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‘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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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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Watch Latin American Music Awards

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.

And it really is (just about) everyone: Along with Uhura, Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Cmdr. Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), Lt. Spock (Ethan Peck), Lt. La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) and even visiting Lt. James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) all get standout solos to croon their hearts’ desires.

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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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Broadway Beams Up: Star Trek's First Musical

Discover how the team made history!

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just made history with the first musical episode of Star Trek ! Discover how they did it, in this clip from the most recent segment of The Ready Room .

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In addition, the series airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern Europe. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Bringing 'Star Trek's First Musical Episode to Life: 'Strange New Worlds' Director Breaks Down "Subspace Rhapsody"

Dermott Downs discusses directing "Subspace Rhapsody," Queen and K-Pop inspiration, and Season 2 of 'Fire Country.'

The Big Picture

• "Subspace Rhapsody" is Star Trek 's first-ever musical episode.
• The episode celebrates the crew's connection to each other and their triumph over their fears and desires to save the galaxy.
• Director Dermott Downs discusses the strength of the script and music, the balance between drama and comedy, and his excitement for future Star Trek episodes and his work on Fire Country .

Star Trek 's first-ever musical episode has arrived on Paramount+ with Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9, "Subspace Rhapsody." Epic in both scale and emotion, the heartfelt space romp sees the crew of the USS Enterprise thrust into a musical reality that has them singing their darkest fears and deepest desires. In order to set things right, they have to give their most triumphant performance together, celebrating their connection to each other to save the galaxy. The episode features knockout emotional ballads from La'an ( Christina Chong ), Uhura ( Celia Rose Gooding ), and Spock ( Ethan Peck ), alongside hilariously campy numbers from Captain Pike ( Anson Mount ), Una ( Rebecca Romijn ), and a whole ship full of Klingons.

To celebrate the groundbreaking new episode I sat down with the director of the episode, Dermott Downs to discuss bringing "Subspace Rhapsody" to life. During our conversation, we discussed the strength of the script written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff as well as the range of the music and lyrics written by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce . Downs also discussed what it was like to piece together that final number, drawing inspiration from Queen and K-Pop, finding the balance between drama and comedy, and what type of Star Trek episode he'd like to direct in the future. He also just finished directing and producing Season 1 of Fire Country and spoke briefly about what fans can expect from Season 2.

COLLIDER: You have quite a history with television and music; you've worked on various series and music videos, and this isn't even your first musical episode of television, though I do think this is my favorite. This is the first musical episode in Star Trek 's 60-year history. What was it like to take on that task that you seem almost destined for?

DERMOTT DOWNS: I love the original, and if you had told me that I was gonna get to beam Captain Kirk onto the Enterprise, and in this he's coming to visit — yeah, I would have been just floored. It’s such a treat to be able to revisit one of my childhood favorite shows. When I first met Secret Hideout about this, there was a sitcom-influenced episode, so like a three-camera comedy, and then there was the musical. So I was just like, “Well guys, let me give you my two cents.”

I'm in this business because I memorized the songbook to Oliver Twist at seven. I was a childhood actor before I became a cinematographer and then did years of music videos. So, by the time I did [ The ] Flash , it was like, “Oh my god, it's the hybrid of everything I love doing,” but this was like a whole new level. The script was so sophisticated and great and grounded for even taking a flight of fancy and doing an hour of musical television because, you know, everybody's singing what they can't say. Once you get that sort of status report, the more the music becomes a virus in the ship, and within them, they're singing their biggest fears. Until you have the Klingons, who are literally ashamed of what this has made them do when they've K-popped their way in a musical showdown with the crew.

That was such a fun twist!

DOWNS: Yeah! There was another version because there were some people that were like, “This may be a bridge too far,” but we were like, “Okay, we're all running to the bridge to hold hands in a line, like, there's no bridge too far.” So yeah, I mean, I think as we were shooting, it was all very aware it was gonna be Klingon K-pop.

That's fantastic. You mentioned being a fan of [ Star Trek ] The Original Series ; what was your relationship with Star Trek , in general, before signing on?

DOWNS: Well, I had not done any of the shows. I had been under contract with Greg Berlanti and Warner Bros. for five, six years, so I was doing all the DC properties there, and then I'd venture out and do, like, Blindspot and Prodigal Son . But with the pandemic, all those deals sort of went away because nobody knew when we were gonna work, and certainly not getting on planes, so this was part of just sort of a reboot. I was just really excited to meet new people. It was just a blessing that it was the right place at the right time with my background to sort of convince them to come aboard for this.

My first meeting, though, I was like, “Look, there's Discovery , there's Picard …how many versions of Star Trek can there be?” Because Strange New Worlds Season 1 hadn't dropped yet. so I was like, “What's going on here?” Because what was great about the original was every week was a standalone, you know, ethical, moral or comedic episode, and they were like, “That's exactly what we're doing.” Then, when the musical came up, I was just…I don't know how I can pitch myself too hard for that. And fortunately, it wasn't just eager pleading because they heard that I had the experience and let me run with it. Obviously, the cast, the crew, everybody, gave it 100-plus percent, rehearsing on weekends…Yeah, it was a real good time.

I love when they first hit the anomaly. You can see it hit through the entire crew. How did you go about setting up how that would translate to screen?

DOWNS: If there was a way to interpret a sound wave, we didn't want to get too kind of CGI and effect-y, but when Carol Kane says, “Have you tried sending music to it?” And they do, and then it bounces back, that was the idea. Sort of like a sound wave with maybe the transparency of water because you need to see it a little bit. It's a wave that shimmers through the ship and doesn't knock people down, but you're just sort of pushed back, like a gust of air. So through status report, they're trying to figure out what's going on until they realize there's a virus. There's a full-blown infection.

Then, with Gilbert and Sullivan, there's the whimsy of, like, “Are we singing or not?” And then it just grows and grows and grows until, you know, look, you've got, you've got Pike [Anson Mount] in a bad country duet with Batel [Melanie Scrofano], literally humiliated and pledging his love in front of everybody. [Laughs] That was the one I was most looking forward to because I just knew Anson would bring it. I mean, he's got such great chops. But once I was part of this and got to see some of Season 1, which hadn't even aired yet, it aired the week I started filming, so everybody was riding that high, but just his comedic chops, too! His timing – he's hilarious. But great casting all the way around on this reboot.

