Star Trek Is Embracing Its Silly Side, and We Love It

Aug 12, 2023

Star Trek in all its forms has always been adept at producing great drama. From the tragedy of The Original Series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever,” through the darkness of The Next Generation’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and Deep Space Nine’s “In the Pale Moonlight,” to the epic action of Discovery’s “The Red Angel” and high stakes of Strange New Worlds’ “A Quality of Mercy,” Star Trek in all its forms can be serious, gripping, and moving.

But Star Trek has always had a silly side as well, as this week’s musical episode of Strange New Worlds, “Subspace Rhapsody,” makes clear. It is part of the beauty of an episodic structure that a show can do something wacky and loosey-goosey one week and go back to being serious the next, but it can be done in more arc-based shows too. In the modern era of Trek, the people behind the various series have been increasingly willing to lean into that side of things. And this has proven to be a really good thing for the franchise.

When Star Trek returned to television in 2017, it initially steered away from sillier, more light-hearted stories. Both Discovery and Picard put the emphasis firmly on high-stakes drama. Neither are without humour or lightness, but it would be fair to say both tend to avoid “silly” in general.

However, six months after Picard premiered, Lower Decks arrived. Star Trek’s second animated show, but the first to be firmly situated within the franchise’s canon, understands the innate silliness of Gene Roddenberry’s world better than anything else. But it also knows how to balance that with just enough seriousness to keep the show plausible and to keep the audience invested. There is no Star Trek trope Lower Decks will not gently mock, but it is all done with such love and sincerity that it somehow works.

Over the past year or two, it seems like the success of Lower Decks has emboldened the writers of various parts of the Star Trek universe to embrace the franchise’s sillier side once again. Another animated series, Prodigy, for example, produced a lovely homage to The Original Series in “All the World’s a Stage” The show also included a surprising nod to the notorious Voyager episode “Threshold.” Fans have wondered for more than 30 years if “Threshold” had been retconned out of existence from sheer embarrassment at how bad it was, but in Prodigy’s bodyswap episode “Mindwalk,” Janeway cheerfully confirms, “I was once transformed into a salamander.” With that one (very funny) line, the writers embraced the silliness of the story, folded it back into Trek canon, and created something funny and touching out of a notoriously poorly received episode.

All the way back in the 1960s Star Trek series we had episodes about alien amusement parks where the female yeoman ends up in a medieval dress complete with enormous hat (“Shore Leave”), what appears at first to be a haunted castle inhabited by a witch (“Catspaw”) and, of course, cute furry aliens that reproduce at a rate of 10 babies per adult every 10 hours (“The Trouble With Tribbles”).

That silly side continued through 1990s Trek, which gave us episodes about the crew being forced to play the roles of Robin Hood and his Merry Men (The Next Generation, “Qpid”), crewmembers being reduced to pre-teens(“Rascals”), aliens mistaking the ship’s Doctor for an impossibly talented Captain and hero (Voyager, “Tinker, Tailor, Doctor, Spy”) and Captain Janeway having to play the part of Arachnia, Queen of the Spider People (“Bride of Chaotica!”).

Deep Space Nine’s intense, war-driven final season also included an episode about everyone playing baseball (“Take Me Out to the Holosuite”) and another about trying to save a bar on the holodeck (“Badda Bing Badda Bang”). Indeed, the holodeck was the source of numerous lighter, sillier episodes throughout the 1990s shows. Viewers may have slightly tired of the “holodeck-gone-wrong” format eventually, but when done well, these stories were a great way to get a breath of fresh air into those long, 26-episode seasons.

Silly episodes work especially well when, like in “Bride of Chaotica!” or “Qpid,” they are obviously intended to be silly. It’s true that there are also some episodes of Star Trek that appear repeatedly on “Worst Episodes” lists because they were supposed to be taken seriously, but the story was extremely silly. Who could forget Spock talking McCoy through his own brain transfer (Original Series, “Spock’s Brain”), Dr Crusher having a romantic relationship with a Scottish ghost (The Next Generation, “Sub Rosa”), Captain Janeway and Lt. Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) turning into lizards (Voyager, “Threshold”) or Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) taking his dog to sickbay (“A Night in Sickbay”)? Some of us have a great fondness for these episodes! But it is fair to say they were just too silly to be taken seriously.

