A review of this week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Human Best Friend" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I use human logic to deduce the avocado is a bomb...
Alan Sepinwall
"Human Best Friend" asks the eternal question: "What if The Hangover, but make it Star Trek?" Where once the Strange New Worlds comedy episodes felt both nimble and charming changes of pace, now they have the air of your coworker who got a big laugh in a department meeting once and now fancies themself the office comedian. Several of the castmembers — Anson Mount and Ethan Peck in particular — have proved to be surprisingly good comic actors, but "surprisingly" is doing a lot of the work here. They can do it, and sometimes do it quite well, but it's not their default performing state, and the more you ask them to do it, the more the returns diminish.
Nonetheless, Pike and Spock were the two characters whose inebriated conditions were the most consistently amusing in an episode with a silly premise. Yes, Pike needs the crew to relax in advance of this hugely important negotiation. But the idea of a vacation planet whose atmosphere automatically makes everyone feel drunk or high is incredibly dumb. Even if you're not a Starfleet officer days away from having to perform interplanetary diplomacy, there just seems to be too much of an opportunity for things to go awry for even the most low-stakes tourist. The episode is also pretty inconsistent on how and when the planet works its spell on people, with everyone being only as incapacitated as the plot needs them to be in that particular moment.