Singin’ in the ‘Subspace Rhapsody’: Music and the quest for harmony

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) was by no means the first musical, but one reason it remains among the most acclaimed is its express engagement with the role of sound and song in our lives. Maybe you only know the film by its iconic and titular “singing in the rain” scene, or maybe you remember that the film’s plot hung on the transition from silent to sound cinema, and how this technology changed career trajectories overnight. Characters “voiced” their feelings for one another against this backdrop of sound’s growing power in visual storytelling, then burst into song when articulated truths gave way to new realities.

Although “Subspace Rhapsody”, the latest episode of Strange New Worlds, is probably not going to knock Singin’ in the Rain off any charts, this franchise-first of a musical set in the Star Trek universe works—it really does!—because it also pays attention to the role of music in our lives. What we have, while a surprisingly entertaining hour of TV on the surface, is also a piece that approaches its far-fetched plot device with the scientific curiosity one expects from a Trek outing.

It could have come sooner in Trek history, mind you. Music has played many roles in Star Trek, but never quite gone to “Warp 10” where song was concerned. We of course have our signature theme songs, and the role they’ve played in asserting different tones for Trek series (looking at you, Enterprise!). Then there’s the use of song in holodeck and holosuite productions, with Deep Space Nine going further than any series with multiple uses of a Frank Sinatra / Dean Martin stand-in, Vic Fontaine, to provide counsel to station residents between sets. And who can forget all the Klingon victory and drinking songs? Or the role of the lute in Vulcan training?

The Original Series also had music, most notably a spontaneous duet between Spock and Uhura in “Charlie X” (S1E02), which gains significant richness now that this latest episode of SNW has back-filled their friendship to include a most unusual encounter in which they sang together with the whole crew.

There’s also a strongly remediating quality to the fact that “Subspace Rhapsody” is very much an episode about Uhura’s contributions to the ship. In TOS, Nichelle Nichols was unfortunately sometimes placed by Gene Roddenberry in roles that degraded what she brought to her acting from a professional singing and dancing career. This would happen again with Seven of Nine in Voyager, but on SNW Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) is finally given the full respect her character was always due.

However, Uhura’s professional joy isn’t the only TOS history enriched by characters and backgrounds revealed in SNW “Subspace Rhapsody”. And that’s where this episode really, surprisingly shines: It’s not just a silly one-off of a plot, disconnected from the rest of this season’s rising stakes. Character arcs progress. Storylines deepen. Real, long term consequences emerge through song.

In the process, this episode honors the fact that “play” isn’t secondary to human progress. What might seem frivolous to some will be deeply affecting to others, and whatever we do with our time alive, whether prosaically or at the upper or lower limits of our register, always has the capacity to transform how we move forward.

So let’s see where that spirit of play took so many SNW characters in this critical, second-last episode of Season 2.

Establishing the stakes (Spoiler-free zone)

The USS Enterprise is observing a naturally occurring MacGuffin—er, subspace fold—near the Klingon border, and the USS Farragut has dropped by so that freshly promoted Jim Kirk can spend a week shadowing our Number One, Una, before taking on the role of First Officer on the latter ship. As Chief Engineer Pelia and Science Officer Spock try to send a message through the subspace fold, to improve communication times for the fleet, Uhura at comms is manually managing all the ship’s everyday correspondence. This includes a personal call for Captain Pike, which will find him struggling to tell love interest Captain Batel that he doesn’t like her choice of vacation spot, and a message for Nurse Chapel, carrying an answer to her application to Dr. Roger Korby’s fellowship for archaeological medicine.

After 13 failures to send a message successfully through the subspace fold, Uhura starts humming a tune and Pelia gets an idea: Why not try fundamental harmonics? Send a song along? Uhura picks “Anything Goes” from The Great American Songbook and the subspace fold reacts, pitching the ship into an “improbability field”. Since “anything goes” in the multiverse, why shouldn’t there be a universe where everyone sings and otherwise follows the rules of a musical? And why shouldn’t one enter into that universe just by pitching music into the rift?

Yes, this is a very, very silly premise, but in proper Trek fashion, the whole crew is aware of how bizarre the situation is, and observes it with scientific curiosity even as it impacts their behavior. All systems are stable, but the crew is very soon singing this fact, to Pike’s deep concern, which only increases when it turns out that the rift is widening as the Enterprise tries to move away. The crew, including Jim and Sam Kirk, prepare for a maneuver to “zip” the fold widening behind them.

Meanwhile, La’an tries to keep her reaction to seeing Kirk again a secret (because she fell in love with another version of Kirk in Episode 3). In this episode, she’ll have a solo where she wrestles with imagining a life where she can take more risks. First, though, she observes Una give Kirk an important lesson in crew management—but through song, in which our Number One discloses more personal feelings than usual. This leads La’an to report to Pike that their musical improbability field constitutes a grave security risk.

Wait. Emotions? A security risk?

