Star Trek’s Craziest Episode Saved By The Soundtrack
While the theme songs are great, Star Trek fans don’t often pay close attention to the music in the episodes themselves because we’re busy paying attention to the compelling characters and out-of-this-world stories. One of the craziest episodes was Discovery’s “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” which featured a time loop plot that threatened to make the whole story too confusing. That’s how composer Jeff Russo felt, so he composed a special song in response to the “schizophrenic” scenes of Harry Mudd killing Lorca, a decision he claims “was the thing that sort of kept it all together.”
A Murderous Time Loop
It’s a bold claim, and one that is going to require a bit of context. “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” was a Discovery episode that, like in the TNG episode “Cause and Effect” before it, had our heroes stuck in a crazy time loop with no easy way out. This time, though, the time loop was a weapon, one used by returning villain Harry Mudd to learn the secrets of Discovery’s spore drive before selling the ship to the Klingons. The time loop meant that reality just kept resetting, and the malicious Mudd used this opportunity to kill Captain Lorca in a series of increasingly inventive murders.
Plot Centered Through Musical Composition
While “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” ended up being one of Discovery’s strongest episodes, composer Jeff Russo was worried about audiences keeping track of all the timey-wimey weirdness. He was particularly concerned about a montage scene showing how many different ways Mudd had killed Lorca in previous loops. The veteran composer felt that “one of the things I needed to do there is we needed to tie the whole sequence together because it was so schizophrenic.”
Sonically-Induced Scene Cohesion
His solution to that particular problem was, of course, to write a new song, one titled “Captain Mudd.” In Russo’s mind, the main thing making this sequence “schizophrenic” was “there were all these cuts, it was happening again and again and again, and he was in that time loop.” By having a singular piece of music play throughout the entire montage, he hoped to give the scene cohesion that it wouldn’t otherwise have.
This montage is arguably the most memorable part of “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” and Russo’s new song is a big reason for the scene’s success. Rather than have this song play the same way throughout the montage, he “would do things like change the tempo a little bit, or slow down the tempo a little bit, or change something as opposed to trying to make a big shift every time.” Ultimately, the composer was quite pleased with how everything turned out, saying that this new song “was the thing that sort of kept it all together.”
My Name Is Mudd
Interestingly, the need to create a new song for this time loop fulfilled one of Russo’s other needs for “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”…specifically, the need for Harry Mudd to have his own unique song. Originally, he tried to compose a song that would be reminiscent of Mudd’s appearances in The Original Series, but he gave up on that because the Mudd of these two shows was so very different. By creating “Captain Mudd,” he knocked out two birds of prey with one phaser, giving this iconic character a cool theme while helping the most confusing part of the episode make sense.
The Music Elevates The Episode
As noted earlier, it’s easy to take the music of Star Trek for granted, and we admittedly didn’t pay serious attention to “Captain Mudd” when we first watched “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.” But Russo is right: in re-watching that scene, it’s easy to see how it could have all fallen apart without a cohesive theme. The veteran composer effectively proved that music is the real magic, and in an ironic twist, it was his own new song that kept audiences watching this episode from going mad.
