8.2/10
93%
71%
77%
79%
I’m going to preface this by saying: Yes, this is the third episode of Strange New Worlds season 4 that I didn’t enjoy as a Star Trek episode but I did enjoy as an episode of TV.
No, I don’t actually hate Star Trek, what I do hate is TV calling itself Star Trek while missing pretty much everything that makes it Star Trek except for the uniforms and the ships.
Producer Alex Kurtzman claimed that dropping a series run down to 10 episodes helped avoid “filler episodes” so I’m not sure why we’ve had 2 filler episodes in a row, which is also concerning seeing as we have just 7 episodes of season 4 left, and only 13 total until the show completely wraps.
Why am I classing Human Best Friend as a filler show? Nothing really happens that affects the overall series arc, or Star Trek universe as a whole. It could simply not exist and it would have no impact on the characters, story or any aspect of Star Trek and to me that is the exact definition of “filler” that Kurtzman said they were allegedly eliminating.
What’s Human Best Friend About?
The crew are getting frazzled, tensions are mounting and trouble is brewing. Following on from the start of the season, the ship has been on missions constantly. Only a couple of shift patterns being granted shore leave and the Alpha shift is on permanent rotation getting no real time off.
Realising that his crew aren’t operating at peak performance, which will be needed as they try to negotiate a peace deal between two factions of the warring Rodaxians, Pike decides that the bridge crew deserve to relax a little bit. Luckily for them, there’s a recreation planet — Cesnar — on the way to the Rodaxian system. How handy!
Cesnar isn’t an ordinary holiday world like Risa, instead it has an atmosphere that causes inebriation when you breathe it, giving the inhaler a personalised, drunken/trippy experience.
Cue various high jinks that the crew get involved in: M’Benga becomes a bar tender, Chapel becomes a fierce bingo player, Spock finds a Human Best Friend (oh look! They said the name of the episode!), La’an takes over a relaxing yoga session, Pike gets inked, Uhuru hosts a legendary (and exclusive) party and Una discovers her inner diva.
Then we have Scotty and Ortegas.
Their journey is one of “buddy movie” meets “cop movie” meets “The Hangover” meets “Dude! Where’s my car?”. While it is funny and Martin Quinn (Scott) and Melissa Navia (Ortegas) are both excellent, I couldn’t help feel that their relationship was rather forced.
We only realised they had issues with each other when it was shoehorned into Valles Marineris where the two began snipping at each other pretty much out of nowhere, and Human Best Friend is about them learning to work together.
Why do Scott and Ortegas need to work together? Ortgeas wakes up in a trashed hotel room, arm in a cast and finds Scotty in a Mugato suit. Scotty is still feeling the effects of of the planet’s atmosphere and is drunkenly stumbling around almost impaling himself on broken glass.
Luckily for him Ortegas is stone-cold sober albeit suffering from an almighty hangover and is able to stop Scotty hurting himself. As they’re trying to figure out what on Earth happened, the resort’s director appears and asks them to deliver a note to Captain Pike — technology is banned on the surface so they can’t just use their communicators.
This leads to Ortegas and Scott running around the resort, trying to find Pike and discovering that their shuttle has gone missing.
Even worse, the note stated that the peace talks with the Rodaxians have been brought forward and they will be arriving in two hours instead of the two weeks the crew thought they had!
The clock is ticking. Can Scotty and Ortegas solve the mystery of who took the shuttle and why? Will they make it back to the Enterprise in time? And will the crew be in a fit state to complete the peace talks?
Klingon To Your Sanity
Red Alert! Spoilers ahead, you have been warned.
One of the best parts of the episode was Una Chin-Riley unleashing her inner prima donna by belting out a karaoke number — a Klingon power ballad! Rebecca Romijn is absolutely brilliant as she puts her entire heart and soul into “Total Eclipse of the Heart” which you haven’t experienced unless you’ve heard it in the original Klingon.
Ethan Peck is also great as Spock who continually apologises for how inebriated he is, despite being no different than his usual self, that is until he has to mind meld with a plant and then perceives Scotty as some kind of Ficus tree and Ortegas as a Cactus, complete with cast on one of the cactus arms.
Spock is also seeing a vision of James T. Kirk and decides to share his deepest thoughts, hopes and fears with him as he wants a “Human Best Friend”.
Now I have a slight issue with this. Considering that just a few weeks ago (in-universe time) Spock was seeing visions of his ex-fiancé T’Pring aboard the USS Griffin, who caused him to physically harm himself. I would have thought seeing even more visions of someone purportedly not there would be very disturbing, even triggering for Spock, Vulcan logic aside.
It’s one thing to see someone you know is physically in the room with you as a cactus, but it’s another completely to imagine an entire human being in a room with you, especially when you’ve recently been through a similar experience.
At the end of the episode it’s revealed that Kirk was actually on Cesnar and Spock wasn’t imagining him at all. But Kirk didn’t seem to be under the influence of the planet’s atmosphere at all, plus he spent his entire vacation in his Starfleet uniform.
And then he’s on the Enterprise somehow even though he wasn’t on the shuttle on the trip back and can’t have beamed up so how did he get there?
It doesn’t sit right with me and makes no sense. It’s like they started that plot strand with Kirk actually being a vision and then changed their minds 5 minutes before the end of the episode. Why would they do this? I’m not exactly sure but I think it’s something to do with the way they are trying to force Spock and Kirk’s friendship.
We know that by the time Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise he and Spock are strong friends, but I don’t know why the writers of Strange New Worlds seem to be forcing them into this friendship the way they are — mind melds, visions, weird hugs — rather than just letting it develop naturally, which it would through time spent together and mutual respect.
It’s like the either can’t be bothered to spend the time crafting a genuine friendship and want to rush it, or they don’t trust the audience to see it developing naturally and understand it’s happening.
As with other ways the writers are spoon feeding the audience backstory, exposition and lore (see my comments in my Griffin Incident review regarding La’an), it’s like they think that the audience is stupid and they don’t trust us to get their writing. Either that or they don’t understand the source material themselves and have to spell it all out to make sure they get it.
Once again I did enjoy the episode, as I did The Griffin Incident, I just don’t think it’s a great Star Trek episode.
It didn’t really forward any in-universe plot or development, the friction between Scott and Ortegas had been manufactured just two episodes before so their reconciliation didn’t really seem that earned, even if it was nice to see how much they had in common and fill in a little backstory for both of the characters.
Again, I don’t hate Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I just think the show’s leaning in to too many genres in order to get its laughs, rather than being funny in its own right. Star Trek: Lower Decks proved it was entirely possible to keep humour within the Star Trek universe without having to turn the show in to a stoner episode to get its laughs.
Maybe I’m just jaded because I’ve invested so much time into Star Trek as a franchise. We’ve been with the some of the Strange New Worlds characters since the 2nd season of Star Trek: Discovery and we’ve seen them grow and develop over that time and their character’s progress seems to have stalled even more in this season.
Sure, I know we still have 13 episodes ahead of us, but we know one of these involves Pike being turned into a puppet.
Personally, I’m getting tired of the absurd and would like a bit more of a “traditional” series back where we actually explore Strange New Worlds instead of just getting high on them.
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