Everyone Hates Star Trek’s Musical Episode For The Wrong Reason

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 19 seconds ago

Strange New Worlds is a Star Trek show that some fans think started falling off after Season 1. While the first season primarily delivered the same kind of episodic exploration that made fans fall in love with The Original Series, season 2 began taking some big, creative swings. The biggest swing of all was most definitely “Subspace Rhapsody,” better known in the fandom as “the musical episode.” While the episode has its defenders, much of the fandom has criticized this episode for a musical myriad of reasons.

Here’s the thing, though: pretty much all of this episode’s biggest critics hate it for the wrong reason. The biggest problem with “Subspace Rhapsody” isn’t that it’s “not Star Trek” or that its premise is wonky or that it’s too silly. No, the major issue here is that the music just isn’t very good, especially when you compare it to “Once More With Feeling,” the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode that is still the gold standard for musical television.

Star Trek Sings!

To bring you up to (warp) speed, “Subspace Rhapsody” is a Strange New Worlds episode where they encounter a very unique cosmic phenomenon: an “improbability fold.” After Uhura broadcasts a song into it (because why not, right?), the crew of the Enterprise suddenly start singing and dancing on a whim. Just like that, everyone is stuck inside a musical, and they can’t help but sing their feelings at the drop of a hat. But unless this intrepid crew can figure out what is happening to them before some bad guys show up, they’ll all have a front-row seat to the day the music died!

Relatively speaking, “Subspace Rhapsody” is considered a middle-of-the-road episode. It has a 6.8 rating on IMDB, which may not sound that bad, but it was the lowest-rated episode of the entire season. Even when you account for Season 3 (which had more stinkers than the previous season), Star Trek’s first foray into musical shenanigans is one of the five worst episodes of the entire series (“Subspace Rhapsody” is tied with “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” another overtly silly episode).

Close, But No Harmony

What do people actually dislike about “Subspace Rhapsody,” though? The classic criticism is that it doesn’t feel like a Star Trek episode, which isn’t entirely true. Sure, the franchise had never gone musical before, but Trek is filled with crazy cosmic crap. If you can believe that going Warp 10 turns humans into lizard people, that transporters can de-age people, and that candles can contain impossibly horny, DTF Scottish ghosts, then let’s be real. You can believe some weird space widget forces people to sing.

Others complained that “Subspace Rhapsody” was too silly, but that’s something of a cop-out. Star Trek has always had silly episodes. Kirk encounters a giant bunny in “Shore Leave,” for example, and Picard has to literally play Robin Hood in “Qpid.” Heck, Sisko fights racism with baseball in “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” It’s not a problem to have an occasional silly episode here and there. As Season 3 of Strange New Worlds later demonstrated, it’s a big problem when a noticeably large chunk of your 10-episode season is dedicated to pure silliness. 

That Old Time Spock And Roll

The final major complaint about “Subspace Rhapsody” is that the stakes are low, which is true. But to these haters, I say you can’t have it both ways. One of the biggest criticisms of NuTrek is that every major plot ends up becoming a super-serious race to save the entire galaxy, and fans eventually got catastrophe fatigue from the whole thing. Strange New Worlds was created in large part as a silly palate cleanser after the heaviness of Discovery and Picard. Given that, it seems silly to complain that an episode of SNW finally delivered the low-stakes storytelling we’d been asking for.

So, given all of that, why do I hate “Subspace Rhapsody”? Simple: the songs stink! For context, I’m a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that show’s musical episode, “Once More With Feeling,” is filled with wall-to-wall bangers. The songs have infectiously catchy beats and impossibly clever lyrics. Not only are these songs I happily jam out to outside of the episode, but they are songs I frequently sing out loud to the shock (and occasional delight, damn it!) of the people around me. As for “Subspace Rhapsody,” I don’t think I could hum a single note if you had a phaser up to my head.

It’s No Buffy

The songs just aren’t memorable, either in terms of music or lyrics. They’re serviceable to the plot, of course, and they do a decent job of advancing plots like the endless romantic drama between Spock and Chapel. Part of the problem is, unlike the writers of the episode, the songs of “Subspace Rhapsody” don’t take any big, creative swings. Nothing stands out because no creative risks are taken, and it simply feels like a bunch of lyrics were just jammed into a musical AI with the prompt “make it sound like off, off-Broadway.”

It doesn’t help that some cast members can clearly sing better than others, and even the ones who can seemingly carry a tune were helped out with pitch correction, better known as autotune. With Buffy, the cast practiced until they could all confidently lead a song, with the exception of poor, tone-deaf Alyson Hannigan. Rather than forcing her to deliver a subpar melody, Joss Whedon simply honored her request to bow out and didn’t give her any songs of her own (which is why one of her only contributions is the cheeky “I think this line’s mostly filler”).

The result is the worst of both worlds. Not only does the premise and tone of “Subspace Rhapsody” set older fans’ teeth on edge, but the songs are a disappointment to those of us who were looking forward to a musical episode. Why do something so unprecedented if you’re going to do it in such a half-assed way? Unfortunately, it’s not clear that Star Trek’s powers that be ever learned their lesson from this, and with our luck, Season 4 will give Muppet Captain Pike one goofy, autotuned song after another!