It’s the hope that kills you. I certainly had hopes when I saw that our director this week, Yana Gorskaya, edited the movie What We Do in the Shadows, before also directing 22 episodes in five seasons of the same show. As well as several other Taiki Waititi projects. Then I saw the writing this week came from Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks writer Kathryn Lyn. Previously, Lyn did “Charades” with Henry Alonso Myers and “What is Starfleet?” with Alan B McElroy. We’re all the subject of Thomas C Lea III’s The Two-Thousand Yard Stare.

12… Near the Cesnar region of space, the crew of the USS Enterprise is tasked this week to hash out a peace treaty in the Rodaxion System where a civil war has broken out. Sounds like it could actually be a Star Trek episode, doesn’t it? To quote the grampa from Holes, “too damn bad,” as the crew more or less is more tightly wound than a nun’s knickers and it is about to result in a major incident if the Captain doesn’t step in. Our main crew, like most Star Trek shows, is part of Alpha Shift, and as it turns out, Alpha Shift hasn’t been off the clock in a long while.

So with only 12 episodes to go after this, we aren’t getting a bit of Star Trek on a strange new world where we’re drawing parallels with current human problems and using alien analogies for those problems. No, we’re sending our crew off to a party planet to do a “comedy” episode with Dave Foley (the cheaper Will Ferrell) playing host to our characters being drunk. Well, Scotty is on the Buckfast, Una is on red and white wine mixers, M’Benga enjoys being a mixologist, I think the smoke and hunger for treats says Uhura is smoking weed, La’An is La’An, Pike is concussed, and Spock is shagging James.

I had a bit of hope after “The Griffin Incident” did some goodwill, as well as knowing that the 5th episode of this season was the puppet one, but I honestly don’t know how to end this sentence without swearing as I ask what I just watched. What the flying Ferengi ff— another F-word, was that? Playing on the whole “engineer vs pilot” feud that kicked off in “Valles Marineris,” seeing Erica and Scotty at each other’s throats, we’re thrown almost directly into the unlikely-duo-comes-together “comedy” thing because no one decided to write a script for this season.

Stop me when you get where I am going with this one: Ex-Lower Decks writer Kathryn Lyn writes an episode with a bit of nostalgia for TOS and the 70s cartoon, where our A-plot this week is about an unlikely duo bickering then compromising to work together after 27 minutes. Something tells me that “Human Best Friend” may have been a repurposed script or idea from the now-dead Lower Decks due to the writers’ strike. Alongside the back-to-back production on seasons four and five of Strange New Worlds.

Ok, let’s calm down after I wanted to put my fist through Dave Foley’s skull for that cheap imitation accent. We’ll go back to the start. As I say, the crew are not jelling well after weeks (months?) without shore leave while other crews within the ship have had that time off, and everyone is at each other’s throats. Most of all Scotty and Erica; he’s put a check engine light on her dashboard while she ignores it. So, in an attempt to avoid undue negative effects of this tension going into negotiations for a peace treaty to end a civil war, we go to a planetary resort, The Cesnar Grand.

Effectively a “tech-free” party planet with an atmosphere that makes you feel naturally drunk or high. Cue the audio and video effects one step below the Scottish invention of a kaleidoscope with the sound of a Sitar in the background, then we wake up days later. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with her “broken arm” before punching a torrid wee beastie, otherwise known as Scotty in a Mugato costume, it is evident there has been a “party.”

With a knock at the door from Dave Foley’s Dendru, our unlikely duo full of hatred have to find the Captain and give him a note. The trouble is, both are too hung-over/still drunk to know where Captain Pike is, so they have to find other crew members to find him. Something that could have been a two-minute montage of Uhura in a princess dress and smoke billowing out of her room as she has the munchies, Una singing a Klingon Opera version of Bonnie Tyler’s (written by Jim Steinman) “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and Spock being extra Spock.

I say he’s being extra Spock; he excuses the “mess” in his room in the resort as he straightens a Tri-Dimensional Chess piece. That’s before he ends up asking if Erica and Scotty can also see James T Kirk. Listen, whatever you boys want to be doing as roommates, it is totally fine by me. As long as you do it behind closed Holodeck doors. I mean, come on now? Someone is doing it on purpose, right? We’re not outright saying they are, but it is no longer just being implied – it is all but said plainly here.

