Star Trek EP Says He Wants To Do A Musical Episode

CBS is in the midst of expanding the Star Trek franchise in brand new ways. Take the just-premiered Star Trek: Lower Decks, for example, the first ever half-hour comedy in the Trek universe and only its second ever animated series. There’s also the short-form anthology show Star Trek: Short Treks, which allows for all kinds of stories to be told week to week. In fact, if EP Alex Kurtzman has his way, it could feature another big first for the franchise in its next run: a musical episode.

Short Treks recently picked itself up an Emmy nomination, so it seems a good bet that another season will be on the way. And while speaking to Gold Derby, Kurtzman – who effectively serves as the architect behind all CBS All Access’ contemporary Trek programming – revealed that he fully intends to keep pushing the boundaries of what they can do within Short Treks‘ anthology format. He listed off a few potential ideas, but the most eyebrow-raising has to be the notion of an all-singing, all-dancing episode.

“As a writer and as a storyteller, it’s a real challenge to figure out how to have a beginning, a middle, and an end in a much more compressed period of time and there’s so many different forms that these could take. I’d love to do a musical, for example. I’d love to do one in black and white, figure out what that means. I can probably think of 50 different ways that we can tell stories and 50 different crevices of the Star Trek universe to explore. That may not be the right kinds of crevices for the larger shows, but I think we always think of the Short Treks as, these are the scenes that are just as important as what’s going on in the main shows but that you wouldn’t actually have time for. These are the moments that you can drill down on. So I’d love to. I’d love nothing more.”

While it seems like a musical episode is just a pipe-dream of Kurtzman’s at the moment, we’ve certainly got all kinds of Trek content on the way. Starting with last week’s Lower Decks pilot, there are a whopping 23 straight weeks of Trek ahead of us. Following the conclusion of the animated show’s first season, the third run of Star Trek: Discovery kicks off the next week on October 15th.

And, after that, there’s Star Trek: Prodigy due in 2021, a children’s CG-animated series headed to Nickelodeon, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, starring Anson Mount’s Captain Pike, and Star Trek: Picard season 2. With so much Star Trek coming, maybe a musical episode slipping in there somewhere isn’t too crazy, after all.