Oh, yeah! You do a really good job of balancing all of the performances because it can easily spiral into being too over the top, but it absolutely doesn't. You somehow find a way to balance those really big comedic numbers, like the one with the captain on the bridge, but then there are also those really emotional numbers, like for La’an [Christina Chong] and for Uhura [Celia Rose Gooding] down in engineering. Those are really profound to me. So how did you strike that sort of balance between those two extremes?

DOWNS: I was fortunate that I had two weeks before production started that I was up there just with the choreographer and then the temp tracks of the song. We really got to sort of process the different tone even though they hadn't laid down their version, which I knew was even gonna bring more gravitas to it. You know, Celia’s is such a big power ballad, and wanting to really support that but not wanting to overwhelm it, but they are such a dynamo. Obviously, they were coming to it full throttle, but internally. So, you know, there were moments with all that that’s overwhelming, wanting to be a little dizzy, but also wanting to just hold back and let their notes push the camera back, and not just be like a full three minutes of cinematic pyrotechnics. But Chrissy's song is very different. It's equally as emotional, but it's very grounded in her room, and very static other than the imagination of where she could go with Kirk in that flash-forward/flashback or dream.

There's a real fluidity in the way you move the camera in this episode, and it comes through beautifully. With the big sequences like the final number, parts of this are taking place all over the ship, which is very complicated and, I imagine, a major process to shoot. What was it like bringing all of those disparate sequences together for that final number?

DOWNS: Look, I had favorite numbers, like knowing I was gonna get be able to watch Anson break down or just have that Ethan [Peck] solo, but that, to me, I knew I was gonna have the most fun because everything was broken up like that. So, for instance, when they're in the hallway running, and the camera spins – that was it. That was the one shot. They weren’t getting anything else. That was gonna propel and push. And then, the cross-cutting of that would be like, “Okay, we're gonna limit the shots here. We're not even gonna let the actors sing their way through it.” Because at that point, they're taking charge, so they're sort of pushing the camera around. Except when La’an and Pelia [Carol Kane] and Ethan are in the Queen moment, where they're all three heads [laughs]; that was the most sort of meta-musical moment. But I was like, “We're at the pinnacle of this, so I think we can give a little reference here.”

DOWNS: But yeah, I was like, “Okay, I don't know if I'm gonna get spanked for this because it's a very grounded show,” but even being grounded, we know we have to sing our way out of this. So it's like, “Alright, I don't know if they all had ever seen Queen, but…” [Laughs] That was the tone of the reference that I just felt people would embrace and have fun with it. Then bringing everybody onto the bridge, that was quite a challenge as they all come in off elevate and join, but we were able to layer it, and we beat the anomaly.

You spoke a bit about how strong the script was, and I completely agree. With a musical episode, the plot can sort of get lost, but that doesn't happen at all here. This episode actually moves several relationships forward and pushes the plot points of the season to where they need to be. How did you make sure that you were really bringing those story beats through as well?

DOWNS: As character is first, as everybody was telling me on the show, and as the song progresses, everybody is expressing vulnerabilities that they can't speak. So, music became a way to really push, give exposition to those things that they couldn't normally speak. But, you know, they were singing it with jazz hands. I mean, with someone like La’an’s alone. It's so heartbreaking that she's singing about these things she can't express in person, and Celia’s big moment, Ethan's big solo. Yeah, I mean, there’s big emotional moments as well as the whimsy of ballroom dancing and the craziness of private conversation.

[Laughs] Yeah! So Star Trek is sci-fi, but by its nature, it's the type of sci-fi that can jump across genres and themes. If you come back to Strange New Worlds or any other Star Trek series, is there a particular genre or style of episode that you'd like to try your hand at?

DOWNS: I have yet to do a Western, so I would really love [that]. And look, a space Western wouldn't be out of the box. And certainly, with Anson's– They pull him out of the wilds in the snow in his cabin; he's certainly an outdoorsman.

That would be great! I spoke to Celia and Melissa earlier this year, and they also mentioned doing a Western, so fingers crossed for Season 3.

DOWNS: Wow, yeah! Well, I'll put it out there. [Laughs]

You recently finished directing and producing on Fire Country . What can you share about that experience? And can you tease anything about Season 2?

DOWNS: It was interesting. I went into Fire Country literally, I don't know, a week after finishing “Space Rhapsody.” I just got back from Toronto, and I was actually looking for something that was really sort of gritty because I had come off of, before all of this, an overall deal with Berlanti and the DC Universe, so I had done a lot of larger-than-life superhero things. And Strange New Worlds was very grounded in a way that I loved, and obviously, it has the music element, but Fire Country was in the Friday Night Lights world of just, like, very gritty, character-driven, you know, not being precious with cranes and dollies. I mean, 80% of that show is handheld and just wanting to get to the truth of the drama, and not being precious with things. So, that was my whole goal with that.

And in Season 2, I mean, he ends up back in prison, so all I can tell you is he's gonna start in prison and have to redeem himself again. [Laughs]

Let’s end on a fun one, besides the ones that you've directed, do you have a favorite musical episode of television?

DOWNS: You know, I like the whimsy of the oddness of Schmigadoon! , but I haven't watched every episode of that. Buffy [ the Vampire Slayer ] (“Once More, With Feeling”) was kind of groundbreaking for what it was, but I would say “Space Rhapsody.” [Laughs]

The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 finale will be available to stream on August 10. "Subspace Rhapsody" is now available on Paramount+.

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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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'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+.

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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...

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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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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' musical episode (and the real singers on the Enterprise crew)

After 'Subspace Rhapsody,' we dive into how musical each cast member of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is.

At this year's San Diego Comic-Con, the Star Trek Universe panel announced that Paramount+ 's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would receive a musical episode. Luckily the wait was only a few weeks to watch 'Subspace Rhapsody.'

In season 2, episode 9, Uhura and Spock are experimenting on a quantum probability field. A freak accident causes the people onboard the U.S.S. Enterprise to reveal their innermost feelings in song. Though only the starship seems to be afflicted by the musical disorder, it has the potential to spread across the galaxy. So, they must work fast to contain it.

'Subspace Rhapsody' is a fun diversion from your conventional episode that still maintains the core of what Star Trek is. Each cast member does an admirable job, and you would think everyone has some musical talent. That made us curious about which actors had prior experience and which were out of their comfort zones. Here's a brief musical history of the actors of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Anson Mount (Captain Christopher Pike)

Anson Mount has spread his acting career throughout television, film, and theater. In theater, he always performed in plays and never had the chance to share his voice in a prior musical. In an interview with Collider promoting the series Hell on Wheels, the interviewer asked whether he sings. The actor responded, "A little bit. Mostly people pay me not to sing, but I could learn."

