“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.
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.