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In space, everyone can hear you sing. That’s the premise of this week’s special musical episode of the Star Trek prequel Strange New Worlds, which swaps photon torpedoes for jaunty flashmobs as the crew of the starship Enterprise find themselves inexplicably bursting into song – much to their bemusement. It’s an oddball delight, even if the science behind it seems a little fuzzy.
When a classic recording of the Cole Porter musical number Anything Goes somehow creates a harmonic quantum field (we know), characters are compelled to reveal their deepest emotional secrets via belt-’em-out Broadway-ready numbers. The crew are pleasingly aware of how daft the situation is even as they strive to resolve being made to sing original songs by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce from 1990s alt-rockers Letters to Cleo. It is slightly cheesy, very self-indulgent and clearly designed to boldly launch a thousand memes of Mr Spock singing his Vulcan heart out. But it is also heartfelt, in keeping with the show’s unfashionably optimistic outlook.
There is an eccentric tradition of US TV series’ embracing their inner glee-club kid by staging a musical episode, from high-kicking fantasies Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess to postmodern sitcoms such as Scrubs and Community. These interludes tend to occur in later seasons, when shows have found such a familiar groove that hard-pressed writers are either looking for a fun way to keep things fresh – or are just running out of ideas.
That doesn’t apply to Strange New Worlds, which is only in its second season. This week’s barrage of show tunes kind of makes sense, given that this is a series that, Mr Benn-style, has been trying on a different genre every week. Being set on the classic USS Enterprise and featuring younger versions of recognisable characters such as Spock and language savant Uhura (lady-killer James T Kirk is also floating around in the background, although yet to graduate to captain) seems to have given Strange New Worlds the confidence to experiment. A ship-wide outbreak of full-throated singing is not even the strangest thing the show has attempted in the last fortnight.
A recent crossover episode with Star Trek: Lower Decks – the ribald cartoon spin-off overseen by the former Rick and Morty writer and producer Mike McMahan – brought cartoon characters (voiced by The Boys’ Jack Quaid and Space Force’s Tawny Newsome) on to the Enterprise. The interpolation of animated sequences and live-action (explained by the classic Trek plot device of a time portal) created a fizzy, frantic romp.
Spock – one of Star Trek’s most highly regarded, serious characters, played here by Ethan Peck – is frequently placed into farcical situations more suited to Frank Spencer. A season one episode channelled Freaky Friday by trapping Spock and his Vulcan fiancee in each other’s bodies, forcing them to vamp their way through crucial missions. This season, his pointy ears and sharply symmetrical haircut vanished when a shuttle accident transformed him into the pouting, impulsive equivalent of a hormonal teenage boy. Somewhere up there, Leonard Nimoy – who directed the 1980s comedy romp Three Men and A Baby – is raising a Spock-like eyebrow in approval.
But the phasers are not always set to fun. There has been a terrifying riff on Ridley Scott’s Alien, with chest-bursting xenomorphs hunting harried crew members on a stranded ghost ship, plus an impassioned, episode-long courtroom drama exploring alien rights and even a Trek spin on Richard Linklater’s romance Before Sunrise, with two Starfleet officers from different timelines bickering and bonding on a mission to present-day Toronto.
This hopscotching is an antidote to the recent wave of ambitious small-screen sci-fi that leans heavily on serialised storytelling, from Prime Video’s hardscrabble asteroid belt drama The Expanse to Apple TV+’s densely plotted, millennia-spanning Foundation. Even Star Trek: Discovery, the series that relaunched the franchise on TV in 2017, has leaned into epic, season-long stories that skew to the dark and brooding. The pick ’n’ mix approach of Strange New Worlds is a welcome palate cleanser, even if it means any overarching story arcs seem rather secondary (the second season wraps up next week and you would be hard-pushed to identify a unifying theme). It all chimes with the highly episodic spirit of the original series, when audiences of the late 1960s were presumably never sure what the next week’s instalment would bring. As Cole Porter said: anything goes.