SNW 4.3 ‘Dude, Where’s My Shuttle?’

It’s fair to say that we in this group-blog are not finding much to praise in the latest series of Strange New Worlds. I’d hazard that the most recent episode is unlikely to shift the dial on that. I’m prepared to be contradicted on this in the comments.

‘Human Best Friend’ is a shore-leave episode, in the tradition of TOS’s ‘Shore Leave’ and DS9’s ‘Let He Who Is Without Sin’. Quirky, silly, contrived: this—handling the word with the sugar-tongs of scare-quotes—‘comic’ episode is, in a word, rubbish. As our noble blog-captain said of the previous episode, we’re Trek lifers, in it for the long haul, but were I a regular viewer this is exactly the kind of episode that would make me go: I’m done with this stupid show.

The story is rudimentary. The Enterprise is on the way to peace talks on the Rodaxian homeworld, over which Pike will preside.1 These talks are hugely important, we are told (not shown), in order to provide the show with at least some dramatic tension. The crew will have to spend the two weeks of their voyage to Rodaxia carefully preparing for them.

But Pike’s bridge crew have been working too hard for too long and are all stressed and snappy. The captain insists they take shore leave on a conveniently en-route holiday world. This is a specialised resort: technology is not allowed (check your cellphones at reception when you enter, holidaymakers!) where merely breathing the atmosphere makes you drunk. The deal with this place is that everybody reacts to the alcho-air differently, and each individual goes on their own ‘journey’. But drunken.

At the start of the episode Scotty and Ortegas are at each other’s throats, because she keeps ignoring his red-lines on what the starship’s engines can handle in her reckless flying and he keeps nagging and micromanaging her. The rest of the bridge crew’s exhaustion is more sketchily indicated, but down to the Pleasure Planet they all go, thereupon to party hearty, get drunk, act out of character &c.

Ortegas wakes up sober with a hangover (which isn’t supposed to be part of the deal with the boozebreathing) and her arm broken, in a cast. She doesn’t remember how she got into this position. Scotty is still drunk, but likewise clueless. The two are given an urgent message for their captain and stagger about the restort trying to find him so they can deliver it, encountering their crewmates in various states of debauchment. The message is that the peace-talks have been arbitrarily brought forward two weeks and relocated to the Enterprise, such that Pike will have to oversee them still drunk from his shore-leave. Scotty and Ortegas go to the Pleasure Planet spaceship-garage to recover the Enterprise’s shuttle to fly everyone back to the ship for these allegedly crucial talks—but the shuttle has mysteriously vanished. Oh no!

This thin plot is the string from which the scriptwriters have dangled a series of what they presumably believed would be brilliant comic moments. How funny would it be to see all our favourite characters drunk? Drunk people are funny, aren’t they? Drunk Scotsmen doubly so! Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Spock mind-melded with a plant? And afterwards hallucinated all his crewmates were cacti? What if Scotty, having been kidnapped and a bag put on his head, believed he couldn’t see because his eyeballs had been stolen? Imagine Pike getting a facial tattoo! Hilarious! ROFLCOPTER! Oh my aching sides!

No.

There are a number of problems here. One is the script: the humour is weak, the dialogue lacks snap, the ‘comic’ conceits are feeble. Another is the acting. The SNW ensemble are not, actually, a bad bunch of actors, but in this episode they all almost without exception flop. Ethan Peck’s Spock is fine, though he has the easiest job of the lot, simply Spock-ing his Spock and insisting, contrary to appearance, that he is monstrously intoxicated. The others make the rudimentary thespian error of acting drunk: the cast slur and stagger and gurn. But the way to act drunk is to do what actual drunk people do, which is to strain to act sober.

A third problem is a hideous sentimental hugging and learning throughline. It’s as if Seinfeld’s famous comedy dictum is being deliberately flouted by the scriptwriters. Scotty and Ortegas start the show like Petruchio and Katherina, but during the episode they bond, they share childhood memories, come to respect their respective talents, they end up fast friends. Ugh. Spock and Kirk literally hug (‘bring in it’ says James T., drawing the Vulcan to him—what is the show doing with this character? He’s nothing like any previous iteration of Kirk). The wrinkle here is that Spock, not expecting to see Kirk on the Holiday World, believes him to be an alcho-air hallucination. We viewers realise long before the Vulcan does that he’s not, he’s real, and Spock’s unguarded confessions of emotional connection give the episode its title, set up the later TOS and movies relationship between the two.

Ortega and Scott eventually recover the shuttle and fly everyone back to the Enterprise. The Rodaxians arrive and are not impressed by slurry-drunky face-tattooed Pike’s attempts at mediation. Then, awkwardly late in the episode, an attempt to inject more drama: Scotty discovers a bomb on board the shuttle—some rogue Rodaxian element (it’s not specified) presumably hoped to Claus-von-Stauffenberg the peace negotiations. This device can’t be defused, so Scotty and Ortega fly the shuttle to a safe distance, and Spock and Kirk beam them back before the bomb explodes. The firework display of the detonation, for ‘Reasons’, deeply impresses the Rodaxians, who conclude their treaty. All’s well that ends well, and there’s still time for a little more hugging and learning.

When I was a kid I watched, as everyone in my country in the 1970s did, a TV show called The Goodies (two of the orginal three Goodies are now dead: Tim Brooke-Taylor died of Covid, and Bill Oddie died only last week). One episode of this silly, surreal kids-oriented show concerned a ‘Yorkshire martial art’ called ‘Ecky-Thump’, a parody of the 1970s craze for kung-fu movies. It is a very funny half-hour of television. Whilst watching the original broadcast a 50-year-old British man, Alex Mitchell, could not stop laughing: he laughed and laughed with increasing vehemence throughout, and the strain on his heart resulted in a fatal heart attack. Mitchell’s widow later sent the BBC a letter thanking The Goodies for making her husband’s final moments so happy.

I don’t anticipate any similiar eventualities with ‘Human Best Friend’.