Hi, I’m Sophie, your guest recapper. Keith will be back to cover the season finale next week, and I’ve promised not to trash the place while he’s away. As they say, both on Broadway and in outer space, on with the show!
The writers of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did not have to go so hard. They could have written a perfectly respectable penultimate episode, where the themes this season has explored — the challenges of navigating collegial, platonic, and romantic relationships; balancing one’s own dreams and ambitions against the dreams of those we love; processing past grief and trauma — would all be folded into an adventure with genuine heart and emotional heft.
Instead, Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff took a big swing and ratcheted up the episode’s degree of difficulty for everyone by writing a musical episode. Not even a supersize portion of hand-wavy, “It’s SCIENCE, okay?!†expository dialogue can fray the elegant weave of all of the character arcs and thematic threads that give “Subspace Rhapsody†its narrative sturdiness. The delightful, often moving, and deeply earworm-y songs furnished by songwriting team Tom Polce and Kay Hanley elevate the whole affair. You may recall their work from the effervescent oeuvre of Letters to Cleo and from appearances in films such as 10 Things I Hate About You and Josie & the Pussycats.
It’s so fun to watch the crew members being hypercompetent. Uhura’s zipping through the Star Trek version of every fun 1940s switchboard-operator montage we’ve ever seen to clear the electronic decks for this experiment and excitement about a naturally occurring subspace fold is matched by Spock’s eagerness to test a hypothesis. What if the naturally occurring subspace fold could triple the speed of subspace communications? They could invent interstellar texting! Uhura’s unconscious humming to herself as she works gives Pelia a brilliant idea: Since the fold operates under a different set of physics laws than they’re used to, maybe a different type of communication will unlock the speed they’re hoping for. Perhaps dynamic harmonics (a.k.a. songs) would work? Pelia is a bit cheeky and is still a somewhat mysterious character. Is she being a sincerely helpful, nearly immortal physics genius, or a trickster? Maybe it’s a bit of both.
The confidence of this episode is further emphasized by its patience: The first song doesn’t arrive until seven minutes in. With the ship reeling from a mysterious wave sent from the fold, Spock, of all people, kicks off the first song with the Spock-iest lyrics imaginable, “The intermix chamber and containment field are stable / I’ll get to the warp core and assess its state when I’m able,†and we are off to the races. It is, as they repeat several times, so peculiar.
Everyone in this cast can sing, and even those with modest vocal gifts acquit themselves well and then make room for powerhouse vocalists like the Grammy-winning and Tony-nominated Celia Rose Gooding and classically trained dancer Christina Chong. Shout-out to Polce and Hanley for writing toward their cast members’ skills. The most surprising new-to-me tidbit I learned on a little dive into their Wikipedia entries is that Rebecca Romijn studied voice at UC Santa Cruz. Actor, supermodel, singer — she can do it all!
Upon returning from the credits — this week featuring a special choral arrangement, a true gift to collegiate a cappella groups everywhere — everyone learns that by sending the fold “Anything Goes†and giving it a taste of the Great American Songbook, the Enterprise prompted the fold to unleash a very unlikely alternate musical-theatre reality. This scene includes a sweet little Easter egg for all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans out there, with La’an and Dr. M’Benga fretting about being turned into bunnies. Seems unlikely, but at least they’re not terrified of bunnies like Buffy’s resident vengeance demon and leporiphobia sufferer, Anya.
Captain Pike wants solutions, and the team set to work with their first attempt, zipping the fold shut. This leads to a trio of related songs about balancing the responsibilities of leadership with one’s feelings. The first, Number One’s charming waltz with the visiting Jim Kirk, “Connect to Your Crew,†furnishes some genuinely helpful life advice about drawing on one’s authentic self to make and maintain meaningful relationships. It’s a tiny slice of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the midst of an episode that leans far more toward the (also lovely) contemporary style of Waitress.
Throughout this song, the camera keeps panning to La’an, crouched behind a hallway buttress. Her face is a picture of jealous anguish as she observes her hero-friend, Una, casually sharing confidences with Jim, for whom she harbors feelings she’s obliged not to name due to space-time reasons. She’s been trapped in this â€Conceal, don’t feelâ€Â place for too long, and as she puts it in her big number, as valuable as being cool, methodical, and responsible is, “it might be time to change [her] paradigm / if only [she] can let go of the wheel.†Can La’an merge the parts of herself that keep the watch — her one memento of “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow†— under a double lock and key with the part that conjures a little flight of fancy where she and Kirk are in love and she can let herself be vulnerable and happy? Is it any wonder that La’an raises the alarm about the crew’s emotions being a security threat?
