Star Trek: Jonathan Frakes Wants to Direct a Musical Episode

Alex Kurtzman enjoys using the Emmy-nominated shorts series Star Trek: Short Treks to experiment with what Star Trek can do. He's produced episodes that pushed the franchise into full comedy and brought it back into animation. He's even expressed an interest in making one installment a Star Trek musical, and veteran Star Trek star and director Jonathan Frakes wants to helm that one. Frakes spoke to Trek Movie recently and touched on various topics, including how Frakes hasn't yet directed and an episode of Star Trek: Short Treks. When the musical idea came up, Frakes jumped on the idea quickly.

"I was just about to say musical," Frakes aid. "I'm dying to do something in that world anyway, ever since Maurice Hurley, who was our showrunner briefly on Next Gen, took me to lunch and said, "What do you like?" I said, 'I like jazz. and I like baseball and I play the trombone.' The next thing you know there I was in the holodeck with Minuet. I think that a musical, especially in a Short Treks, would be spectacular. I think it'd be wonderful. The dancing in 'Calypso' was magical."

As to whether he's only interested in directing the episode, or possibly getting Will Riker involved in the musicality, Frakes said, "No. Well… maybe Riker's in the band," with a laugh.

In August, Kurtzman talked about using Star Trek: Short Treks to take more risks with the franchise. "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."

Star Trek: Short Treks is streaming now on CBS All Access.