Prouvaire

A Jellico cat perhaps?

One could argue that "Skin a Cat" makes a more profound point amidst the silliness. Which is that (as Azetbur has pointed out) "the Federation is nothing more than a homo sapiens only club".

Obviously there are real world reasons why human (and primarily American) cultural references abound in Star Trek, but it's always irked me that, for instance, there would be an entire class of Starfleet vessels named after cities in one United States state - ie, the California class. Why not have all the ships in this class named after towns in, say, the ShiKahr district of Vulcan instead? I think that would do a better job of world building, representing the Federation as a body that's more than just a bunch of humans with a handful of token aliens. Or, better yet, have all the ships ships named after smaller cities in a range of UFP member planets?

edit: typo

I'm not familiar with Pete Holmes but it would have been nice to have Paul Wesley voice Kirk to provide some aural continuity.

I watched "Too Many Cooks" in preparation for Very Short Treks and so thought "Skin a Cat" was tame in comparison. I enjoyed it. 'Twas silly.

I would not presume to debate you.

That is wise.

and we get close up enough on Batel to see that the patch on her shoulder reads “USS Enterprise”.

I figure Pike got her one from the Enterprise gift shop. She's probably got one of Pike's pajama tops too.

Or maybe midgets.

Another musical theatre Star Trek fan who finally caught up with the episode. Obviously I loved it. The writers took their cue from "Once More With Feelings" and used the "very special episode" conceit to progress seasonal character arcs (as they did with "Those Old Scientists"). You could tell was the intent even from the "previously on" recap with a bunch of relationship tensions ready to be revealed through song. (The bunnies reference was a nice nod to the Buffy episode.)

I knew Celia Rose Gooding could sing (although, sadly, she was off when I saw Jagged Little Pill on Broadway), so the actor whose vocal chops surprised me most was Christina Chong. I see from her wikipedia entry that she was actually in the Elton John musical Aida in Berlin, so that makes sense now.

Maybe my favourite minor running gag was how the characters always heard and acknowledged the backing music - in dialogue or with just a glance. I could go on a pretentious detour on mimetic vs diegetic music, but won't.

But I wasn't blind to some of the episode's flaws either. The biggest to me was that the songs lacked the craft and polish of really good musical theatre songs, with (for instance) many imperfect rhymes and awkward prosody (putting the stress on the wrong syl-LA-ble of a word). Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show that I loved, suffered from the same issue.

A minor complaint is that I didn't think we need the rules of musical theatre to be so explicitly lampshaded by the characters, although La'an treating it as security (and personal, emotional) risk was cute - and in character.

Is there somewhere a list of the songs that Ford was parodying in How Much For Just The Planet? Even though I'm a huge musical theatre nerd, I didn't get some of the references in the book and it always bugged me.

(And speaking of John M Ford: Personally I still regret that the Klingon culture that the franchise developed through TNG and subsequent shows differed so much from the one Ford created in The Final Reflection.)

Alien of the Week shows like TOS and TNG. No season long arcs, no dramas where the events in the episode are less important than the character development [...] SNW was supposed to be that

I remember that during SNW's development one of the producers explicitly stated that while the stories would be episodic, there would be character arcs that ran through the season. So SNW was never intended to be as standalone as TOS or TNG were.

in TOS there was very little rhyme or reason to the Stardates

The explanation Roddenberry gave was that a stardate was dependent not just on time but location, but the real world reason was that the episodes were aired out of production order.

The danger with these "very special fun episodes" is that they can be confined to being just that. But what elevated this episode is how it used the time travel/crossover conceit to foreshadow, progress and pay off SNW character arcs, including Chapel and Spock's ultimately doomed relationship (something that I've previously said could be incredibly poignant, if handled right), Number One's legacy, and the way Pike confronts his fate. I hope the musical episode does the same.

That's how I read it too.