“Human Best Friend,” the third episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season four, sends the Enterprise crew on shore leave to a pleasure planet called Cesnar Grand, where an intoxicating atmosphere gets everyone blackout drunk and most of the cast wakes up with no memory of the night before. Scotty and Ortegas, who spent the season’s opening episodes feuding, have to piece together what happened while the rest of the crew deals with the fallout in parallel. The episode lands a 4 out of 10.
Star Trek has always had comedy in it. That defense gets thrown at every critic of these episodes, and it misses what actually changed. The Next Generation could give Data a malfunctioning emotion chip and still treat him as the most competent officer on the ship. The joke sat on top of the character. It never replaced him. “Human Best Friend” runs the opposite direction. The episode calls its heroes’ behavior “screw ups” outright, and that word choice tells you everything about where the writers decided to put the humor: not alongside competence, but instead of it.
Take Pike. In the middle of this shore leave, the captain gets a face tattoo and a full arm sleeve while under the influence of a planet’s intoxicating gas, then heads straight into peace negotiations that could unite an entire star system. A real Starfleet captain, days out from talks that carry that kind of weight, does not agree to a bender that erases his memory. That’s not a character taking a breather. That’s a captain making a decision no competent leader would make, dressed up as harmless fun. The episode plays it for laughs. It should have played as a crisis.
The structure gives away the influences. This is The Hangover wearing a Starfleet uniform: characters piece together a blackout night through fragments and flashbacks, the same shape that made Todd Phillips’ movie work as a comedy. It’s a fine premise for a comedy. It is not a fine premise for the fourth episode of a ten-episode season that needs every hour to develop its cast. And “Human Best Friend” isn’t an isolated swing. The episode two weeks prior borrowed its structure from Doctor Who. Last week’s borrowed from Event Horizon. Three episodes into the season, and three episodes have been something else wearing a Star Trek costume.
Spock gets the worst of it. He spends the episode insisting, in his usual deadpan, that he is inebriated, a joke that depends entirely on nobody around him noticing the obvious. He then starts hallucinating conversations with Kirk, only for the episode to reveal Kirk was there the entire time. The two share a scene that plays like a Hallmark reunion, complete with a hug, and the chemistry the show builds between them edges toward romantic subtext that has no business in this material. Two Starfleet officers, one of them supposedly compromised by an alien intoxicant, do not need their friendship staged like a will-they-won’t-they arc.
The production choices compound the problem. Cesnar Grand looks like a modern resort, and the crew wears clothes pulled from a beachwear catalog rather than anything that reads as 23rd century. Maybe the budget ran thin this week. Whatever the reason, nothing about the sets or costuming places this story in the Star Trek universe. Strip the uniforms and the ship interiors from the opening act, and nothing left on screen tells you what franchise you’re watching.
Number One gets her own detour into parody with a Klingon opera performance that plays as a direct riff on “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Star Trek has poked at Klingon culture appropriating human tradition before, going back to the courtroom scene in The Undiscovered Country. That worked as a single, contained joke inside a film that otherwise took its Klingons seriously. This episode turns the bit into a set piece, another instance of subversion standing in for character work instead of sitting beside it. The Scotty subplot lands the same joke with less weight: the crew calls their drink a “warrior’s song,” a nod to Worf’s fondness for prune juice as a warrior’s beverage. That one worked in its original context because it was a single aside inside a character who was otherwise depicted as a formidable warrior in every other scene. Here it’s one more wink in an episode built entirely out of winks.
None of these gags fail because Star Trek shouldn’t have jokes. They fail because the show keeps using comedy as a replacement for its cast instead of a seasoning on top of it. Ortegas and Scotty spend the hour proving they can barely function, not proving they can hold it together under pressure and still find something to laugh about. A ten-episode season doesn’t have the runway to spend a full hour undermining two characters the show needs the audience to trust for the rest of the year.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds built its early reputation on episodes that borrowed genre trappings, like a courtroom drama or a musical, while still keeping Pike, Spock, and the rest recognizable underneath. “Human Best Friend” borrows the trappings and forgets to bring the characters along for the ride. Three episodes into season four, has the show found a single hour that trusts its cast enough to let them be Starfleet officers first and punchlines second?
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Khan's kin punching a dinosaur was the dumbest thing, or so I thought.
Then it was the hallucinations on the gryphon.
And then "Human best friend."
How is the flagship of the Federation run by such morons?