After becoming Captain Pike in Star Trek: Discovery, Mount shared during a panel at the Great Philadelphia Comic Con in 2019 that he had a singing part in the second episode of season two entitled 'New Eden.' When the crew meets with human inhabitants of a distant planet, his character sings an old church hymn, 'Let Us Break Bread Together.' The actor even asked for a voice teacher for the part. But for story reasons, the scene was eventually cut. He would have to wait until 'Subspace Rhapsody' for others to see him finally sing on Star Trek.

Celia Rose Gooding (Nyota Uhura)

Celia Rose Gooding is a big reason Uhura plays a significant role in 'Subspace Rhapsody.' They are a talented singer who broke out as Mary Frances 'Frankie' Healy in the rock and roll musical Jagged Little Pill. They earned a Grammy award and a Tony nomination for the performance. They studied dance at the Alvin Alley Institute in New York City and majored in musical theater at Pace University before dropping out due to Jagged Little Pill obligations.

Melissa Navia (Erica Ortegas)

Helmsman Erica Ortegas is one of the breakout characters of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds due to Melissa Navia. In addition to acting, she is a writer and stand-up comedian. No wonder she hits Ortegas's one-liners and zingers. She grew up as a musical theater kid. In an interview with IRK Magazine , she mentions one of her earliest leading roles was as Peter Pan when she was younger. Despite many adult projects not needing song and dance, Navia still looks right at home in the musical episode.

Ethan Peck (Lieutenant Spock)

Entertainment runs in Ethan Peck's family as his grandfather and father were both actors. It's no surprise that he began his career as a child actor with his early roles, including parts in the made-for-TV movie Marshal Law and Passport to Paris, which starred the Olsen twins. Though none of his prior projects required any musical talent, he did appear in the music video for 'I Want You to Want Me' by KSM. The video was for the television series 10 Things I Hate About You. Peck also studied classical cello for six years when he was younger.

Christina Chong (La'an Noonien-Singh)

Christina Chong started dancing at the age of four. She initially studied at the Sutcliffe School of Dance in Longridge, England, then attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theater Arts in London beginning at 14. After graduating from the academy, she received a role in the musical Aida, which featured songs from Elton John and Tim Rice. An injury shortened her musical theater career, so she turned to acting. Chong proves she still has it in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' musical episode.

Carol Kane (Pelia)

The newest main addition to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is Chief Engineer Pelia. Her actress, Carol Kane, has a long career in entertainment as an actor. She has also received an Academy Award nomination for best actress for the film Hester Street and earned two Oscar awards for her work on the sitcom Taxi. But did you know she has musical experience as well? She played Madame Morrible in Wicked during the first national tour and later on Broadway. For someone who is most known for her comedy, Kane is a sneaky musical ringer for "Subspace Rhapsody."

Jess Bush (Nurse Christine Chapel)

Jess Bush's first television appearance was as a contestant on the seventh season of Australia's Next Top Model. She later pursued acting in the Australian soap opera Home and Away and having a recurring role in the drama series Playing for Keeps. Playing Nurse Chapel on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is her first international role. She might not be a singer, but she has other talents. She is a visual artist who has been selling her work since age 19, and she even designed some of the jewelry her character wears in the series.

Babs Olusanmokun (Doctor Joseph M'Benga)

The one crew member who isn't a slight bit amused with all the musical shenanigans is Doctor M'Benga. Compared to the other characters, he seems to sing the least. Looking through Babs Olusanmokun's filmography and history, there don't appear to be any roles that called for musical ability. That's okay because we saw one of his other talents front and center in the previous episode 'Under the Cloak of War." Olusanmokun utilized his championship Brazilian Jui-Jitsu skills in a sparring scene with Ambassador Dak'Rah.

Rebecca Romijn (Una Chin Riley/Number One)

Rebecca Romijn was first known as a supermodel before she transitioned into acting. She had geek cred even before Star Trek. Her first film role was as the mutant Mystique in the X-Men films of the '00s. Romijn has also dabbled in singing. She covered the Prince song 'Darling Nikki' for the 2005 album Electro Goth Tribute to Prince and featured on 'Color Me Love' on RuPaul's eighth studio album Realness. More recently, as cohost of The Real Love Boat, she sang the iconic theme song of the '80s show, which the reality romance television series is based on during the opening credits alongside her real-life husband, Jerry O'Connell.

Paul Wesley (Lieutenant James T. Kirk)

Before he was Lieutenant Kirk in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Paul Wesley is probably best known for his role as Stefan Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries. Due to the popularity of the series, he was a regular on the convention circuit featuring in many panels. You can search for videos of the various panels and find where the actor sings, including a viral video where he and The Vampire Diaries co-star Ian Somerhalder rap Vanila Ice's 'Ice Ice Baby.' However, these instances are all for fun to entertain the attendees in the audience. You'll have to dive deep into his filmography to find a role where he professionally sang. In the season 2, episode 11 of the legal drama Shark entitled 'Shaun of the Dead,' Wesley plays the lead singer of a rock band. There is a scene where the character performs onstage at a bar, and you can hear Wesley sing a few lines.

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‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’: ‘Subspace Rhapsody’ Is TV’s Best Musical Episode Since ‘Buffy’

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The joke, in the context of the episode, feels slightly random and out of step with the show’s typical sense of humor. But for anyone who has ever watched “ Buffy the Vampire Slayer ,” the reference to bunnies instantly brings to mind a specific song from another musical episode, maybe the most famous one in the subgenre — “Bunnies,” Anya’s (Emma Caulfield) rock solo in Season 6’s “Once More With Feeling.”

“Once More With Feeling,” which focuses on the cast of the teen fantasy drama fighting a demon that cursed the town of Sunnydale into singing their inner thoughts, wasn’t the first musical-themed episode of TV ever produced; there was a 1997 episode of medical procedural “Chicago Hope” where the cast burst into song as a result of brain aneurysm-induced hallucinations, to name one example. But the “Buffy” episode is notable for the acclaim that it received, becoming a fan favorite in a series that already drew obsessive adoration from its audience. And in the years since its 2001 release, it has seemingly inspired other shows to force their characters to belt their hearts out in (hopefully) epic fashion for an installment or two.