Eventually Erica and her Buckfast-drinking friend find Captain sexy hair as he’s getting a tattoo of “a horsey thingy.” Turns out the note is about the peace treaty – the delegations will be meeting the crew not in two weeks as scheduled, but here in two hours. Thus we get our second quest with the unlikely duo: Find the Shuttle so we can all go back to the Enterprise. Too bad someone checked it out while drunk and hid it, resulting in us going to find La’An taking charge of a Yoga class, now making it Taekwondo class.

See, this is my “problem” with this as an episode: It is a superficial version of Star Trek with little reason to make you care for this story. Maybe it is because I only watched “Valles Marineris” a week ago when I was writing this, or maybe because I find this frivolous story to be just that with only 12 left to go. I’ve already posited that this may have been a leftover idea from Lower Decks, and with that someone might assume that itself is a criticism, not only of the episode but also of Lower Decks.

If “Human Best Friend” was a Lower Decks episode, I don’t think I would have minded it as much. Why? There is a different tone assumed with the animated series that is on-premises supposed to be a comedy show, while the only active live-action Star Trek still going isn’t that. Am I saying you can’t have funny moments? No. If anything, Star Trek is allowed to be funny, irreverent, and have its moments, but notice that last word, moments. A 45-50 minute live-action show with 10 episodes a season and only 12 episodes after this left to tell its story does not need this dead weight.

In fact, this is a whole discussion independent of this series, but the shorter seasons mean you can’t do this every other episode anymore. In the days of 21-26 episode-long seasons, doing a funny episode, two serious episodes, a funny episode, a serious episode, then two funny episodes worked. Why? You had space to fill; people were actively sitting down to watch shows because they didn’t have an encyclopedia of “brain rot” at their fingertips. You either watched that show, or you watched something else.

At this point, I can’t begrudge anyone who, 10-15 minutes in, puts the episode off and either stops watching entirely or says “I’ll give next week’s episode another chance.” Our season opener being “light and fun” would have been fine(-ish) here, but I wouldn’t have been too excited about it. However, the fact of the matter (and the truth of the matter) is that we opened with an episode that was light and kind of comedic (punching a dinosaur is a laughable concept), we did the more serious mystery with “The Griffin Incident,” and then we’re teased with proper TNG/DS9 “boring” adult diplomacy only to be rug-pulled.

Once again, this is kind of my point: Why are we teasing proper honest-to-god Star Trek as it is known and loved, then giving us Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen “comedy?” I wouldn’t wish this ill on anyone. Including him (you know who). I honestly don’t know that I’d be going as hard on the concept if we didn’t have that peace treaty bit, or if we didn’t already have “Wedding Bell Blues” a season ago. Again, it goes back to the balance of forum-dwelling “STAR TREK” as they (underlined) put it versus these “silly” episodes.

Sadly, we do eventually get the peace treaty bit we were teased, but with the framing that Pike (and the crew) is still hungover. Even then, saying it is a focus would be overstating its presence. It gets about three scenes: The delegates arriving, Pike drunkenly reading terrible notes to emphasize how drunk he still is, and the culmination where they agree to peace because Scotty and Erica nearly die. A climax so terribly thought out that I might put it next to anything Chris Chibnall wrote; you aren’t killing off Scotty, the guy from TOS, which takes place after this.

As a concept, fine in the right circumstance, but in action “Human Best Friend” is about as welcome as a wet fart in an all-white Sunday Best church suit while going commando. Like a Catholic priest, I wouldn’t trust it around the kids because it will make the wrong impression of what this series is and what it should be.

Is it the worst episode ever made? I don’t know; I am still angry over “Threshold,” but if I am ever forced to watch it again for any reason or hear praise for it in general, I might just put them level pegging. The only saving grace of “Threshold” in my eyes is that Brannon Braga would go on to make the best of Star Trek, The Orville. “I thought you’d say Enterprise,” I still hate Rick Berman for “Faith of the Heart” and the fact that he’s alive. At least at the time of writing.

Ultimately, “Human Best Friend” isn’t worth watching, even if you need a reminder that your writing isn’t terrible, but I honestly don’t know that it is “Threshold” bad. There is nothing memorably terrible about it other than it generally being something that Star Trek itself is not – a poor imitation of “cringe” stoner comedy. The only positive I can genuinely pick out of its 45-ish minute runtime is that Spock is 100% having sex with James T Kirk, and I will not accept “they’re just human best friends.” They are King James and his secret door.

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Strange New Worlds "Human Best Friend"

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• James and Spock, sitting in a tree, F-U-*-*-I-N-G...
• "Every now and then, I get a little bit angry..." but in Klingon.

Cons

• A 30-second sketch comedy over 45 minutes.
• Rug-pulling the proper Star Trek story for this tripe.