Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 19, "Subspace Rhapsody" Episode Review

 Hey everyone, happy Friday! How's it going? I'm doing okay. I'm back for another episode review for season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This week I'm reviewing episode 19 (S02E09), "Subspace Rhapsody". This is a special episode because it's Star Trek's first ever fully fledged musical episode. Unlike other episode reviews I've done, I'm not going to have spoilers in this review, simply because not a whole lot happens, and what does happen, just gives us some easter eggs for TOS and the TOS movies, and unless you've never seen any other Star Trek series or movie prior to watching SNW, none of what I talk about will be spoilery for you. Though there is one thing I need to mention that will be go into spoiler territory, but I'll tell you when I'm gonna be hitting the spoilers. So let's get into it.

While this is the first episode to be a musical for Star Trek, we've had characters singing throughout the franchise. From Uhura in TOS and the TOS movies, to Sisko's big duet with Vic Fontaine at the end of the DS9 season 7 episode, "Badda-Bing Badda-Bang", to The Doctor singing various tunes on Voyager. So singing is not a foreign thing in the Star Trek franchise. It's just never been utilized in this way before now. Which is really cool.

As someone who grew up watching animated musicals, and movies like The Sound of Music and Grease, I loved this episode. It was fun, but there was some character development as well. It also wrapped up a ton of storylines from earlier in the season so that they wouldn't have to be dealt with in what I assume is going to be an intense season finale next week. Which is fine, because many season finales tend to have too much in them as it is. So being able to wrap up a bunch of stuff in this episode, works for me.

The songs were brilliant and the entire cast had great singing voices. Christina Chong (La'an) is a recording artist, and Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura) is a stage performer and has been on Broadway, so I wasn't surprised that either of them were good at singing. It's the rest of the cast that surprised me. Though apparently Rebecca Romijn has also recorded music. I'm not surprised that Anson Mount is a good singer though, since he seems to be great at everything. While I don't have a favourite song among the nine songs that appeared in the episode, because they were all so good, I would like to highlight the grand finale, "We Are One", because the original Alexander Courage Star Trek theme played at the end of it. More precisely, the end theme from the closing credits of TOS played at the end of the song. Which is pretty cool considering everyone has remixed and redone it between the Kelvin timeline movies and of course the opening credits of SNW itself. So to hear the actual music on a modern Star Trek series was neat.

Something else that I really appreciated about this episode as a lifelong Star Trek fan, is something they confirmed during a scene with Kirk (Paul Wesley) and La'an. In the scene, as La'an is telling Jim about her experience with the alternate timeline version of him from "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", Jim informs her that he's currently with Dr. Carol Marcus, and she's pregnant with their son, David. Though David's name isn't mentioned, most likely because Carol hadn't named him yet. It's good to know that Kirk is with Carol at this point, and it's around the time that Carol was pregnant with David, though Kirk is still a Lieutenant, until his promotion to first officer of the Farragut at some point in the next little while. This next part is where I'll be getting into SPOILER TERRITORY, so if you don't want to hear about SPOILERS related to SNW, then click off this review, and know that I really enjoyed this episode.

The one thing that did bring this episode down for me a little bit is how Chapel ended things with Spock. I get what the writers were going for, given they name dropped Dr. Roger Korby at the beginning of the episode, but these writers don't seem to know how to write lasting romantic relationships. I mean, sure, we currently have Pike and Batel, and we have Stamets and Culber in Discovery, but the Spock/Chapel pairing is the second one they teased at the end of an episode and then did nothing with except break them up. The first was, of course, Seven of Nine and Raffi in Picard, and they did it with them twice. It just feels wrong given how much they built up to Spock and Chapel getting together, including breaking Spock and T'Pring up I might add. So that's my only negative about the episode.

Overall, I loved this episode. However, it's definitely not going to be for everyone. If you like musicals, you'll enjoy this episode. If you're not a musicals person, you're not going to enjoy the episode at all. But I loved it, which I'm glad about because this was another episode, like the crossover last week, that I was nervous about going into it because, again, musicals aren't for everyone, and not any writer, director, or producer can pull one off, so kudos to the people involved in the production of this episode, including the writing and the directing, because they did a fantastic job. 

And that my friends is it for me for this week. But I'll be back next week with lots of posts as the third season of Only Murders in the Building premieres with two episodes on Tuesday, and then I'll have my review of Dark Forces: Rebel Agent on either Wednesday or Thursday, and then on Friday I'll have my review of the season finale of Strange New Worlds. Finally, on Saturday, unless I feel bold enough to put it out on Friday after my season finale review, I'll have my SNW season 2 review out for you. So until then, have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.