The appeal of the musical episode, separate from full on musical shows like “Glee,” is obvious; it’s an easy way to make an installment that departs from formula and sticks out as memorable, and the extra level of time and effort involved in bringing one together can be impressive. But in practice, the majority of musical episodes tend to be frustratingly superficial, gimmicky ploys for attention that dilute rather than enhance a show’s narrative; look at the series of “Riverdale” episodes that focus on the cast’s school productions of musicals like “Carrie” or “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” as examples, installments that clumsily graft the shows’ songs onto the characters with little to no regard for how they fit into the storylines of the people singing them. The question that underlines every piece of musical theater is what do the songs and dances achieve that dialogue and blocking cannot; most one-off musical episodes don’t try to bother answering.

In “Once More With Feeling,” the central conceit of the curse that musical demon Sweet (Hinton Battle) places on Sunnydale is that the songs that the citizens are forced to sing reveal their deepest truths. For the Scooby Gang, this means Giles (Anthony Head) and Tara (Amber Benson) both realize they need to abandon the person they love for very different reasons, while Anya and her fiancé Xander (Nicholas Brendon) share their mutual doubts about their impending nuptials. Most prominently, the entrance into a musical reality causes Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) to finally open up about the intense depression she’s been feeling all season, and give herself over to her desire for former enemy Spike (James Marsters).

And “Subspace Rhapsody” almost directly pulls “Once More With Feeling’s” fantasy musical logic into its sci-fi universe. Early on, Gooding’s Uhura, the resident musical theater geek on the ship, explains how the new reality the crew is briefly living in works; they sing when their emotions are their most intense, overriding rational thinking and giving way into a vocalization of their purest id.

The curse of being forced to reveal your innermost secrets through song is a particularly cruel one to put on the cast of “Strange New Worlds.” As a crew of highly decorated officers for Starfleet, the main characters of the show aren’t exactly a cold bunch, but they’re a group whose interactions and relationships are undergirded by the Enterprise chain of command. Many characters, like Rebecca Romijn’s Una Chin-Riley, purposefully keep themselves at a distance from their subordinates due to their own secrets or past traumas. Spock (Ethan Peck), a character synonymous with cold logic over emotional openness, is one of the main faces on the ship.

Una comes to an emotional realization about the effect hiding her status as an augment has had on her life, Pike admits his doubts and worries about his relationship with girlfriend Batel (Melanie Scrofano), and Uhura is able to express, and heal slightly from, the trauma of her mentor Hemmer’s (Bruce Horak) death in Season 1. The empathetic Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) vocalizes, through a free-wheeling group number, that she prioritizes her career over her nascent romance with Spock, who in turn sings a response song expressing his humiliation and a resolve to further bury his human side. These are all revelations that theoretically could be done in a non-musical episode, but the beauty of “Subspace Rhapsody” is how the songs so efficiently break down the cast’s emotional barriers, shifting the way they communicate with one another entirely.

In the episode’s best scene, La’an decides to come clean about her unusual circumstances to Kirk before the musical logic forces her into it. Kirk is gracious and sympathetic, but awkwardly reveals he’s already in a relationship (with Carol Marcus, who “Star Trek” fans will remember from “The Wrath of Khan”). Chong, very often the show’s MVP, plays her reaction beautifully, with a wistful sadness and longing for what could have been palpable in her every word. You expect her to break out into song at some point, but it never comes. For a very brief moment, La’an doesn’t need music to say what she’s feeling.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is now streaming on Paramount+. The Season 2 finale premieres August 10.

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

“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.

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 intact long enough that this becomes your breaking point, but you do you.

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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 defense 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—one that emphasizes the importance of the growth of its characters, and their connection to each other, as much as it emphasizes 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.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel , Star Wars , and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV , and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who .

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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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• April 25, 2024 | Prep Begins For ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 3 Finale; Cast And Directors Share BTS Images
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Prep Begins For ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 3 Finale; Cast And Directors Share BTS Images

| April 25, 2024 | By: Anthony Pascale 11 comments so far

Work on the third season of  Star Trek: Strange New Worlds  continues to move swiftly in Toronto and looks to be set to wrap up next month. We have some fun bits from the set shared by the cast and a couple of directors, as well as some details on the production.

2 more episodes to go

First up, a selfie from director Jordan Canning, who previously directed the season 2 episode “Charades.” The image posted earlier this week shows the director with Ethan Peck and Rebecca Romijn and has the message, “Always happy to be the redshirt between these two.”

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Jordan Canning (@jjhcanning)

TrekMovie has confirmed that Canning directed episode 8, which has wrapped. Filming for episode 9 has already begun, with Andrew Coutts directing. This will be the directorial debut for Coutts, a co-producer and editor on the show. The 10th and final episode of the season will be directed by Maja Vrvilo, a Paramount+ Trek veteran who has directed episodes of Discovery , Picard , and Strange New Worlds . Earlier this week, she posted an image of her office door, indicated prep work for her episode had already begun.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Maja Vrvilo (@majavrvilo)

Anson has a challenge for cosplayers

There have also been a couple of fun recent social media updates from the cast. First up, Anson Mount posted on Twitter/X that season 3 will require cosplayers to bring their “A-game” as he shared some creative fan costumes.

I will say this about season 3 of #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds : Cos-players, you better be ready to bring your A-game. #Cosplay @StarTrek @StarTrekOnPPlus pic.twitter.com/mZ9gMmIhsL — Anson Mount 🖖 (@ansonmount) April 16, 2024

One new look for cosplayers to try is an armed Nurse Chapel, as seen in this short video from Jess Bush showing off her phaser holster.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Jess Bush (@onejessa)

Finally, on the day of the big eclipse, some of the Strange New Worlds team took a moment to check it out. Bush shared an Instagram story with herself and co-star Melissa Navia rocking their eclipse glasses. (They had 90% totality in Toronto.)

Last week brought big news for Strange New Worlds: It’s been renewed for a fourth season. Paramount+ recently confirmed season 3 will debut in 2025.

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

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I LOVE holodeck dude in cosplay!

I’m curious how long their entire season shooting period actually is.

Usually 5 to 6 months. This one started just before Christmas.

I know I’ll end up watching it, but I’m just not excited for the next season. Season 2 was all over the place, in my opinion. For every episode like Those Old Scientists or Ad Astra Per Aspera, there was rubbish like The Broken Circle and Under the Cloak of War and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I like the cast, but the quality isn’t there- and for all the talk of “big swings” and pushing the envelope- Season 2 was almost painfully generic.