And that brings us to Strange New Worlds, a show which makes the most of its episodic, Space Oddity of the Week format to tell a mixture of dark, dramatic stories and lighter, more fun ones. Season 1, as with Prodigy, gave us a bodyswap early on in “Spock Amok,” a well-known story type in science fiction and fantasy that nearly always comes with a hefty dose of humor. And Episode 8, “The Elysian Kingdom,” offered a full-blown fantasy setting appearing out of nowhere on the ship and some hilarious out-of-character acting from the series regulars. “The Elysian Kingdom” also demonstrates how well the show can work when its sillier side is blended with sincere emotion and character drama, serving as it does as the emotional and dramatic climax of M’Benga’s (Babs Olusanmokun) storyline with his daughter. It is no less moving for being preceded by some silliness and fun; if anything, it is more so because of that.

Season 2 gave us more of poor Spock’s (Ethan Peck) romantic troubles in “Charades,” but it really embraced the sillier side with Episode 7, “Those Old Scientists,” the long-awaited crossover with Lower Decks. Partly animated, this episode somehow managed to blend the over-the-top tone of Lower Decks (perfectly acted in live-action by its stars, Jack Quaid as Boimler and Tawny Newsome as Mariner) with the still generally serious tone of Strange New Worlds, showing that the two really do belong in the same universe. Like “The Elysian Kingdom,” it included moments of seriousness and of character drama, with Pike (Anson Mount) once more facing up to his grim future and Chapel’s (Jess Bush) heart silently breaking on screen, but the episode also gave us the beautiful, uplifting silliness of Boimler doing a Riker over the Captain’s display saddle and Mariner being distracted by Hot Spock (“The body, the face, the ears, what?!”). It is a true gift to long-term fans of the franchise because, like both Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds as a whole, “Those Old Scientists,” understands what we love about this show – some daftness as well as some solid drama.

And now, with a particularly serious hour of drama focused on war trauma sandwiched in between the two (“Under the Cloak of War”), Strange New Worlds has produced the perfect combination of silliness and character drama – a musical episode, “Subspace Rhapsody.” Despite its long history of wackiness, Trek has only dipped its toes in the musical direction with some episodes on Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. (Franchise writing legend Ron Moore wanted to do a DS9 musical episode, but it never happened.)

Calling back to the beloved musical episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a reference to bunnies and the phrase “I have a theory” in the Trek episode are clearly Buffy shout-outs), Strange New Worlds uses its musical hour to reveal the characters’ deep-seated emotions that they would otherwise try to suppress, while also having a lot of fun with the unavoidable silliness of the whole idea.

The basic concept has an inherently silly aspect to it, and the frequent references to “improbability” give it a wonderfully Douglas Adams-esque feel. The episode leans into that when it brings Pike to his knees on the bridge, or in that glorious Klingon dance sequence (everyone wants to see singing Klingons, Una). But there is seriousness here too. La’an (Christina Chong) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) have deeply heartfelt solos, and having seen Chapel’s heart broken in the previous silly episode, here she returns the favour and Spock is forced to confront his own emotional turmoil. “Subspace Rhapsody” is a joy to watch, and it reminds us just how much its playful tone owes to The Original Series with a beautiful reprise of that show’s theme music to close out the finale (over a quip from Pike that seamlessly echoes Kirk’s customary joke at the end of many episodes).

Going forward, Picard has ended and Discovery and Prodigy have been cancelled with final seasons still to air (hopefully, in Prodigy’s case - #SaveStarTrekProdigy). Leaving aside one-off TV movies or limited series like Section 31, that leaves us with Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and a new series set at Starfleet Academy in the 32nd century. One would imagine there would be room for quite a lot of silliness in a series following a group of students, who will surely be having keg parties full of whatever has replaced Romulan Ale as the 32nd century illegal beverage of choice (in between more serious adventures, of course). If the proposed Picard spin-off Star Trek: Legacy gets the greenlight, that will likely take on the mantle of being the show with a more serious tone, but so far there has been no confirmation that it will go ahead. We very hope it does, but there would hopefully be room for a little silliness there too – maybe we could even hear Seven of Nine’s very nice singing voice again…

The future of Star Trek at the moment is potentially full of silliness, and that really does make us smile. We love a good drama, but right now, with the world outside dark enough as it is, we also need some lightness to balance it out. Star Trek has always been a beacon of optimism and hope, and this is part of how it is going to stay that way.