Pike is at first skeptical, but when their attempt to “zip” the fold backfires, the improbability field extends to the Farragut, leading Batel to call Pike and, right on the main bridge viewscreen, hash out relationship difficulties in a song that Pike quickly cuts off once he realizes what’s happening.

Oh my yes, this could get messy.

Especially since the improbability field seems to be spreading not just to Federation ships but also to nearby Klingon vessels. There’s a possibility that shooting photon torpedoes at the phenomenon could cause it to collapse… or the explosion could take out the whole Federation and half the Klingon Empire. Spock sets about running an experiment to test these outcomes, but he’s also on the verge of a personal implosion, after having noticed Chapel’s correspondence and wondering why she hasn’t thought to talk to him about it.

(They haven’t been speaking to each other since Chapel’s war trauma was triggered in the preceding episode. Or at least, that’s the superficial final straw: really, it was Ensign Boimler’s visit from the future two episodes ago that broke her heart, essentially telling her that she’ll have no significant impact on Spock’s life. Her behavior toward Spock changed after that interaction. Thanks, Boimler!)

What are the chances the ship can get out of this whole song and dance alive, and with their hearts even close to whole?

Challenging expectations (Spoiler zone)

Unfortunately, just as Spock’s test on a tiny sample of subspace material proves disastrous, it also becomes clear that the singing has reached the Klingons, and they are not pleased, so they’re heading over to attempt to blow up the rift themselves.

Crunch time on the Enterprise! La’an and Kirk pair up to look at defensive options, in part on La’an’s suggestion so that she can finally muster up the courage to explain to Kirk her complicated feelings. This confession won’t work exactly as planned, though, because it turns out that Kirk already has a lady, and she’s knocked up! (See: Easter Eggs.) But hey, he’s at least very gracious about this fact (as one would hope, since he kept pushing to have a drink with her! Kirk, you roguish goof), and La’an does seem somewhat better for having spoken her truth at all.

Meanwhile, Uhura and Spock are working on another solution to this whole musical mess. If the ship is indeed following the rules of a musical, as suggested by the structure and visual elements around each song, then maybe they need to play out all the key movements in a musical to collapse the improbability field? And maybe deeper emotion is needed to trigger such a grand display?

Good, diligent scientists that they are, they soon find an opportunity to test their hypothesis when they spy Chapel celebrating her acceptance into Korby’s fellowship with Ortegas and Sam Kirk. With Uhura holding the monitoring equipment, Spock broaches Chapel about her avoidance of him, and the intensity of emotion underpinning their dying relationship has Chapel burst into song about how much this fellowship means to her, and how she “won’t fight it” if it means leaving him.

Ouch ouch ouch, for our dear Mr. Spock, who will at least have a grief number, “I’m the X”, to process the consequences of having risked emotion instead of dedicating himself to the rich study of the cosmos that science and logic provide.

But also? This was just what he and Uhura needed to confirm their hypothesis. Uhura posits that if they can appeal to enough emotional energy from the whole crew, they can put together a proper grand finale that will collapse the improbability field. Glowing from Pike’s warm recognition of the power of her work, Uhura realizes she’s good with being “solo” if it means that she can help bring others together, and she organizes a perfect ensemble number that will pitch everyone on board into song and dance that affirms how much stronger they are as one.

The feat works. The improbability field is no more. Spock gets “diplomatic” (drinks) with the Klingons. Pike and Batel finally talk like proper adults. And although Uhura still takes to humming at her station… no worries! It’s just an earworm, for now.

Humanist storytelling structure?

So here’s the thing: I’m not a fan of musicals. I’ve enjoyed a range (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, My Fair Lady, Rocky Horror Picture Show), but they’re never my go-to viewing experiences. I went into this episode thinking I wouldn’t enjoy it.

But where this episode won me (and many others) over was in the express, scientifically curious attention that it paid to the role music serves in our lives. Whereas words alone report on emotion, music aspires to embody emotion: to do different communicative work on our material selves.

In a recent collection of (excellent) science fiction writing, Life Beyond Us, an anthology of science fiction and fact reflecting on the possibility of alien life, one writer asks why we should ever expect other species to demonstrate intelligence by speaking our formal languages. Why would the dolphin need such a clunky work-around, when it could probably feel the heartbeats of others in the water? Why would the whale ever need more than its songs?

Similarly, this episode invites us to see our humanity as something best communicated through more than simple speech and recorded fact. As corporeal beings, we contain corporeal multitudes, so any effective summation of what “being human” entails would necessarily include our fully embodied experiences: our tactile interactions, and of course our sense of play.

And here’s where form and function perfectly dovetail, because it’s in an episode about holistic experience that we finally get bigger answers about the series as a whole. In the course of “Subspace Rhapsody” it’s not just the musical alt-universe that collapses, but also a whole other alt-universe that SNW had been toying with all along. Now, after many episodes in which we weren’t certain if this series would break from TOS canon, we’re finally seeing the “play” of all those other what-ifs collapse. Chapel is essentially signing off in time to bond with Korby (canonically, her fiancé by the time Kirk helms the Enterprise), while Kirk is becoming a more common presence on the ship, and Uhura and Spock are also building a rapport. After a season of uncertainty about canon, we’re starting to “zip up” all the other, more playful alternatives that this whole series dwelt upon for so long.

