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.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
34 points (100.0% liked)
Daystrom Institute
675 readers
18 users here now
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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!
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).
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.