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Strange new worlds.. don't get it
vetteguy904
Member Posts: 3,923 Arc User
in Ten Forward
so I'm re watching season 1 preparing for season 2... all season they are building the Gorn as the big Bad.. and in the season finalle they bait and switch?!? it didn't bother me the first go through but really...
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the crossover episode was fun, and Hegemony.. OMG. but there is no redeeming the musical episode
Spatial Anomalies gonna be weird?
It did show just how skilled the actors are though. And it was something Star Trek never actually tried before. Toyed with other genres in the past, but musical was never one of them.
HOWEVER I will point out that Star Trek has done music in the past, just not to this level. I haven't seen the episode myself but I've heard some are citing it as the best Musical episode since the one in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only other series that I can think of that toyed with a Musical episode was SyFy Channel's Sanctuary. And I'll say Amanda Tapping has a pretty good voice.
However, it kept me entertained from beginning to end, and that's all I want from a TV show, movie, book, or whatever.
For good reason(s), but probably not the ones you seem to think (or at least for TOS anyway).
Probably the biggest reason from a practicality standpoint, strange as it may sound nowadays where crossovers and cross-genre do-something-different episodes are considered good things, back in the '60s they were considered anathema by Hollywood, and a serious full-on musical like Subspace Rhapsody is about as cross-genre as you can get.
That is especially true since the "Broadway snobs" were still quite a big factor in critic circles (not surprising since there were a number of Hollywood musicals still being made then and had to be twice as good as stageplays to be considered even half as good as them), and official reviews could make or break a show even on television back in the days before social media was a thing. It was much safer to keep singing isolated to a non-musical-show "live performance" format like in The Way to Eden and the occasional song by Uhura in the Rec room.
Close behind that was the sheer expense of doing a full musical like that (and trying to skimp was not an option unless the producers wanted to get laughed out of town because of the way the musical production culture was at the time). In the TV stone age before the invention of things like Auto-Tune the studio would have had to hire ghost singers for cast members who are not professional-quality singers, and they did not come cheap. And then there is the expense of writing all the custom songs for it and having the music performed for those songs, as opposed to the usual reuse of a show's stock incidental music.
Also, musicals take a lot of time to film compared to dramas because the cast have to learn the dance routines and musical numbers (even if they are just lip-syncing) in addition to the drama parts and TOS had a brutal filming schedule as it was (one musical episode would probably take as long as three or four normal ones to film, and that is if things went smoothly), and time is money in Hollywood.
While TOS was a TV show with a rather large budget for the times, the fact that they used movie-grade special effects instead of bargain basement "b-grade" SFX ate most of the budget and there is no way they could have afforded to make a musical episode even if they wanted to.
And they didn't want to anyway since Roddenberry was very adamant about trying to make serious sci-fi an actual thing in Hollywood instead of just a rare novelty like Forbidden Planet and The Day The Earth Stood Still so serious in fact that he was quite cross with the way Gene Coon injected humor into episodes like The Trouble With Tribbles and I, Mudd.
As for the traditional spinoffs like TNG and whatnot, TNG started with Roddenberry still in a snit over getting forced out of the movie side of Trek and therefore pushing seriousness in TNG to try and out-legitimize the Paramount Pictures' efforts. Also, by the 1980s the "post musical" era was firmly entrenched, to the point that many considered musicals somehow embarrassing, and the few successful Hollywood ones (like the Buffy musical episode and the Fame series) gained a sort of edgy, guilty-pleasure vibe because of it and a lot of the people who watched and actually liked them would not admit liking them.
Considering the generally hostile-to-musicals atmosphere of the time, it is unsurprising that the closest the Berman era Treks got to a musical was that VOY episode with the Doctor singing. But that atmosphere broke up years ago and nowadays musical and other crossover episodes are better judged on their own merits rather than a blanket distain simply because they are something different from the usual fare. And Subspace Rhapsody is an excellent example of how a proper "serious" story-driven style musical (as opposed to the chaotic and crazy connect-the-dots style musicals where plot is simply a loose justification for a stack of random songs with little in common in the same show) should be done.
A lot of that would depend on if you like musicals at all I suppose, some people just don't nowadays regardless of whether they are well done or not, and there is nothing wrong with that. I like history and probably talk about it too much when I get the chance: lol: Without the history/context part, the gist of my previous comment was that Subspace Rhapsody was well written and true to the more serious musical convention, not a silly bolt-on like so many of the other series have done for their "musical" episodes.
On a more general note, SNW is much better written than DSC in regard to characters and plot, though it has its problems too (especially in the science and technical areas), a lot of which they inherited from early DSC (aka Moonves's Trek for Trek-haters).
