Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: How Lin-Manuel Miranda Ghosting A Picard EP Led To That Memorable Musical Episode

Nobody is having more fun making television than the creatives behind Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. That was evident in this week's episode, "Subspace Rhapsody," a musical installment which found the Enterprise crew involuntarily sharing their true feelings through song.

The hour is predicated on an outside force compelling the crew to perform catchy song-and-dance numbers when emotions are running high, much like the demon behind the musical hijinks in the beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling."

Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers confirms that Thursday's Strange New Worlds was, in fact, influenced by the Buffy musical.

"That was definitely an inspiration," he tells TVLine. "We held that up as like, 'OK, well, we have to live up to that because if we do this badly, it will not go well, and we would be upset by it. And none of us wanted to do it badly."

The idea for a Star Trek musical came up while Picard executive producers Michael Chabon and Akiva Goldsman were enthusiastically chatting with star Michelle Hurd about the prospect of one on the Picard set.

Goldsman, who also serves as EP and co-showrunner on Strange New Worlds, recalled how Chabon told them he knew Lin-Manuel Miranda. "We were like, 'Call him! call him!"" the EP shared. Two days later, when they followed up with Chabon, he told them, "[Lin-Manuel] didn't call me back."

"And that was the end of that musical," Goldsman noted. "But it did seem like such a good idea. As soon as Henry and I got together to make [Strange New Worlds], I kept peppering him with, 'We should do a musical,' and Henry, of course, had done musicals before."

Myers, who oversaw musical episodes as showrunner on Syfy's The Magicians, "was like, 'You know they're really hard,' and I was like, 'Well, they can't really be hard, can they?' knowing nothing about how hard they could be. But my blind optimism, I think, finally persuaded Henry's pragmatic, actual practical understanding of the heavy lifting required, and off we went."

According to Myers, writer Bill Wolkoff had "a kind of crazy pitch for a musical idea" at the beginning of Strange New Worlds' second season, and they ran with it. "We were like, 'Oh, that sounds good. Let's finally do that,'" Myers explains.

"It has to come late in the season because there's a lot of work that is required. I remember I started making calls about six months out because we needed to find a composer, we needed to find a lyricist, we needed to start designing what we would do for the sets," he continues. "Once they're finally ready, they shoot more quickly than you think. But it's the months and months and months before that, while you're making a TV show and doing lots of other things, that make it extremely hard."

TVLine has reached out to Lin-Manuel Miranda's reps for comment.

What did you think of Star Trek's first musical episode? Grade "Subspace Rhapsody" below, and then share your thoughts in the comments!