I don’t know, I hear a lot about how TOS was weird and wacky and, as someone who rewatches each episode every year, I feel that’s as much a mischaracterisation as the “Kirk drift”; the idea that Kirk is a hot-headed man whore. An episode like “Spock’s Brain” certainly dents my assertion, but generally, the writers made a real effort to create solid, serious science-fiction. It was far, far from, say, Lost in Space. TOS took itself quite seriously by and large.
For me, however, “Subspace Rhapsody” was just pure gimmick. If it had been the work of, say, a Q-like being, and if the musical numbers were a capella without the magical background instrumentation, I could maybe have bought it.
The SNW producers love boasting about how zany and off the wall they are but I wish they’d just rein it in a bit. That clip they released last year with the Vulcan transformation magic seriously made me doubt whether I’d even watch the next season.
SNW: