Mild spoilers ahead for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 4, Episode 3, “Human Best Friend.”
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” if nothing else, doesn’t lack for variety. At some point early in its run, the show’s creatives seemingly developed a mission statement to make sure that every one of its episodes is a different genre, merrily testing the limits of what the “Star Trek” franchise can contain. These experiments have been largely successful. Last week’s “The Griffin Incident” was a straight-up haunted house in space story (à la “Event Horizon”), Season 2’s “Subspace Rhapsody” was, somewhat infamously, a musical, and so forth.
That brings us to this week’s Season 4, Episode 3, “Human Best Friend,” which is, believe it or not, a stoner comedy, as unexpected as that may be. Some of you out there might already watch “Strange New Worlds” in an altered state of mind, so to speak, but this is the first time the show’s characters have been in the same boat.
In “Human Best Friend,” the crew of the USS Enterprise is severely overworked. Lieutenants Scott (Martin Quinn) and Ortegas (Melissa Navia) are at each other’s throats, Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) is breaking glasses in the ship’s lounge, and Lieutenant La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) wants to fight everyone. Longing for a vacation, the Enterprise heads to Seznar Grand, a planet with a unique atmosphere that, just by breathing it, makes you drunk. It’s also a tech-free zone, so no screens, scanners, or transporters are permitted. A zany caretaker (Dave Foley) serves as our heroes’ guide.
As one might predict, the Enterprise crew soon gets drunk on Seznar Grand’s air, only to wake up a few days later with no memory. All they have to piece together what happened are some bizarre post-party clues.