Same here. I’ll be tuning in, but it’s not up there on my ‘must-see right away’ list. I feel like overall, the storytelling floundered during S2, legacy characters written badly, and a distinct corny popcorn feel to it. Both Spock and Pike were reduced to bumbling sidekicks. Hoping S3 has a bit more gravitas to it. Like you said, not the fault of the cast. All blame goes back to the writer’s room. I’m more than happy to consider this show as existing in its own separate timeline, as has been confirmed.

I still can’t get over how *boring* the finale was. It felt like it went on for hours and yet nothing actually happened besides a super-quick and appallingly shot fight in zero-g. Season Two really dropped the ball.

I agree. I don’t even remember what happened in the finale, except Pike at the end hesitating like a scared junior officer when the situation called for fast decisive action. As for the season in general, it feels empty, like nothing really happens in the episodes. I hate the way they turned Spock into a moron. There are better ways if the writers wanted to put some humor in… I’m sure the 12 year olds found it funny but adults are watching too…

So relieved I’m not the only one who felt this way. I hear “game changer” and “big swing” and I think “great, they’re effing with my show again to bring in the non-Trek fans”!

Yes, to them “big swing” means having the characters do things completely out of character and turning Star Trek into a Broadway play. Sure the musical was original and unexpected, but really out of place, and I will never be able to get the K-Pop Klingons out of my head.

I’m absolutely giddy for this next season. Season two was fantastic and I cannot wait for this next season.

Star Trek Producers Try To Follow One Rule With Strange New Worlds

Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have used "Strange New Worlds" to explore the fun side of space travel and push the envelope. From the spooky horror elements of "All Those Who Wander" to the romantic comedy of "Charades," the series has experimented with various genres to tell different stories. Despite the variety on display, however, the creators still have guidelines to adhere to.

While speaking to Variety , Goldsman and Myers revealed that their only rule is to make each season feel episodic. "You shouldn't have to watch a 'previously on' to watch our show," Myers said. This means viewers can pop in whenever they feel like it, knowing that the series isn't 100% beholden to pre-existing "Star Trek" media.

Goldsman and Myers intend to stick to the formula that's worked so well until now, so viewers can expect more genre-hopping adventures and episodic storytelling moving forward. Of course, the "Strange New Worlds" producers aren't the only "Star Trek" alums who've had to follow a rulebook throughout the years, as the franchise used to be much stricter.

Star Trek rules were made to be broken

"Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry was protective of his baby. As such, he devised a franchise rulebook that other producers, showrunners, and writers are supposed to abide by. Roddenberry's bible covers everything from character relationships to instructions on how "Star Trek" should approach the sci-fi genre, but some people have disobeyed the mastermind's edicts. One rule regarding "Spock" even caused a behind-the-scenes fight on "Star Trek: The Next Generation,"  and a change was implemented as a result.

While shows like "Star Trek: Discovery" have continued to break Roddenberry's rules , their existence shows this franchise is treated with care. The creators must consider the bigger picture when developing new projects, even if they occasionally stray from the path. "Strange New Worlds" might have its own rules to follow, but the series actually breaks one of Roddenberry's, as he didn't want characters from "Star Trek: The Original Series" to be used in other shows. Times have changed since then, though, and "Strange New Worlds" is exploring new frontiers for the long-running sci-fi franchise.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the untold truth of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."

Screen Rant

Star trek: discovery just did a secret strange new worlds crossover.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 brought Captain Burnham to the Mirror Universe's Starship Enterprise. If the sets look familiar, it's because they are.

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 5 - "Mirrors"

• Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 5 was a crossover with Strange New Worlds' Enterprise sets.
• Captain Burnham found the Mirror Universe's ISS Enterprise in interdimensional space.
• The two Star Trek series share sets in Toronto and they have filmed on each other's sets before.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors," was a secret crossover with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . Written by Johanna Lee & Carlos Cisco and directed by Jen McGowan, Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5 sent Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) into interdimensional space in pursuit of Moll (Eve Harlow), L'ak (Elias Toufexis), and the next clue to the ancient treasure of the Progenitors. Burnham never expected to find the derelict ISS Enterprise from the Mirror Universe within the dangerous wormhole.

Star Trek: The Original Series season 2, episode 4, "Mirror, Mirror", introduced the Mirror Universe and the ISS Enterprise , the alternate reality counterpart of the USS Enterprise. The ISS Enterprise hadn't been seen since, but Star Trek: Discovery revealed refugees attempted to flee the Mirror Universe aboard the Constitution Class ship. The passengers, including Science Officer Dr. Cho, abandoned the Enterprise in interdimensional space and made it to Star Trek 's Prime Universe. Later, Dr. Cho returned to hide her clue to the Progenitors' treasure aboard the ISS Enterprise.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Returning Cast & New Character Guide

Star trek: discovery season 5 filmed on strange new worlds’ enterprise set, discovery and strange new worlds film on adjacent sets in toronto.

Although no characters from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds appeared in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5 - which makes sense since the two series are set over 930 years apart in Star Trek 's timeline - "Mirrors" was filmed on Strange New Worlds ' USS Enterprise sets which doubled for the ISS Enterprise. Star Trek: Discovery and Strange New Worlds shoot in Toronto on adjacent soundstages and both shows have access to each other's sets. In an interview with Screen Rant , David Ajala confirmed that Discovery filmed its scenes in late 2022 after Strange New Worlds season 2 wrapped production.

Sharing sets is a Star Trek tradition going back to the 1990s Star Trek series.

This type of 'crossover' between Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has happened before . Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 2 , "Ad Astra Per Aspera" shot its courtroom scenes for Lt. Commander Una Chin-Riley's (Rebecca Romijn) trial in Discovery 's Federation headquarters set. Sharing sets is a Star Trek tradition going back to the 1990s Star Trek series when Star Trek: The Next Generation , Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would film on each others' sets as a cost-saving measure.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country redressed Star Trek: The Next Generation 's 10 Forward set to become the office of the Federation President (Kurtwood Smith).

Can Discovery & Strange New Worlds Have A Real Star Trek Crossover?

It's unlikely, but not completely impossible..

Star Trek: Discovery season 1's finale and season 2 can be credited as the first Star Trek 'crossover' of the Paramount+ era when the USS Enterprise, Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Lt. Spock (Ethan Peck), and Number One joined the show. The trio proved so popular, fans clamored for them to receive their own spinoff set aboard the Starship Enterprise, which became Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . Star Trek: Discovery then jumped forward to the 32nd century, and it was a one-way trip that left the Enterprise and the 23rd century permanently behind. But can a Discovery and Strange New Worlds crossover still happen?

