'”
“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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