In Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (S4 – EP3) Human Best Friend

Synopsis: In Human Best Friend, the crew take shore leave on a pleasure planet with an atmosphere that causes inebriation. Which is fun right up until it isn’t.

The Story

While en route to a diplomatic mission, Captain Pike decides that the crew needs a couple of days of shore leave to blow off some steam. To that end, they head to Cesnar Grand, a planet with an atmosphere that has the unique property of causing inebriation in most sentient species.

Things are going well until Pike decides to bring the diplomatic mission forward by a few days, and the crew lose the shuttlecraft that got them to the planet. Ortegas and Scotty, who are still bickering over Ortegas’ piloting, seem to be the only crew members with clear enough heads to investigate.

Meanwhile, Una Chin-Riley is singing Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart in Klingon, Spock thinks he’s hallucinating his best friend James Kirk, Uhura is partying, Pike is getting tattoos, and Chapel is obnoxiously winning at bingo while irritating everyone else in the room.

Can Scotty and Ortegas save the day?

Acting

The actors all performed well, given that their brief was to act drunk for most of the episode.

Melissa Navia and Martin Quinn carry much of the episode’s story as we witness Ortegas and Scotty finally figure out their friendship and develop a newfound respect for each other.

We also get another guest appearance from Paul Wesley as James Kirk, who by this point must be stalking the crew of the Enterprise, given how often he turns up in a show that isn’t actually about Kirk.

Overall

I wasn’t a fan of this episode, and I’m not really a fan of this group of writers whenever they try to turn Star Trek, a science fiction drama, into an all out screwball comedy.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind the occasional comedy episode, but only when it’s done well. Episodes like Data’s Day and A Fistful of Datas from what I consider Star Trek’s golden age, Star Trek: The Next Generation, struck that balance perfectly. They were funny without undermining the characters or the world they inhabited.

Whenever this particular writing team leans heavily into comedy, I feel it undermines much of the good work they’ve done developing these characters. Truth be told, I’d much rather watch a Star Trek series that shows us a crew demonstrating competence than one where the crew get inebriated on a random pleasure planet and somehow lose their shuttlecraft.

Also, the notion of Spock being so drunk that he convinces himself he’s hallucinating Kirk, when Kirk is standing in the same room as him, is just plain dumb. And don’t even get me started on him seeing Ortegas as a plant.

Finally, the title of the episode feels a little misleading. Most of the story revolves around Ortegas and Scotty trying to recover the missing shuttlecraft, while the Spock and Kirk bromance, which the title appears to reference, is really just a subplot.