Inside ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Musical — Plus, About That [Spoiler] Mention
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 9 “Subspace Rhapsody.”]
If the musical proves one thing, it’s that “Strange New Worlds is not going to jump the shark,” Dermott Downs, who directed the groundbreaking episode (a first for Star Trek!), tells TV Insider.
That was a concern of his, when he first heard about it, he admits, “but there’s such great writers on [the show], and once you understand the conceit of the music anomaly, when Carol Kane [who plays Pelia] says, ‘Well, have you tried bouncing music at it?’ and it comes back into the ship. Once you’re going with it, then it just became better and better because the more you sang, the more your vulnerabilities were coming out through the music.”
He continues, “every song was different, to the amazing credit of the songwriters and the screenwriters. It wasn’t just like, ‘OK, we’re going to go with the musical and just throw everything at the wall, jazz hands for an hour.’ Everybody got to express themselves through music in a very unique way.”
Executive producer Akiva Goldsman is a fan of musicals and had wanted to do one, and executive producer Henry Alonso Myers has experience with them, but they waited until the second season. After Goldsman brought up the possibility, Myers thought, “we need to get at full speed before we attack this because it’s going to be hard. And then Season 2, there was a pitch in the room from one of the writers that we were like, this feels like the musical that we were talking about doing.”
It took a lot of coordinating. “We really try very hard to do each episode of the show as its own movie,” Myers explains. “And this seemed like an opportunity to do something that had not really been done on Trek before. There have been musical scenes, but nothing like this, nothing with original music, nothing in this zone. So that was a unique opportunity for us.”
“Subspace Rhapsody,” which featured 10 original songs (including a fresh take on the main title sequence), with music and lyrics by Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley and Tom Polce, is full of catchy lyrics, fun dancing, heart, and, of course, a threat to the crew.
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“It was vital to continue the character stories,” Goldsman says, pointing out this is the penultimate episode of the season. “And so a lot of stuff is looking towards resolution. We drove the storytelling based on what character stories had to be resolved and combined that with the musical and the idea of music in shows being disclosure, truth, singing from your heart. And so in a weird way, the needs of the story kind of shaped what genre of musical it would be. It couldn’t be whimsical beyond reason. It couldn’t be frivolous because what the characters were going through when they walked into it and where they had to be when they walked out of it were about real emotion.”
The anomaly results from Spock (Ethan Peck) and Uhura’s (Celia Rose Gooding) failed attempt at real-time communication across thousands of lightyears; off Pelia’s suggestion, they send music, and as a result, the crew is compelled to sing, confessing personal, emotional information. It takes the entire crew, uniting in the grand finale “We Are One” to create an improbability breaking event and reverse it.
“What was fun about that is it is broken out all over the ship, and then as the energy of that song builds and their confidence of how we’re going to overcome this by the power of one, there’s the cross-cutting and all those different scenarios, building into the crew running down the hallway with the 360 and everybody landing on the deck and just holding hands and it becomes the chorus line,” Downs recalls.
“I was on the bridge! That was choreographed on the bridge. That’s like a little boy’s dream,” Roberto Campanella, who choreographed the musical (which he calls “probably the best, most fun experience I’ve ever had in 20 years that I’ve been doing TV and film”), exclaims. “From day one, there was a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement about doing it from everybody.” In fact, the cast became more excited once Campanella and his associate choreographer, Kelly Shaw, did a performance of that finale for them.
Another fun dance number was Chapel’s (Jess Bush) “I’m Ready,” after she was accepted into a fellowship (that will take her from the Enterprise, something Spock doesn’t handle quite so well). That was the last one they filmed, and it became the wrap party for the episode, with everyone singing a cappella, Downs shares. “It was the penultimate episode [of the season], so everybody was exhausted, but their spirit just shined through,” he adds.
For Campanella, that was among the most fun for him to choreograph. “[Dermott] wanted to use the entire space and it goes around, and then the pillars and the couches. … The set was so vibrant the entire day,” he says. He has videos of the cast and dancers singing and dancing. (Downs picks Anson Mount and Melanie Scrofano‘s “Private Conversation,” in which they’re compelled to discuss their relationship via song in front of his crew, adding, “[Anson]’s got the drama chops, but he is actually a really, really funny guy, too.”)
Paramount+
Campanella shares that the cast came up with ideas, pointing specifically to a conversation he had with Downs and Christina Chong (who plays La’an) about her solo, “How Would That Feel.” “I said, ‘Listen, I can do anything dance wise with Christina, anything. But for that, I really don’t see the dancing.’ I was there just in case Chrissy wanted anything, some kind of movement. Every single take, I got either goosebumps or watery eyes. I was so moved.”
Downs reveals, “Originally, when it breaks open and it’s a callback to her episode with Paul [Wesley as Kirk] and the alternate Earth, that blowout moment in the musical was going to be like The Sound of Music, and it was just going to be nature and wide open, like you couldn’t be further from space.” Instead, “we kind of stayed so grounded to the story. We were like, ‘Well, how else can we frame that but still make it celebratory or just exciting in her mind?’ … We decided to just go for something way more intimate. Eighty percent of it’s under the sheets and it’s just full of all the love that she can’t express to him in the real world. And I ended up being really happy with that.”
While La’an initially fights it, after a conversation (and song) with Una (Rebecca Romijn), she does talk to Kirk and reveal she’d met another version of him. She confesses she feels like he really sees her, and while he in turn shares that he does feel a connection, he also tells her he’s in a complicated relationship — and Carol, a scientist, is pregnant. (Star Trek fans know Kirk and Carol Marcus’ history, which does include a child.)
Why did they bring that up now, in this episode? “It was always there. This is a real thing that those people who are familiar with the series would know existed and happened but hasn’t really ever been discussed during that time,” according to Myers. “So we thought it was an opportunity to dig into how it would change him and how it would make him feel and how it would make the world around him feel. Because part of the opportunity of this series is that we get a chance to imagine what the life of people is like before they become the person who we know they will be. I think if we stick on that, it gives us something unique and unusual and genuine and human. And that’s all we were trying to go for with that.”
What was your favorite number? Which songs will you be listening to over and over?
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+