It all brings to mind the closing lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when our “honest Puck” concludes a play that hinges on everyone veering from their usual roles in a speech that begins with the following, famous lines:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.

But since there’s been a lot of Shakespeare all season, we can forgive SNW for not being too on the nose with such allusions here. The “visions” have been fun, but all the alternate worlds they contrived are now closing. How much time left before we wake? What will the series look like once we do? Only time (if not song) will tell.

‘Subspace Rhapsody’: The thematic pay-off

But before we close off this season and wonder until the next what the future of this Trek will contain, there’s one other key lesson in this penultimate episode. At the heart of “Subspace Rhapsody” is the question posed by La’an’s note of caution:

Is emotion dangerous? More dangerous than constructive, even?

To answer this question, the episode runs us through situations where emotion certainly causes harm, but also situations in which its articulation can heal and unite. The fact that we end on emotion’s better outcomes, and not the ruin of a whole civilization, certainly suggests that SNW ultimately errs on the side of emotion doing more good than harm by and large.

But what about in the world around us?

Can we “zip” the rift that often brings real-world emotion so disastrously to the fore?

Harmony is a challenging concept to achieve, in part because many wrongly assume that it can only be managed through uniformity of action and expression.

That’s another way in which a musical episode like this one can gently rap us on our knuckles and correct the anti-humanist error. Harmony is achieved in music by having people sing different notes in complementary unison. In this episode, some relationships grew and some declined, while other crewmates found comfort and strength in being true to themselves. And all of this transpired more or less together, under the shared umbrella of everyone still adoring what the Enterprise represents as an aspirational sum of all its messy parts.

Which means that, even if SNW is taking quite a few stories back to their canonical roots in TOS, there’s also no shame in our having held other possibilities in tension for as long as we did. Variation is an essential part of the journey, after all. Four happy humans, then, to an episode of very silly and enjoyable TV that nevertheless reminds us why imagining different futures is part of living better here and now.

Quotes of note, and other Easter Eggs

• Okay, okay, I was so hoping for Klingon opera or classic war ballads, but I admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the approach taken here. Of course there are more possible genres of Klingon music than the ones we’ve seen! Bring on #Kpop in the #AlphaQuadrant!
• Well, it looks like we’re going to get that canonical Korby/Chapel plotline after all. That’s a real shame, because Korby turns into a really creepy dude dedicated to essentially making sex dolls on Exo-III (TOS S1E07). Unless… maybe they’re not going to go quite as far as all that, and just have Dr. Korby as a mentor who inspires Chapel in her own research? Fingers crossed.
• With respect to canon, though, SNW threw everyone a real curveball this episode by introducing Carol Marcus, best known to Trekkies from The Wrath of Khan (1982) as the mother of David Marcus, who was killed by Klingons in a situation crafted by Khan Noonien Singh. In this episode it seems that Kirk still thinks he can do right by her, but canonically she soon tells him to leave her alone. Will this quirk of canon mean anything, where La’an’s future love-life is concerned? Probably not, but the warmth Kirk shows for her as a friend still has a fascinating retroactive effect on 1960s Star Trek. Now, thanks to SNW, long before Kirk meets Khan, we know that he’s grown partial to an Augment. Is it better or worse for the overall universe, to imagine that Kirk’s decision to spare Khan’s people a penal colony existence might have extended from his time with La’an? (I think “worse”, because it’s always lousy when we need to have a personal bond with someone from a given demographic to treat the whole demographic better, but others are charmed by this possibility. To each their own.)
• Christina Chong apparently asked the writers a lot for a musical episode. She’s a dancer who did musical theatre until an injury changed her career path. As for the rest? Celia Rose Gooding won a Grammy and was nominated for a Tony. Melissa Navia was a musical theatre kid. The least musical of the group? Babs Olusanmokun. But that’s okay: he got to show off some of his Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu skills in the last episode.
• There were some cute lines outside the songs, too:
  • “So, what’s next? More Improbability? Or will we just suddenly poof into bunnies?“
    “I would prefer not be a bunny, either.“
    “I doubt we will be bunnies.“
• But most of what made this episode work was the music. Shocker! The art team had a field day with the poster art, and the soundtrack is available online. Despite Una being a self-identified fan of Gilbert & Sullivan, some numbers have a more Rodgers & Hammerstein feel to me, though I’m no expert. There were, however, very few musical styles on display here, especially for a crew from different backgrounds. This makes some sense: having a musical at all was risky, so of course the team would play it safe with musical variation. It also just means we’ll have to wait for the next musical to see a fuller human (and alien!) range of song and dance. What, I wonder, would a Lanthanite’s preferred genre be?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

“Subspace Rhapsody”: Season 2, Episode 9

Season 2, Episode 8 | Season 2, Episode 10