Star Trek gives the musical episode thing another go. Spoilers.
So are we going to get ‘Once More with Feeling’? Yeah, pretty much. The basic conceit of the plot is the same – use the ‘express your emotions through song’ nature of musicals to resolve some lingering threads such as La’an/Kirk and Spock/Chapel. While the singing is caused by a dangerous threat that could easily cause massive damage.
But it is also very much the Star Trek version of this. It has a good mix of ‘funny’ and ‘very very worrying’. While they never quite landed the ‘is this plausible’ thing for my tastes, they treated it seriously enough within the show for it to work. The songs themselves are a little bit of a mixed bag, with the lyrics getting a bit bogged down by the need to play to the fiction of what was happening. But they’re produced seriously, and all work to advance the plot.
The real star is Uhura, who gets a couple of very important numbers and carries them beautifully. Although the K-Pop Klingons stole the show for me.
Not a well they should rush back to, but an enjoyable way to do something (nearly) totally new after 852 episodes or movies.
Quick hits:
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For some reason the angle on the Enterprise in the first shot felt very TOS to me.
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La’an with the crush on Captain Kirk is very cute.
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Very high production values on the music.
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Hee, acapella main credits. They could’ve used the Roddenberry lyrics though.
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OK, the bunnies joke has to be a Buffy reference.
-Ah, La’an gets the traditional ‘I want’ song then. Even with a bit of a belt.
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‘Emotions constitute a security threat’ – surely not news…
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Genuine laugh out loud for the user Zero G for the Secrets song.
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Retcon on Kirk’s son here (maybe), as I’m pretty sure it was news to him in Wrath of Khan.
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I do wish we could be seeing a bit more of other ships. Missed opportunity for a ‘They Got the Mustard Out’ style song.
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Clearly the accompanying music is audible to the crew – I would’ve liked a bit more attention to working that out…
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Uhura gets the rare ‘I want’ variant, the ’I have’ song.
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Some great technobabble to get to the finale sequence.
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Oh god. The Klingons are doing K-Pop. That is so on the nose it goes all the way back to brilliant.
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Not quite sure if there were any voice doubles for the crew, but it seems like everyone did a pretty strong job.
902 down.