Nu Trek Scoring
- Lukas Kendall
- Jul 27
- 1 min read
I really don’t get the new Paramount+ Star Trek shows. I accept that I’m no longer the audience, but I just find them bewildering in so many ways.
I watched the third season premiere of Strange New Worlds to see how the Gorn cliffhanger resolved and, well, from the original “Arena” episode in 1967 (a sci-fi action-suspense classic and a thoughtful statement about mercy) the Gorn are now a cheesy Aliens rip-off.
Obviously I’ll get a few old timers saying “Amen!” which is not really the point.
But I do have one thing to add about the music...WTF?
When I was a teenager, and learned that the reason the mid-season (and later) TNG episodes were scored with virtually no melody was because the producers instructed the composers to do so—it was totally baffling.
Why would anybody want music that tries to sound like it doesn’t exist? (Well, because Rick Berman said so.)
Now the new shows have the opposite problem. The scene is two people talking in a room AND THE MUSIC IS BLASTING AWAY WITH A MILLION NOTES!
It’s like we can’t win?
Thirty years ago, people used to complain when a movie was over-scored with music accentuating every little dramatic beat (Patrick Doyle's hyperbolic soundtrack to the Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein movie is a good example), but...isn't that better than today, when you have music shouting at you insistently, but stripped of any semblance of melody or dramatic structure (Oppenheimer is a perfect example)? In Oppenheimer, the movie was three hours long, and I swear to God, at least 170 minutes of it had music constantly playing, yet I can't remember a note of it other than "Loud". It DRAINED drama out of a lengthy, talky drama, rather than adding anything. Doyle's Frankenstein music is also over-scored and labeled over everything like syrup,…