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• WATCH: The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds panel from Seattle's ECCC 2025 with Anson Mount, Celia Rose Gooding, and Melissa Navia

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The USS Enterprise has made it their mission to boldly go where no man has gone before, and in 2023 the starship took the franchise to a strange new world….musical theater!

The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 episode ‘Subspace Rhapsody’ found the crew of the Enterprise affected by a subspace fold, which caused them to burst out into song and dance. The songs were catchy, the choreography was dynamite, and the episode was unforgettable.

“I’m actually a musical theater kid, so I was very excited when I found out we were doing a musical episode,” Melissa Navia recalls during the show's panel during Emerald City Comic Con 2025 this past weekend. “I’ve been singing since forever. I love singing. And then I couldn’t wait to get the script, and then I got the script, and I saw that Ortegas had no song. That made me sad. But she had wonderful verses in songs, and she was a part of everyone else’s songs, and that was great.”

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Watch now the 'Charting New Frontiers: The cast of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' panel live from the Emerald City Comic Con 2025 Main Stage powered by Xfinity:

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When asked how long she had been preparing for the episode, Celia Rose Gooding noted that she had been performing since childhood, and this was just the culmination of it. “I’ve been singing longer than I’ve been speaking, so like 25 years,” Gooding notes.

For those who needed help in the singing department, a vocal coach was on hand to help the cast. Since this episode required a lot of preparation, the vocal coach began working with the cast while they were filming earlier episodes of the series.

“Our production team on the ground in Toronto did a very good job of scheduling,” Anson Mount recalls. “I actually had several weeks where we had a vocal coach that would come and sort of lived in her own trailer on set, and when we had time, we went in there and did vocal lessons. It helped me a lot.”

“By the time we were cutting the album, which we had to do before we shot the episode, we were all feeling pretty strong. We were in good hands, and it’s great working in a studio situation, because you can just pick it apart and do a single line 50 times if you have to,” Mount says.

“I think Pike singing to Batel on the bridge while we were at the helm was one of the most memorable moments on the bridge,” Navia says. “That was the first singing scene we shot,” Mount recalls.

“Seeing everyone sing, the way the cast came together, and the way that everyone rehearsed, having studio time, which was my first time recording in a studio, it was very cool,” Navia muses. “It just felt like, since the day we found out we were doing a musical episode, we were all hands on deck, including those of us who maybe were not the happiest that they had to sing. But we all pulled it together.”

“This one was a great challenge, and everyone kind of jumped into it with the right spirit,” Mounts says.  

You can watch Charting New Frontiers: The cast of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds from ECCC 2025's Main Stage powered by Xfinity for yourself as part of Popverse's all-encompassing coverage of Emerald City Comic Con 2025. Be there from anywhere.

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