Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - “Human Best Friend” Review
Following “The Griffin Incident,” a strong but emotionally punishing hour of television, “Human Best Friend” functions as exactly the tonal palate cleanser this season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds needs at this point – a shore leave gone spectacularly, psychedelically wrong, in a grand Star Trek tradition stretching back to the original series. The crew descends on the Cesnar Grand, a resort whose atmosphere provides a custom-tailored intoxicating high to every visitor, courtesy of proprietor Dendru, played by Dave Foley with exactly the right register of unctuous, presumptuous hospitality. What follows is a structurally satisfying comedy of escalating consequences: Ortegas waking up in a trashed hotel room fighting a Mugato that turns out to be an intoxicated Scotty in a costume, Una belting “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (RIP Bonnie Tyler) in Klingon, M’Benga doing a spectacularly unconvincing impression of Tom Cruise in Cocktail, and Pike contemplating a face tattoo with the untroubled serenity of a man who has almost entirely forgotten he has a diplomatic crisis to manage.
The episode’s true achievement is what it does with Ortegas and Scotty, whose recent tensions had begun to feel a touch manufactured in the premiere. Stranded together, hungover and confused, forced to cooperate to retrieve their sabotaged shuttle, the two discover genuine common ground stemming from fractious sibling relationships and past failures. Melissa Navia and Martin Quinn play this thaw with real warmth, and by the episode’s end, their buddy-comedy dynamic has become one of the show’s most charming assets rather than a source of friction.
Dendru’s confrontation with Ortegas – his observation that she is looking for something to be angry about, delivered with the authority of someone who recognizes the pattern because he once lived inside it himself – is a small but well-placed piece of character insight buried inside an otherwise farcical hour.
But it’s the Kirk and Spock material that gives the episode its title. Spock’s realization that he has never had “what humans call a 'human best friend’” – someone to confide in fully and without calculation – lands with real tenderness precisely because the episode has earned it through comedy rather than despite it. That the entire subplot turns out to be genuine rather than hallucinated is the kind of reveal that could feel like a cheap twist in lesser hands; here, it reframes everything that preceded it as a foundation being laid in real time, and as a showcase for this ensemble’s comedic range and as connective tissue building toward the Kirk-Spock partnership this series has always been building toward, “Human Best Friend” succeeds completely.