She knows she needs to nip the possibility of singing to Jim in the bud, but to do so is also to come clean about how she knew Alternate Timeline Jim. Number One, opening up to La’an in exactly the way she’d hoped for earlier, counsels a Marie Kondo approach to her skills and habits. They’re not in a desperate struggle for survival anymore, so perhaps it’s time to thank secret-keeping and emotion-crushing for their valuable service and let them go. Wanting to avoid the whole thing coming out in the form of a 17th-century sea shanty (for the record, I would love to hear that), La’an does what she must, leading to the episode’s best scene. Kudos to Christina Chong and Paul Wesley for leaning into the maybe-next-lifetime of it all. In lesser hands, this scene could have been kind of maudlin, but they transform it into well-earned heartache.
All that honesty may be for naught, though. The musical logic anomaly’s expansion across the entire subspace communications network could overwhelm the entire fleet’s logical thinking and drive them to the brink of war. The threat of total communications annihilation grows more intense now that even the Klingons are affected. General Garkog cannot abide “the abominable source of our dishonor†and intends to destroy it immediately upon arriving at the fold in about two hours.
Spock’s next gambit, generating a song-prompting moment, leads into another pair of songs: Chapel’s big ensemble number, followed by his own response song. Chapel’s is the most fun song of the episode so far, and yet it also raises some questions. She’s usually pretty easygoing, and perhaps some of that easy-breeziness is as much a survival tactic as Number One’s secret keeping. Her song underlines the professional ambition that led her to apply for (and get) another prestigious fellowship with a leading archaeological medicine specialist. She’s ready for what the future holds, even if it includes leaving Spock behind entirely, though I note that she’s still keeping her rationale a secret from everyone. Spock’s response song, back in the emotionally safe space of Engineering, uses the same melody as Chapel’s, and is every bit as lovelorn as hers is (mostly) triumphant. It’s such a bummer to see Spock describe his behavior in their relationship as “dysfunctional, weak, and emotional†when that relationship prompting him to let his human side take precedence seemed to be a boon for him.
Thank goodness for Uhura, whose song is the barn burner of the episode, making the most of Celia Rose Gooding’s gorgeous voice and presence as she sings about finding patterns in both data and in her heart. As a person who’s always been devoted to helping everyone else maintain their connections, can she marshal those skills to include herself in that everyone and find a way out of the potential impending disaster as a member of a team? Uhura is the youngest member of the Enterprise crew, and the degree to which they rely on her is staggering.
She leads the crew to the unified emotional heights they’ll need to scale to reverse the effects of the improbability field with a Back to the Future–style jolt of emotion of 344 giga electronvolts. The grand finale works because Uhura is able to inspire all 200 or so crew members to sing together. As ever, teamwork makes the dream work, and each person contributes all they can — including dancing! — in spite of the real challenges they’ve been singing about. The triumphant climax of the song is delayed a tiny bit by a check-in from the Klingons, who are led in song by General Garkog, who … can’t possibly be familiar with T-Pain’s oeuvre, but who nonetheless delivers a flawless impression of the greatest practitioner of Auto-Tune. A+ silliness by Bruce Horak, who played Hemmer last season.
The song does the trick, and everyone on board is relieved to get back to their new normal of being more in touch with their feelings and chance-taking. They’re still sensitive enough to be struck with momentary dread when Uhura hums the tune of Chapel’s and Spock’s songs, but it passes, as every feeling does.
Space Tidbits
• As JTK is about to arrive, Number One tells La’an, “You have … an energy. You came in hot. On fire. It’s making me sweat.†I love this line delivery so much and have been waiting all season for it.
• Musical Pun Watch: Pike tells Uhura and Spock, “You’re applying old rules to a new reality. I suggest you find a different tempo.†LOL.
• A prize for the best bit of business in the background goes to Sam Kirk’s tiny body rolls, which I’m pretty sure only Uhura notices.
• Does the grand finale include an homage to The Muppet Show theme song? You be the judge: The crew sings that “We’re unbreakable, unshakeable, improbable, unstoppable, sensational, ovational, we, the fully explorational crew of the Enterprise!†Their Muppet forebears always sang about “the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational / This is what we call The Muppet Show!â€