Strange New Worlds Review: Human Best Friend

"Human Best Friend" has me thinking about what I liked about Strange New Worlds in the first place.

There's been lots of talk since the show began - including on this blog - about its determination to return to a model of truly episodic storytelling that has broadly fallen out of fashion. Over the years it's been running, SNW seems to have settled into a model Alex Perry at TrekCore has described as "trope of the week". This is both a clever insight and a broadly accurate one, though one could alternatively frame it as "borrowed IP of the week". Season four opened with an episode of Doctor Who, moved on to Event Horizon, and this week offers us The Hangover (or, as a deeper cut, Red Dwarf's "Thanks For The Memory" - a story which, like this one, has a character wake up wearing a cast).

This is not necessarily a problem. Indeed, given the sheer number of Trek episodes that now exist, it's at least arguable that liberal borrowing from other stories is going to result in more originality than trying to stay withing the franchise's own boundaries - to avoid the accumulation of lore and ossification of tone that leads to so many shows producing episodes that look more and more like each other, with fewer and fewer surprises. It's to the show's credit that, four years in, trying something new (if only within its own context) is a priority.

With all that said, though, It's making for a slightly frustrating experience as a reviewer. It's hard to shake the idea - or at least, it's hard for me to shake the idea - that each week I could just identify the most obvious source material for an episode, and say "If you liked that, you'll like this".

This is exacerbated by the specifics of the last two episodes. People's thoughts on "The Griffin Incident" seem to mostly reflect their position on horror in general. Not just in the crude sense of being pro- or anti-horror, but the specifics of what elements of horror does or doesn't work for them. "The Griffin Incident" was high on atmosphere, used gore sparingly but upsettingly, and mostly eschewed jump scares for building realisations that something was amiss. Those are specific techniques within the genre, and there wasn't much more to say about them than that they're done well enough that they'll work just fine for the people who whom they generally work.

I'm almost certain something similar is going to be true of "Human Best Friend". If you like the kind of comedy it's revelling in, you'll probably like this. It's well-pitched, well-performed, and well-edited. I smiled a lot, and laughed more than once. The cast are clearly having fun, which helps, especially when you consider how drunkenness - as opposed to simple inebriation - is ultimately a social contagion. I'm not sure it says anything terribly complimentary about our crew that they're so willing to sign up for immediate and uncontrolled levels of intoxication (and I wonder what happened to those on Alpha Shift with personal/cultural/religious/medical prohibitions against such an idea - did they just have to stay on Enterprise?), but these are all issues that could be easily resolved with a few additional scenes/lines. The episode chooses not to include those, to avoid slowing matters down (see also: the shuttle not having an autopilot, there being no explanation for how Kirk made his way to the Enterprise). It's worth noting that this is the shortest episode so far this year by over ten minutes, which speaks to the tightness on display here - a tightness this form of comedy absolutely needs to fully work.

Not that it's all just fun and games. The episode repeats the trick used by "Valles Marineris", with a sudden and significant raising of the stakes (I also like how both stories play around with how the universal translator interprets structural differences in language), but manages it rather better. I particularly enjoyed there being two fake-outs about a serious situation developing (the gang of criminals who prove to be pathetically easily cowed, the kidnap attempt which turned out to be an overly literal attempt to help Ortegas and Scotty relax), before the actual threat appears, both upping the ante and helping make sense of what's been going on throughout the episode. It would have been easy at that point to have shifted to a much more serious tone, but "Human Best Friend" resists the urge, committing to its bit in a way that makes sense. As others have pointed out, just about every Trek show is essentially a workplace drama, or in this case a workplace comedy. An episode where everyone got drunk at a work do and then suddenly got hit by a crisis is a fun take on that. It's even familiar, in its own way; I've never had to deal with a bomb threat at work, but overdoing it at an afternoon wine reception and realising I still have something that needs doing before I get the bus home isn't an experience I am totally unfamiliar with.

On it's own terms, then, "Human Best Friend" is a success. To again compare it to "The Griffin Incident", its ambition is focussed upon making a comedy first, and a Trek episode second, and it's broadly successful in that context. In the subgenre of lighthearted shore leave stories, this might end up being my favourite. In terms of the season more generally, and of the show entire, I'm a little less sanguine. We've talked already about how this show seems too comfortable in silliness; how it's almost the default mode at this point. Perhaps even more worryingly, we're only three episodes into the season, and we've already had two episodes which make significant use of main characters acting very out of character. The problem with borrowing an IP each week is you need to find a way to map it onto what your own show is doing, and SNW has struggled with this twice in a row (three times, if we include Starfleet officers being able to shrug off a genocide). It's one thing to have no idea where the show might go each week. It's something rather different to have no idea what it might be.

Even here, though, the show has an answer. From the beginning, SNW has made its episodic structure work through a focus on character throughlines. Story arcs are kept simple, while emotional arcs provide each season's support. Here, we take a break from La'An's increasing panic about her new abilities (which would have been hard to address using this episode's tone), and instead resolve Ortegas and Scotty's feud. This is done in rather sweet way, and gets points for briefly implying the possibility of an "enemies to lovers" plot before going somewhere much more in keeping with the show/franchise. This was never about two people bickering to hide their mutual attraction. This was two professionals unable to process their envy of each other's skills, a problem exacerbated by their respective family histories (and on that, how nice it is to have characters with family issues like "I don't feel I can measure up to my brother(s)" and not "They all got eaten by bloody space lizards). Sure, we could argue this all got wrapped up rather quickly, but that's just what happens when you've only got ten episodes a year to play with. I'm just glad they finally seem to have found something for Ortegas to do that's genuinely worth Melissa Navia's time - a remarkable thing to say about an episode in which she twice is replaced by a cactus in a t-shirt.

I realise that I've gotten more or less wholly through this review without talking about Spock and Kirk, despite the episode's title coming from one of their interactions here. Mostly, that's just because it feels like the episode's primary weakness, and not in a particularly interesting way. It makes Spock look like an idiot and, assuming Kirk realised from the start that Spock thought him a hallucination, makes Jim look like an absolute piece of shit. Plus, I know I said just one paragraph earlier that we have to make allowances for how few episodes we get of this show each year, but it stretches credulity past breaking point that Spock already considers Kirk the closest human friend he's ever had. The extent to which this show seems to want to sideline just about every character other than Spock and La'An in favour of endless Kirk guest appearances is already a frequently-commented upon issue, but this feels like wholly rewriting the relationship between Spock and Pike in order to set up a relationship that was already wholly believable and complete. People were already pissed off enough about Kirk being told last episode that his son was fated to be stabbed to death, and this feels similar but much worse. It's bad enough to use the show as retrospective foreshadowing (a common sin in prequels), but actively twisting the show in knots to force a new context upon what's gone before strikes me as a baffling act of self-harm (see also last year's "Terrarium").

Still. For all this episode both continued and intensified the Kirk irk issue this show has been suffering from ever since they hired Paul Wesley (who's blameless in all this), I don't think it ruins the fun. And having fun is really all this episode is aiming for. We might wish we were being given more, but at a certain point, you figure out what kind of food a place does, and you either stop eating there or you don't.

I'm still booking a table for next week.

Ordering

1. The Griffin Incident

2. Human Best Friend

3. Valles Marineris