The Star Trek Character Who Loves Her Own Theme Song

This was a Season 1 episode, which meant that Tilly’s primary arc was transitioning from a nervous cadet into the kind of promising officer who would someday become a starship captain. Burnham, who once mastered moving up the ranks before being tried and convicted for mutiny, took the young cadet under her wings, helping to prepare her for the Command Training Program.

The Star Trek: Discovery episode “Lethe” involved the two officers exercising by jogging through the ship’s hallways, and that’s when we hear the show’s theme song as we’ve never heard it before.

As the show’s composer, Jeff Russo, later said, he was reviewing this scene back when it only had temp music in it. His memory was a bit fuzzy, but he recalled that “maybe Tilly was listening to some music or something.” At this point, the Star Trek composer had a great idea that he ran by Alex Kurtzman: he wanted to do “an eight-bit electronic version” of the show’s theme song.

It’s easy to overlook the presence of the Star Trek: Discovery theme song in this scene, and that’s by design: as Russo described it, he wanted to “sneak the main theme in,” and it would go mostly unnoticed because it “doesn’t sound like our score” and “it’s not very like our show to have this moment.”

Kurtzman was a tad skeptical and asked Russo to provide an example, causing the composer to create a “very percussive, eight-bit-sounding, synthetic sounding” version of the score that was ultimately included in the final scene.

Now, here’s where this Star Trek trivia gets interesting: while Russo didn’t seem completely certain in his recollection of the scene when it had temp music, he thought that Tilly might have been listening to music while jogging with Burnham, a fairly common practice with runners in the real world.

While Tilly didn’t have headphones on or anything, it would be trivially easy for the Discovery to play music that follows officers while they exercise. In fact, that would be (as Spock might say) quite logical since it appears that running through the ship like this was commonplace.

Since Russo replaced the temp music in this Star Trek episode with the Discovery opening song, there is a decent chance that Tilly is listening to the theme of the show she appears in. That would make the theme (or at least this arrangement of the theme) diegetic, which is just a fancy word for music that the onscreen characters can hear. And while Tilly is one of the more recent characters to enjoy a Star Trek theme song, she wasn’t the first nor the last.

For example, in Star Trek: The Original Series, there are at least two instances of Uhura singing the show’s theme song. Deep Space Nine has a visiting Bajoran musician play an old folk tune that is just a version of that show’s theme.

As for Lower Decks, episode after episode has musical homages to earlier shows, including the most recent use of The Next Generation theme song (and if you’re about to “remind” us that this was originally the theme from The Motion Picture, we might have to stun you with a phaser).

Long story, not very short, Tilly is following in a fine Star Trek tradition of enjoying her own show’s theme song. Compared to other characters, though, she has the dubious honor of being the only one to listen to a kind of lo-fi, chiptune version of her theme. That means we’re left making a simple request of Paramount: it’s time to have a permanent “lo-fi beats to study by” channel with a cartoon Tilly cramming for the Command Training Program.