Star Trek and its various spin-off series have always featured quirky episodes. The original series had episodes like The Trouble With Tribbles and A Piece Of The Action, where Kirk and Spock go to a planet that had adopted the governance principles of ’20s-era mobster Chicago due to the contaminating influence of a book inadvertently left behind by prior Federation visitors. We’ve watched episodes where characters lost their inhibitions, prematurely aged, lived alternative lives, met their evil selves, time traveled to meet historical figures, and just about every other oddball plotline you can think of.
But there has never been a musical Star Trek episode–until this year. Brave New Worlds, the show that features Captain Christopher Pike, Spock, Uhura, and Nurse Chapel on the Enterprise in the pre-original series years, aired an episode called Subspace Rhapsody in which the characters periodically burst into song and dance steps, just like they do in ’40s musicals or West Side Story. I’ve been trying to catch up on Brave New Worlds this week, and I finally watched the episode last night.
The concept underlying the episode is that the Enterprise encounters a fold in subspace, tries to use it to speed up subspace communication, and broadcasts a song at the phenomenon–which reacts in a way that causes everyone in the Enterprise to start singing their deepest innermost feelings. The phenomenon spreads, and eventually crew members in every ship in the Federation are launching into revealing songs, which incidentally poses obvious security problems. Even the fierce Klingons are affected–and they don’t like it, because rather than singing Klingon opera they’re crooning a “boy band” number with accompanying dance moves, which is pretty hilarious.
From the on-line reaction, it looks like the episode was a hit with viewers. You can read a Variety interview with the creators of the episode here, check out a “behind-the-scenes” article here, find out about the musical abilities of the cast here, and see the nine songs sung in the episode ranked here.
I’m not a big fan of musicals, but I thought Subspace Rhapsody was a worthy addition to the roster of classic, one-off, quirky Star Trek episodes. It did make me regret, however, that the original series didn’t try this approach, at least one. It would have given Dr. McCoy the chance to utter the timeline line: “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a singer!”
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