It does not feel like it goes out of its way to trash traditional Trek but it still has occasional random bouts where it seems like the only exposure they have to TOS is via games and the various Trek wikis rather than taking a deep dive into TOS Trek lore via watching the show itself, reading production memos and other internal documentation, and interviews from/about TOS the way the oldschool Trekkies did.
They also don't seem to have any kind of science or technology advisors since they do have some painfully stupid gaffs like dialog about hallucinations caused by "trace deuterium toxicity" (it is non-toxic in trace amounts and is even used in medications for Huntington's disease and other neurological disorders and in Polio vaccines).
The absolute worst gaff so far though (also in Lost in Translation like the toxicity nonsense btw) was when they showed the interior of the SNW Enterprise's nacelles as a long, mostly empty tube with a windmill-like structure at the front, a small, elevator-sized sized room in the middle that inexplicably contained ship's communications gear, and nothing else except for some pipes and boxes on the walls of the tube and the grill at the rear of the nacelles visible as nothing but holes punched in the back wall of the nacelle (and there was bright diffused light coming through the holes, the same kind of light they show coming in through cabin windows even when in deep space).
Matt Jefferies always described the nacelles as solidly-packed with machinery and nothing but crawlways to service it, and that it had deadly levels of heat, magnetic fields, and radiation when in operation that made it necessary to have them separated from the crewed areas of the ship via the long stalks. The sewerpipe with conduits on the walls style visuals in SNW is as far from that as you can get.
But those are exceptions and if they called it a branched-off timeline like the Kelvin stuff to lessen the impact of the more idiotic of the technological and historical/lore gaffs it would easily fit in the traditional Trek envelope despite the compatibility issues and being more people-focused and a bit light on science and philosophy than Traditional Trek.
Eh... not so much as you'd think...
We have seen the interior of a warp nacelle before. Technically twice. TNG and Enterprise.
While I am not quite sure about the ramscoop (though that was cool actually seeing it do something) the rest seems to follow a bit with what was seen in TNG.
Not that similar, those are from widely separated points in time with vastly different practical considerations.
Also, from a filming perspective, having nothing but crawlspaces and/or tight maintenance corridors can be difficult to film in an interesting way, and the episode The Catwalk needed the extra space to have any believability to it anyway.
Not only did they have to pack all the nacelle machinery into a relatively narrow armored tube, but the technology had also improved to the point where if anything major went wrong with a nacelle they could easily pop it off and replace it at any fleet maintenance yard rather than attempt a ship-in-a-bottle style major component replacement in the confines of the nacelle itself.
Also, the maintenance control room and the chamber beyond (some sort of plasma surge tank maybe?), despite looking large, is actually a small part of the nacelle (the nacelle does not look big compared to the rest of the Galaxy class it is attached to, but it is actually about the size of a WWII aircraft carrier and realistically should have corridors and turbolifts instead of Jefferies tubes).
The point is that the whole thing is not just an empty tube with a few pipes and boxes bolted to the walls like the SNW depiction of a nacelle shows. In fact, those ribs in the TNG picture make it probable that the chamber shown is the view down the center of one of the warp coil sections that you can see stacked like flashlight batteries in a flashlight in the official diagrams from the show (and there is more than enough space in a Galaxy's nacelle to have one of those engineering rooms on the end of each coil block).
Another annoyance with the SNW depiction is that it perpetuates the "space turbine" nonsense from the Kelvin stuff. Yes, the big model from TOS did have contrarotating moire pattern generating devices but they were just part of the prop that (along with variable-intensity colored lights) generated the complex light patterns that represented the interaction of the ionized gasses, the magnetic lines of the scoops, and the forcefields that captured the scooped gasses at the front of the nacelle.
Uh... we've never seen the inside of a Connie's Nacelle unitl now. There's on screen evidence, there's beta canon stuff, and there's intent from some document or interview that not many people may be aware of. Unless there's some official statement in something or said on screen... we kinda have to go with what we see on screen.
As of right now... the SNW Nacelle interior shares similarities to the TNG interior, and to me that makes sense as the technology is similar enough to draw a line between the two and say "yes this is the same tech, just not as refined as in TNG." Its got a visual continuity with "what will come in the future" in that way.
Whose to say that the "space turbine" doesn't play into any of that in some way? It could be that they need some kind of rotating device to work with all those systems, and it just happens to look like a turbine. *shrug* Until we get something official to state what it is... bit harsh to just brush it off as nonsense. And who knows, maybe the ramscoops get upgraded at some point with newer technology that lines up more with the visuals we see in TOS.