Yet there are possibilities for a Discovery and Strange New Worlds crossover.

There won't be a crossover with Star Trek: Discovery season 5 outside of Burnham, Book, Moll, and L'ak occupying the ISS Enterprise in "Mirrors" . Discovery season 5 has long since wrapped production and the hunt for the Progenitors' technology doesn't leave room for any time travel to see Strange New Worlds' characters . Yet there are possibilities for a Discovery and Strange New Worlds crossover. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is in production and the series is renewed for season 4. Perhaps a way could be found to have Captain Burnham see Captain Pike and Spock one more time. Or both show's characters may meet on neutral ground through various sci-fi means on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy . Where there's a will, there's a way to still crossover Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds .

New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season 5 stream Thursdays on Paramount+

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Picture This

George takei 'lost freedom' some 80 years ago – now he's written that story for kids.

Samantha Balaban

George Takei was just 4 years old when when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066:

"I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders... to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded..."

It was Feb. 19, 1942. Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor two months earlier; For looking like the enemy, Japanese and Japanese American people in the U.S. were now considered "enemy combatants" and the executive order authorized the government to forcibly remove approximately 125,000 people from their homes and relocate them to prison camps around the country.

Book Reviews

George takei recalls time in an american internment camp in 'they called us enemy'.

Star Trek actor George Takei has written about this time in his life before — once in an autobiography, then in a graphic memoir, and now in his new children's book, My Lost Freedom.

It's about the years he and his mom, dad, brother and baby sister spent in a string of prison camps: swampy Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, desolate Tule Lake in northern California. But first, they were taken from their home, driven to the Santa Anita racetrack and forced to live in horse stalls while the camps were being built.

"The horse stalls were pungent," Takei remembers, "overwhelming with the stench of horse manure. The air was full of flies, buzzing. My mother, I remember, kept mumbling 'So humiliating. So humiliating.'"

He says, "Michelle's drawing really captured the degradation our family was reduced to."

Michelle is Michelle Lee, the illustrator — and researcher — for the book. Lee relied heavily on Takei's text and his excellent memory, but it was the research that both agree really brought the art to life.

"I'm telling it from the perspective of a senior citizen," Takei, 87, laughs. "I really had to wring my brains to try to remember some of the details."

So Takei took Lee to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the board. They had lunch in Little Tokyo, got to know each other, met with the educational director, and looked at the exhibits. Then Lee started digging into the archives.

Movie Interviews

From 'star trek' to lgbt spokesman, what it takes 'to be takei'.

"I looked for primary sources that showed what life was like because I feel like that humanizes it a lot more," Lee explains. She found some color photographs taken by Bill Manbo, who had smuggled his camera into the internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. "While I was painting the book, I tried as much to depict George and his family just going about their lives under these really difficult circumstances."

Takei says he was impressed with how Lee managed to capture his parents: his father, the reluctant leader and his mother, a fashion icon in her hats and furs. "This has been the first time that I've had to depict real people," Lee adds.

To get a feel for 1940s fashion, Lee says she looked at old Sears catalogues. "What are people wearing? All the men are wearing suits. What kind of colors were clothes back then."

But a lot of information has also been lost — Lee wasn't able to see, for example, where Takei and his family lived in Arkansas because the barracks at Camp Rohwer have been torn down — there's a museum there now. "I didn't actually come across too many photos of the interior of the barracks," says Lee. "The ones I did come across were very staged."

She did, however, find the original floor plans for the barracks at Jerome Camp, also in Arkansas. "I actually printed the floorplan out and then built up a little model just to see what the space was actually like," Lee says. "I think it just emphasized how small of a space this is that whole families were crammed into."

One illustration in the book shows the work that Takei's mother put in to make that barrack — no more than tar paper and boards stuck together — a home.

"She gathered rags and tore them up into strips and braided them into rugs so that we would be stepping on something warm," Takei remembers. She found army surplus fabrics and sewed curtains for the windows. She took plant branches that had fallen off the nearby trees and made decorative sculptures. She asked a friendly neighbor to build a table and chairs.

"You drew the home that my mother made out of that raw space, Takei tells Lee. "That was wonderful."

Michelle Lee painted the art for My Lost Freedom using watercolor, gouache and colored pencils. Most of the illustrations have a very warm palette, but ever-present are the barbed wire fences and the guard towers. "There's a lot of fencing and bars," Lee explains. "That was kind of the motif that I was using throughout the book... A lot of vertical and horizontal patterns to kind of emphasize just how overbearing it was."

Takei says one of his favorite drawings in the book is a scene of him and his brother, Henry, playing by a culvert.

Asian American And Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2022

George takei got reparations. he says they 'strengthen the integrity of america'.

"Camp Rohwer was a strange and magical place," Takei writes. "We'd never seen trees rising out of murky waters or such colorful butterflies. Our block was surrounded by a drainage ditch, home to tiny, wiggly black fishies. I scooped them up into a jar.

One morning they had funny bumps. Then they lost their tails and their legs popped out. They turned into frogs!"

"They're just two children among many children who were imprisoned at these camps," says Lee, "and to them, perhaps, aspects of being there were just fun." The illustration depicts both childlike wonder and — still, always — a sense of foreboding. Butterflies fly around a barbed wire fence. A bright sun shines on large, dark swamp trees. Kids play in the shadow of a guard tower.

"There's so much that you tell in that one picture," says Takei. "That's the art."

"So many of your memories are of how perceptive you are to things that are going on around you," adds Lee, "but also still approaching things from a child's perspective."

Even though the events in My Lost Freedom took place more than 80 years ago, illustrator Michelle Lee and author George Takei say the story is still very relevant today.

"These themes of displacement and uprooting of communities from one place to another — these are things that are constantly happening," says Lee. Because of war and because of political decisions ... those themes aren't uncommon. They're universal."

Takei agrees. "People need to know the lessons and learn that lesson and apply it to hard times today. And we hope that a lot of people get the book and read it to their children or read it to other children and act on it."

He's done his job, he says, now the readers have their job.

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‘Cabaret’ Review: What Good Is Screaming Alone in Your Room?

Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin star in a buzzy Broadway revival that rips the skin off the 1966 musical.

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By Jesse Green

Just east of its marquee, the August Wilson Theater abuts an alley you probably didn’t notice when last you were there, perhaps to see “Funny Girl,” its previous tenant. Why would you? Where the trash goes is not usually part of the Broadway experience.

