This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Strange New Worlds 2x09 Subspace Rhapsody.

Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.

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4 points

Curious what others think about this, but I was wondering about the mechanism for how the parameters of the quantum uncertainty field were defined to create a reality that follows the ‘rules’ of the musical genre. Uhura transmitted Anything Goes into the subspace fold, but that’s just a structured harmonic pattern (or however Pelia called it) and even if you took the song’s content into account, it doesn’t inherently contain any kind of comprehensive definition of common musical tropes (songs tending to give voice internal character motivations, choreographed dancing, songs combined into a medley, etc).

So were the crew thoughts somehow influencing the “selection” of the improbability fields? If so, how? Is the subspace fold sentient somehow? And even if so, all the anomaly knew was that a ship full of life forms was beaming something at it, how would it know which life form in which room was the one pressing the button and that their thoughts should be doing the ‘driving’? (Heaven help us if it decided to read Ensign Johnson’s mind down on Deck 7 and get a glimpse into the world of Federation-era Furry fandom!) What do you think?

Personally, I think this is some good ol’ fashioned TOS-style handwaving that we’re not meant to think too much about, but that’s not the kind of thinking we get paid for around these parts. 😜

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5 points

My take is that “Anything Goes” managed to find an exact match in the multiverse, and they became entangled from there - the song is from a Broadway musical of the same name, after all.

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