Episode Analysis | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x09 “Subspace Rhapsody”
This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Strange New Worlds 2x09 Subspace Rhapsody.
Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.
I don't know a lot about musicals, but it felt like each song was referencing a musical sub genera. Nurse Chapel's song seem to reference something jazzy like Chicago, another song sound like it would of fit into the 60s Marry Poppins/Sound of Music.
Most of the songs are in a modern Broadway poppish sounding Pasek & Paul vein (La La Land, The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen) with the exception of Una and Kirk’s “Connect to Your Crew”, which is more old school. Maybe they were going for a Gilbert & Sullivan vibe, but it’s closer to Rodgers & Hammerstein in The King and I and The Sound of Music, musically.
Cool! Its nice to know my ear isn't that bad!
Some surprisingly moving musical numbers! They could have easily taken the cheap and entertaining way out here with a bunch of over the top ensemble numbers (which would have been perfectly acceptable), but they opted for some genuine character growth-through-song instead. As I'm frequently saying this season: this episode had significantly more thought and consideration put into it than was necessary.
I love that the theme of this episode was centered around relationships and what "being connected" means. Uhura's penultimate number was very powerful and tied the subject of the previous songs all together. I've been streaming the album pretty much nonstop on Spotify since Thursday!
They had most of the big musical tropes, including a rebuke and reprise (nurse chapel and Spock's subsequent song).
I felt Soong's song was a direct reference to On My Own from Les Miserable, but that's a personal favorite of mine so I could be projecting.
Overall, an excellent episode.
I could tell that Chapel and Spock's songs had some significant structural similarities (I am largely ignorant of the technical aspects of music, so I couldn't say what exactly). Is that typically a part of the "rebuke and reprise" sequence (which is also totally new to me)?
I think a reprise is technically when a song is used again as an expansion on / evolution of a certain theme. The best example that comes to mind is from Phantom of the Opera where the phantom cry- sings to himself after he witnesses Cristine confess her love to the other guy.
Painting with a broad brush here, but this episode definitely feels like it was made by huge Broadway musical nerds 🤣
Curious what others think about this, but I was wondering about the mechanism for how the parameters of the quantum uncertainty field were defined to create a reality that follows the 'rules' of the musical genre. Uhura transmitted Anything Goes into the subspace fold, but that's just a structured harmonic pattern (or however Pelia called it) and even if you took the song's content into account, it doesn't inherently contain any kind of comprehensive definition of common musical tropes (songs tending to give voice internal character motivations, choreographed dancing, songs combined into a medley, etc).
So were the crew thoughts somehow influencing the "selection" of the improbability fields? If so, how? Is the subspace fold sentient somehow? And even if so, all the anomaly knew was that a ship full of life forms was beaming something at it, how would it know which life form in which room was the one pressing the button and that their thoughts should be doing the 'driving'? (Heaven help us if it decided to read Ensign Johnson's mind down on Deck 7 and get a glimpse into the world of Federation-era Furry fandom!) What do you think?
Personally, I think this is some good ol' fashioned TOS-style handwaving that we're not meant to think too much about, but that's not the kind of thinking we get paid for around these parts. 😜
My take is that "Anything Goes" managed to find an exact match in the multiverse, and they became entangled from there - the song is from a Broadway musical of the same name, after all.