But it is for the latest revival of “Cabaret,” which opened at the Wilson on Sunday. Audience members are herded into that alley, past the garbage, down some halls, up some stairs and through a fringed curtain to a dimly lit lounge. (There’s a separate entrance for those with mobility issues.) Along the way, greeters offer free shots of cherry schnapps that taste, I’m reliably told, like cough syrup cut with paint thinner.

Too often I thought the same of the show itself.

But the show comes later. First, starting 75 minutes beforehand, you can experience the ambience of the various bars that constitute the so-called Kit Kat Club, branded in honor of the fictional Berlin cabaret where much of the musical takes place. Also meant to get you in the mood for a story set mostly in 1930, on the edge of economic and spiritual disaster, are some moody George Grosz-like paintings commissioned from Jonathan Lyndon Chase . (One is called “Dancing, Holiday Before Doom.”) The $9 thimbleful of potato chips is presumably a nod to the period’s hyperinflation.

This all seemed like throat clearing to me, as did the complete reconfiguration of the auditorium itself, which is now arranged like a large supper club or a small stadium. (The scenic, costume and theater design are the jaw-dropping work of Tom Scutt.) The only relevant purpose I can see for this conceptual doodling, however well carried out, is to give the fifth Broadway incarnation of the 1966 show a distinctive profile. It certainly does that.

The problem for me is that “Cabaret” has a distinctive profile already. The extreme one offered here frequently defaces it.

Let me quickly add that Rebecca Frecknall’s production , first seen in London , has many fine and entertaining moments. Some feature its West End star Eddie Redmayne, as the macabre emcee of the Kit Kat Club (and quite likely your nightmares). Some come from its new New York cast, including Gayle Rankin (as the decadent would-be chanteuse Sally Bowles) and Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell (dignified and wrenching as an older couple). Others arise from Frecknall’s staging itself, which is spectacular when in additive mode, illuminating the classic score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the amazingly sturdy book by Joe Masteroff.

But too often a misguided attempt to resuscitate the show breaks its ribs.

The conception of Sally is especially alarming. As written — and as introduced in the play and stories the musical is based on — she is a creature of blithe insouciance if not talent, an English good-time gal flitting from brute to brute in Berlin while hoping to become a star. Her first number, “Don’t Tell Mama,” is a lively Charleston with winking lyrics (“You can tell my brother, that ain’t grim/Cause if he squeals on me I’ll squeal on him”) that make the Kit Kat Club audience, and the Broadway one too, complicit in her naughtiness.

Instead, Frecknall gives us a Sally made up to look like she’s recently been assaulted or released from an asylum, who dances like a wounded bird, stretches each syllable to the breaking point and shrieks the song instead of singing it. (Goodbye, Charleston; hello, dirge.) If Rankin doesn’t sound good in the number, nor later in “Mein Herr,” interpolated from the 1972 film, she’s not trying to. Like the cough syrup-paint thinner concoction, she’s meant to be taken medicinally and poisonously in this production, projecting instead of concealing Sally’s turmoil.

That’s inside-out. The point of Sally, and of “Cabaret” more generally, is to dramatize the danger of disengagement from reality, not to fetishize it.

The guts-first problem also distorts Redmayne’s Emcee, but at least that character was always intended as allegorical. He is the host to anything, the amoral shape-shifter, becoming whatever he must to get by. Here, he begins as a kind of marionette in a leather skirt and tiny party hat, hiccupping his way through “Willkommen.” Later he effectively incarnates himself as a creepy clown, an undead skeleton, Sally’s twin and a glossy Nazi.

Having seen Frecknall’s riveting production of “Sanctuary City,” a play about undocumented immigrants by Martyna Majok , I’m not surprised that her “Cabaret” finds a surer footing in the “book” scenes. These are the ones that take place in the real Berlin, not the metaphorical one of the Kit Kat Club. She is extraordinarily good when she starts with the naturalistic surface of behavior, letting the mise en scène and the lighting (excellent, by Isabella Byrd) suggest the rest.

And naturalism is what you find at the boardinghouse run by Fräulein Schneider (Neuwirth), a woman who has learned to keep her nose down to keep safe. Her tenants include a Jewish fruiterer, Herr Schultz (Skybell); a prostitute, Fräulein Kost (Natascia Diaz); and Clifford Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood), an American writer come to Berlin in search of inspiration. Soon Sally shows up to provide it, having talked her way into Cliff’s life and bed despite being little more than a stranger. Also, despite Cliff’s romantic ambivalence; over the years, the character has had his sexuality revamped more times than a clownfish.

The Schneider-Shultz romance is sweet and sad; neither character is called upon to shriek. And Rankin excels in Sally’s scenes with Cliff, her wry, frank and hopeful personality back in place. The songs that emerge from the boardinghouse dramas are not ransacked as psychiatric case studies but are rather given room to let comment proceed naturally from real entertainment. Rankin’s “Maybe This Time,” with no slathered-on histrionics, is riveting. It turns out she can properly sing.

The interface between the naturalism and the expressionism does make for some weird moments: Herr Schultz, courtly in a topcoat, must hug Sally goodbye in her bra. But letting the styles mix also brings out the production’s most haunting imagery. The intrusion of the Nazi threat into the story is especially well handled: first a gorgeously sung and thus chilling version of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” then the swastika and then — well, I don’t want to give away how Frecknall stages the scene in which Schultz’s fruit shop is vandalized.

That so many of these moments arise from faithful attention to the original material should be no surprise. “Cabaret” hasn’t lasted this long for nothing. Created at the tail end of Broadway’s Golden Age, it benefited from the tradition of meticulous craftsmanship that preceded it while anticipating the era of conceptual stagings that followed.

All this is baked into the book, and especially the score, which I trust I admire not merely because I worked on a Kander and Ebb show 40 years ago. That the lyrics rhyme perfectly is a given with Ebb; more important, they are always the right words to rhyme. (Listen, in the title song, for the widely spaced triplet of “room,” “broom” and, uh-oh, “tomb.”) And Kander’s music, remixing period jazz, Kurt Weill and Broadway exuberance, never oversteps the milieu or outpaces the characters even as it pushes them toward their full and sometimes manic expression.

When this new “Cabaret” follows that template, it achieves more than the buzz of chic architecture and louche dancing. (The choreography is by Julia Cheng.) Seducing us and then repelling us — in that order — it dramatizes why we flock to such things in the first place, whether at the Kit Kat Club or the August Wilson Theater. We hope, at our risk, to forget that, outside, “life is disappointing,” as the Emcee tells us. We want to unsee the trash.

