Of course Star Trek looked to Buffy for its big musical: 'That was our bar'

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 9, "Subspace Rhapsody."

When it comes to musical episodes of television, few have done it better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The producers behind Star Trek had that pop culture event on the brain when they set out to make the sci-fi franchise's first-ever music-fueled extravaganza on Strange New Worlds season 2.

"That's one of the best made ones," series co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers tells EW of 2001's "Once More, With Feeling," in which Sarah Michelle Gellar's supernatural warrior faces a demon of song and dance. "It was done very well. It's really smart and thoughtful. It has big heart. The only thing I will say that I distinctly thought differently was that they wrote their own music, and I knew that that was a little more than we could handle. But that was kind of like, let's challenge ourselves to be as good as the best of this [genre]. That was our bar."

Warner Bros.; Paramount+ The 'Star Trek' team set 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' as the bar for their musical episode on 'Strange New Worlds'

As time went on, Myers realized they actually could write their own music, with help from Letters to Cleo rockers Kay Hanley and Tom Polce, who crafted the songs. "Subspace Rhapsody," the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 (now streaming on Paramount+), sees the likes of Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Spock (Ethan Peck), and the rest of the U.S.S. Enterprise breaking out into musical numbers after an encounter with a quantum probability field. They all find themselves operating by the rules of a parallel reality in which everyone sings all the time, which causes problems for anyone trying to hide their emotions, including La'an (Christina Chong) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush). The problem gets bigger when it starts spreading to other spaceships.

"I'm a huge fan of musicals, but had no idea what it took to actually make one," says Akiva Goldsman, the other co-showrunner on Strange New Worlds. Myers had worked on musical episodes of Ugly Betty and The Magicians, but Goldsman was coming in fresh. "When we started on season 2, a small voice, like a gremlin kept going, 'Music. Musical. Musical.' And Henry kept going, 'Not yet. Not yet. Not yet,'" he continues. "We were going back and forth on the story, and we sort of knew where the character arcs were. Then, to our delight and terror, the idea of what we needed to do emotionally in episode 9 and the idea of a musical went hand in hand."

Paramount+ Carol Kang, Christina Chong, and Ethan Peck feature in 'Subspace Rhapsody,' the musical episode of 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' season 2

With a script written by Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff, the producers got to work on "Subspace Rhapsody" about six months ahead of filming, Myers estimates. Goldsman likes to say, "This episode happened in large part before it happened," meaning most of the execution went into prep, including dance rehearsals and singing lessons. Director Dermott Downs also wanted to shoot the episode like a musical, which means the shots are "a little more wide and you really see people doing things, you're not in their faces all the time," Myers explains. "It was a lot of work from a lot of people, but the one thing I remember waking up and thinking was that everyone will expect this to be silly. We should surprise them and have it be gut-wrenching and emotional."

Some of that can be credited to Gooding. It was clear to everyone from the start of the show that their Uhura actress had some pipes. An early episode of Strange New Worlds season 1 saw her singing out tones to activate a piece of alien tech. So, it's no surprise that the actress is the one to get the musical's big power ballad, "Keep Us Connected." "What we do like to do is write to our cast," Goldsman remarks. "It suddenly became clear that a lot of the folks who we work with had musical theater in their backgrounds or real musical training. The universe was conspiring to get us to throw down in that way."

Paramount+ Celia Rose Gooding joins Anson Mount and the cast of 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' for the finale number to 'Subspace Rhapsody'

Peck was less confident about pulling this off, Myers notes: "I don't think Ethan thought that he could do it, and he surprised everyone by having this crazy deep voice, the baritone, that was kind of beautiful."

Now that it's all come together, it almost feels like a miracle that it even happened. Goldsman looks back to when the news of what would become "Subspace Rhapsody" came up during the closed-door meetings with the other showrunners from across the active Star Trek series. "All I remember was people being like, 'Okay, sure,'" he recalls. "This is basically the tenor of all the [meetings], which is somebody will say a bunch of stuff and then somebody else will go, 'Wow, that sounds cool.' Subtext: 'Please don't f--- it up.'"

Goldman adds, "We were like, 'If we're gonna do this, we gotta do this.'" And so they did.

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