Cabaret At the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; kitkat.club . Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes, with an optional preshow.

Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions. More about Jesse Green

Kirks Starship Enterprise Returns In Star Trek: Discovery - With A Big Twist

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 5 - "Mirrors"

• The Mirror Universe's ISS Enterprise, last seen in Star Trek: The Original Series' "Mirror, Mirror," makes a shocking return in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5.
• Star Trek: Discovery filmed scenes on the USS Enterprise set of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
• The ISS Enterprise now exists in the 32nd century, offering a new glimpse into the alternate reality of the Mirror Universe.

Captain James T. Kirk's (William Shatner) Starship Enterprise makes a shocking return in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, but with a jaw-dropping twist - it's the ISS Enterprise from Star Trek: The Original Series ' "Mirror, Mirror"! Written by Johanna Lee & Carlos Cisco and directed by Jen McGowan, Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors," sees Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) enter interdimensional space to pursue Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis) and the next clue to the Progenitors' ancient treasure. What Burnham and Book never expected to find was the Mirror Universe's derelict ISS Enterprise.

Star Trek: Discovery picked up the mantle of the Mirror Universe from Star Trek: The Original Series , Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , and Star Trek; Enterprise. Discovery 's season 1's game-changing Mirror Universe arc introduced Emperor Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who would enter Star Trek 's Prime Universe and is now headlining Paramount+'s upcoming Star Trek: Section 31 movie. Star Trek: Discovery deepened the saga of the Mirror Universe, but the alternate reality's final appearance was in Star Trek: Discovery season 3. Thanks to Star Trek 's Temporal Wars , it's now impossible for the Prime and Mirror Universes to cross over in Star Trek: Discovery 's 32nd century.

Individuals who both time travel and cross from Star Trek' s Prime and Mirror Universes suffer a lethal medical condition, such as what happened to Emperor Georgiou.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Returning Cast & New Character Guide

Star trek: discovery brings back kirks mirror universe starship enterprise, the iss enterprise last appeared in star trek: the original series' "mirror, mirror".

The Mirror Universe's ISS Enterprise in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5 is the same Constitution Class starship from Star Trek: The Original Series season 2, episode 4, "Mirror, Mirror," which was the ISS Enterprise's only prior canonical appearance. The ISS Enterprise was trapped in interdimensional space and abandoned by its crew, who were refugees and freedom fighters attempting to flee the Mirror Universe for Star Trek 's Prime Universe in the 24th century. As Captain Burnham later learned, the refugees made it to the Prime Universe, and one scientist even became a Starfleet Admiral.

In Star Trek: Enterprise season 4's "In A Mirror, Darkly", the 22nd-century Terran Empire gained control of the Constitution Class USS Defiant, which crossed over and time traveled from the 23rd-century Prime Universe.

In Star Trek: The Original Series ' "Mirror, Mirror", the ISS Enterprise was commanded by Captain James T. Kirk who assassinated its prior Captain, Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter). "Mirror, Mirror" saw the Prime Universe's Kirk, Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), and Scotty (James Doohan) switch places with their Mirror counterparts due to a transporter accident during an ion storm. Before switching back, Prime Kirk planted a seed with the goateed Mirror Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to take control of the Terran Empire and institute reforms to prevent the inevitable destruction of the Empire.

Mirror Spock's reforms were successful but ultimately weakened the Terran Empire, which was conquered by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance, as seen in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Star Trek: Discovery Filmed Season 5s Enterprise On Strange New Worlds Set

Star trek: strange new worlds was on hiatus after season 2..

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors", was filmed on the USS Enterprise set of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds . When Discovery season 5 was in production in late 2022, Strange New Worlds was on hiatus after completing season 2 filming in June . ( Strange New Worlds wouldn't begin season 3 production until December 2023.) Sonequa Martin-Green, David Ajala, Eve Harlow, and Elias Toufexis shot on Strange New Worlds ' sets, which are located in Toronto where Star Trek: Discovery also filmed.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is in production, and the series has been renewed for season 4.

Star Trek: Discovery redressed Strange New Worlds ' USS Enterprise set to become the ISS Enterprise. Scenes were filmed on the Enterprise's bridge, hallways, and medical bay. Interestingly, by using Strange New Worlds ' Enterprise set, which depicts the USS Enterprise before Captain Kirk assumes command, Star Trek: Discovery season 5 establishes that the ISS Enterprise, which crossed into the Prime Universe decades after Star Trek: The Original Series , is the same ship as in "Mirror, Mirror" despite the very different interiors.

Star Trek: Enterprise recreated the sets of Star Trek: The Original Series ' USS Enterprise for the interiors of the USS Defiant.

What Happens To Mirror Universes Enterprise In Star Trek: Discovery?

The 32nd century just got another 23rd-century starship.

Captain Burnham and Cleveland Booker piloted the ISS Enterprise out of interdimensional space and into Star Trek 's Prime Universe with the help of the USS Discovery. Afterward, Burnham assigned Lt. Commanders Kayla Detmer (Emily Coutts) and Joann Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) to fly the ISS Enterprise to Federation headquarters, so that the Mirror Universe's starship could be put into "storage". However, there are now fascinating ramifications to the ISS Enterprise existing in Star Trek: Discovery 's 32nd century .

Amazingly, the ISS Enterprise is also now the second 23rd-century starship in 3191 along with the USS Discovery itself.

Although the ISS Enterprise is obsolete by 32nd-century standards, it's still a bonanza of Mirror Universe technology that the United Federation of Planets has now acquired . This would certainly be of interest to Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg). The 23rd-century ISS Enterprise is a window not just to 900 years ago, but also to the alternate reality, especially since the Mirror Universe is now sealed off permanently from the Federation. Amazingly, the ISS Enterprise is also now the second 23rd-century starship in 3191 along with the USS Discovery itself. Perhaps the ISS Enterprise will reappear and play a role in the second half of Star Trek: Discovery season 5.

New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season 5 stream Thursdays on Paramount+

Cast Blu del Barrio, Oded Fehr, Anthony Rapp, Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Wilson Cruz, Eve Harlow, Mary Wiseman, Callum Keith Rennie

Streaming Service(s) Paramount+

Franchise(s) Star Trek

Writers Alex Kurtzman

Directors Jonathan Frakes, Olatunde Osunsanmi

Showrunner Alex Kurtzman

Where To Watch Paramount+